Mnamon
Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean
A critical guide to electronic resources
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2019-10-29Book
S. Gaspa, M. Vigo (eds.), Textiles in Ritual and Cultic Practices in the Ancient Near East from the Third to the First Millennium BC (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 431), Münster: Ugarit-Verlag 2019, VIII+268 pp., ISBN 978-3-86835-187-3.
The anthology is the outcome of a research project leaded by Salvatore Gaspa and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (Denmark). It mostly includes papers presented at an international conference organized by Salvatore Gaspa (University of Padua) and Matteo Vigo (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, Hethitologie-Archiv) at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen in 2015. Through the analysis of textual and visual art evidence from various regions of the ancient Near East (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, Iran) from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BCE different international scholars offer for the first time an in-depth investigation of the use of textiles in various types of ritual practices and the symbolic meaning attached to these products. Numerous texts witness to the ritual use of textiles or textile-related tools in the Near East, from the Ebla texts of the 3rd millennium BCE to the Hittite texts of the 2nd millennium to the Assyrian and Babylonian written evidence of the 1st millennium BCE. Thus, the book represents a collective multidisciplinary effort to combine the current historical research on ancient Near Eastern epigraphical, linguistic and material evidence with textile-related analysis and recent trends in ritual studies.