The Ancient Middle East
focus: Mesopotamia, a.k.a. the "Fertile Cresent"
- Historical Divisions
- Neolithic (stone tools) ~ 8000-4000 BCE
- Bronze Age (copper + tin tools) ~ 3200 - 1200 BCE
- Iron Age (iron tools) ~ 3200-1200 BCE
- The Bronze Age
- Sumerians developed the first writing system
- cuneiform (of cubes)
- on clay tablets
- Akkadian language
- Egyptians developed hieroglyphics and build pyramids
Eurpoean Rediscovery
- 1800s -- Napolean goes to Egypt and finds the Rosetta Stone
- composed of:
- hieroglyphics
- demotic (?) language - common Egyptian language
- Greek
- code cracked by Champolllion in 1822
- Babylonia unearthed in the 1800s
- tablets of cuneiform found
- Akkadian decifered (1950s)
- Ugarite (1929)
- clay tablets of cuneiform found
- the language was close to Hebrew and Arabian
These artifacts tell us about the historical and cultural concepts of time period in which they were created.
Myths
Myth: a story (Gr), often a "sacred story," that reveals what was important in the culture at that time
e.g. Enuma Elish and the parallels to the story of Adam and Eve
Documentary Hypothesis -
concerning the Torah/Pentateuch
- Spinoza argued that the Torah could not have been written by Moses and was instead written by Ezra.
- John Astruc, the father of the Documentary Hyphothesis, noticed the difference in the names of God.
- Elohim (God)
- YHWH
- Four "Authors"
- (J) - God is YHWH
- (E) - God is Elohim
- (P) - priestly writings
- (D) - Deuteronomist writtings
- (R) - redactions
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