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E-book Ancient Knowledge Networks : A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia
This is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies, writ-ings and performances. It explores the forms knowledge takes, the mean-ings it accrues and how they are shaped by the peoples and places that use it. This is also a book about the relationships between political power, family ties and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium bc (see Tables 3a and 5a for chronological overviews). Its particular focus is on two regions where cuneiform script was the pre-dominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq; and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad (Fig. 1.1). And third, this is a book about Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries. It asks how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. But perhaps above all this book is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian sci-ence’, as it has often been known. By focusing on the geographical and the social I hope to shed new light on the historical and intellectual too. Although I have included a lot of technical detail and evidential data, I have tried to make the book accessible to those without a specialist train-ing in cuneiform studies. In particular, the following introduction aims to set the scene and explain my rationale, while maps, online glossaries and other resources will, I hope, give some further support to non-expert readers.
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