Creating a book for the academic or professional market is a major undertaking--one that is likely to require an investment of hundreds of hours. This book offers a complete guide to the process, from weighing the costs and benefits of becoming an author, through negotiating a contract, to marketing the final book.

The information, which is presented from an author's perspective, includes: selecting the most appropriate publisher(s) to which to submit a proposal, factors to consider when drafting a proposal, contract negotiation, joint collaboration agreements, time management and other writing tips, academically respectable ways to facilitate marketing, and working with the IRS.

The volume contains a critical review of data, results and open problems concerning the principal Greek and Coptic majuscule bookhands, based on previous research of the author, revised and updated to offer an overview of the different graphic phenomena. Although the various chapters address the history of different types of scripts (i.e. biblical majuscule, sloping poitend majuscule, liturgical majuscule, epigraphic and monumental scripts), their juxtaposition allows us to identify common issues of the comparative method of palaeography. From an overall critical assessment of these aspects the impossibility of applying a unique historical paradigm to interpret the formal expressions and the history of the different bookhands comes up, due to the fact that each script follows different paths. Particular attention is also devoted to the use of Greek majuscules in the writing of ancient Christian books. A modern and critical awareness of palaeographic method may help to place the individual witnesses in the context of the main graphic trends, in the social and cultural environments in which they developed, and in a more accurate chronological framework.

Essays illuminating a complex and sophisticated musical manuscript. The Segovia Manuscript (Cathedral of Segovia, Archivo Capitular) has puzzled musicologists ever since its rediscovery at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unique: no other manuscript of the period transmits a comparable blend of late fifteenth-century music, consisting of 204 sacred works and vernacular pieces in Flemish, French, Italian, and Spanish. An important group of pedagogical pieces by French and Flemish composers may preserve transcriptions of instrumental improvisation. This summary might suggest a messy collection, but on the contrary the manuscript is arranged with care, copied by one proficient scribe (except perhaps for the Spanish texts), who obviously followed a predetermined master plan. But which plan, who designed it, and why was the person responsible so interested in this combination? The essays here aim to treat every dimension of this fascinating source. New discoveries help date the manuscript and explain how it came to Segovia; particular attention is paid to the main scribe, now determined to be Flemish, and his relation with northern composers and repertory, above all that of Jacob Obrecht, Alexander Agricola, and Henricus Isaac; and the vexed question of the conflicting attributions is considered afresh and found to affect only a few of the fascicles. The contributors also look at questions of ownership and function. . WOLFGANG FUHRMANN is Professor of Musicology at Leipzig University; CRISTINA URCHUEGUIA is Professor of Musicology at the University of Bern. Contributors: Bonnie J. Blackburn, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Tess Knighton, Kenneth Kreitner, Honey Meconi, Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Cristina Urchueguia, Rob C. Wegman

The history of the early Slavs is a subject of renewed interest and one which is highly controversial both politically and historically. This pioneering text reviews the latest archaelogical (and other) evidence concerning the first settlers, their cultural identities and their relationship with their modern successors. Dr Dolukhanov explores the various historiographical debates before offering his own interpretations.

A comprehensive reference volume describing all ancient and modern scripts of the world. Scripts are illustrated by texts with full explanation and grammatical analyses, and each discussion has a bibliography leading to more technical literature.

Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing - the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects, spaces and landscapes, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. Authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.

Based on the hieroglyphic texts of the Ramesses Age of Ancient Egypt (c.1300-1100 BC), the books in this series present a modern English translation of the vast majority of historical sources for this important epoch of Egyptian history. This volume covers a period of great change in the early twelfth century BC (c. 1185-1155 BC).
The latest in a respected series of translations of the hieroglyphic texts of the Ramesside Age of Ancient Egypt (c.1300-1100 BC)
This fifth volume covers a period of great change in the early twelfth century BC (c.1185-1155 BC)
Coverage includes the epic wars with the 'Sea Peoples' from the Aegean and the first mention of the Philistines
Many texts included have been translated into English for the first time in this volume

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese uses a corpus-based, multi-dimensional model to account for variation in written Chinese. Using statistical method and two-dimensional visual representation, it provides a concrete and objective view of the internal variation in written Chinese. This book is a timely work that addresses the growing interest in quantitative genre analysis and how knowledge thus gained can contribute to the teaching as well as understanding of the Chinese language. Zheng-sheng Zhang is Professor of Chinese at San Diego State University. He has been a long-term editor of the Journal of Chinese Language teachers Association (now known as Chinese as a Second Language) and is a respected researcher in the field of Chinese linguistics.

"A valuable reference."
-- "Religious Studies Review"

Jesus never wrote a book. The main sources about him, the Four Gospels, were written some forty years after his death, and contentious debates reign concerning their sometimes contradictory portrayals, which accounts are credible, and how far their authors may have altered or invented episodes to support a view or doctrine of the early Church.

Most scholars assume that information about Jesus was preserved only orally up until the writing of the Gospels, allowing ample time for the stories of Jesus to grow and diversify. Alan Millard here argues that written reports about Jesus could have been made during his lifetime and that some among his audiences and followers may very well have kept notes, first-hand documents that the Evangelists could weave into their narratives.

Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus first provides a brief, fascinating introduction to the history of writing's early survival, how we have the documents we have, and what they can tell us about the times and places of their origins. This overview is followed by a more specific look at what biblical and religious writings survive, how they are dated, and who was able to read and write at the time of their creation. Finally, Millard examines the possibility that Jesus' words and actions were committed to writing during his lifetime and what this would mean for the study of Christianity and the origins of the Gospels.

This book brings together theoretical and practical debates from adult literacy and language education with those of creative writing and community publishing work. Illustrated by accounts of first-hand experience, each chapter focuses on the practical business of achieving good learning and development opportunities for women and men of all ages. Whether working with refugees seeking confidence in spoken English, elderly people reflecting on life experience, or basic education students wishing to 'improve' their literacy, the principle with which the writers are engaged is that of democracy - a process which has lessons both uncomfortable and exciting for educators, as well as for learners. In direct opposition to current imperatives to standardisation and 'standards', the writers in this book argue for the effectiveness of deeper and more generous approaches to literacy and language: approaches which are at the heart of the community publishing movement in the UK. As Judy Wallis puts it: I am not arguing that the teaching of formal skills should be abandoned. Adult Basic Education students know better than anyone that it is important to spell correctly and to write in Standard English because people will discriminate against those who can't... The issue is not whether students need to acquire formal writing skills, but how they can acquire them most successfully.

The chapters in this edited volume explore the sociolinguistic implications of orthographic and scriptural practices in a diverse range of communicative contexts, ranging from schoolrooms to internet discussion boards. The focus is on the way that scriptural practices both index and constitute social hierarchies, identities and relationships and in some cases, become the focus for public language ideological debates. Capitalizing on the now robust body of literature on orthographic choice and debate in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, the volume addresses a number of cross-cutting themes that connect orthographic practices to areas of contemporary interest in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. These themes include: the different social implications of self vs. other representation and the permeability of the personal/social and the public/private; how scriptural practices ("inscription") serve as sites for social discipline; the historical and intertextual frameworks for the meaning potentials of orthographic choice (relating to issues of genre and style); and writing as a broader semiotic field: the visual and esthetic dimensions of texts and metalinguistic "play" in spelling and its ambiguous implications for writer stance.

This volume presents 12 papers on a new approach to the analysis of writing systems. For the first time, quantitative methods are introduced into this area of research in a systematic way. The individual contributions give an overview about quantitative properties of symbols and of writing systems, introduce methods of analysis, study individual writing systems as used for different languages, set up an explanatory model of phenomena connected to script development/evolution, and give a perspective to a general theory of writing systems.

A Grammar of Eton is the first description of the Cameroonian Bantu language Eton. It is also one of the few complete descriptions of a North-western Bantu language. The complex tonology of Eton is carefully analysed and presented in a simple and consistent descriptive framework, which permits the reader to keep track of Eton's many tonal morphemes. Phonologists will be especially interested in the analysis of stem initial prominence, which manifests itself in a number of logically independent phenomena, including length of the onset consonant, phonotactic skewing and number of tonal attachment sites. Typologists and Africanists working on morphosyntax will find useful analyses of, among others, gender and agreement; tense, aspect, mood and negation; and verbal derivation. They will encounter many morphosyntactic differences between Eton and the better known Eastern and Southern Bantu languages, often due to evolutions shaped by maximality constraints on stems. The chapters on clause structure and complex constructions provide data hardly found in sources on the languages of the region, including descriptions of non-verbal clauses, focus, quasi-auxiliaries and adverbial clauses.

The first object created by God, according to early Muslim commentators, was the pen, which he used to chronicle events to come. The word, in its various manifestations, is central to the Islamic faith. Surely a reflection of this centrality, profuse inscriptions mark countless Islamic objects, from the humblest oil lamps and unglazed ceramics to the finest and most expensive rock crystals and jades. The inscriptions serve numerous functions: decorating, proclaiming ownership and patronage, proffering good wishes and proverbs, and spreading religious texts throughout the world. Aside from their aesthetic worth, these inscriptions provide a fascinating window onto a distant culture.

In Islamic Inscriptions, Sheila S. Blair a wealth of stunning images and incisive commentary, while also providing the newcomer to Islamic civilization with a key to unlocking the mysteries of Islamic epigraphy. In addition to chapters devoted to the main types of inscription, detailing the development of their content and style, inscriptive techniques, and the motivations behind them, the book provides practical knowledge on finding, identifying, interpreting, researching, and recording inscriptions. The variety and clarity of information presented makes Islamic Inscriptions an ideal reference for historians, curators, archaeologists, and collectors.

This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

This book introduces a new linguistic reconstruction of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Old Chinese, the first Sino-Tibetan language to be reduced to writing. Old Chinese is the language of the earliest Chinese classical texts (1st millennium BCE) and the ancestor of later varieties of Chinese, including all modern Chinese dialects. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart's new reconstruction of Old Chinese moves beyond earlier reconstructions by taking into account important new evidence that has recently become available: better documentation of Chinese dialects that preserve archaic features, such as the Min and Waxiang dialects; better documentation of languages with very early loanwords from Chinese, such as the Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai and Vietnamese languages; and a flood of Chinese manuscripts from the first millennium BCE, excavated or discovered in the last several decades. Baxter and Sagart also incorporate recent advances in our understanding of the derivational processes that connect different words that have the same root. They expand our knowledge of Chinese etymology and identify, for the first time, phonological markers of pre-Han dialects, such as the development of *r to -j in a group of east coast dialects, but to -n elsewhere. The most up-to-date reconstruction available, Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction brings the methodology of Old Chinese reconstruction closer to that of comparative reconstructions that have been used successfully in other language families. It is critical reading for anyone seeking an advanced understanding of Old Chinese.

This book sheds new light on the work of Jean-François Champollion by uncovering a constellation of epistemological, political, and material conditions that made his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. Champollion’s success in understanding hieroglyphs, first published in his Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822, is emblematic for the triumphant achievements of comparative philology during the 19th Century. In its attempt to understand humanity as part of a grand history of progress, Champollion’s conception of ancient Egypt belongs to the universalistic aspirations of European modernity. Yet precisely because of its success, his project also reveals the costs it entailed: after examining and welcoming acquisitions for the emerging Egyptian collections in Europe, Champollion travelled to the Nile Valley in 1828/29, where he was shocked by the damage that had been done to its ancient cultural sites. The letter he wrote to the Egyptian viceroy Mehmet Ali Pasha in 1829 demands that excavations in Egypt be regulated, denounces European looting, and represents perhaps the first document to make a case for the international protection of cultural goods in the name of humanity.