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.

Four years after the publication of the Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature, volume I (Brill, 2014), this volume present the second installment of the Corpus. Inspired by D.H. Muller's pioneering studies of the 1900s, the authors publish a large body of folklore and ethnographic texts in Soqotri. The language is spoken by more than 100,000 people inhabiting the island Soqotra (Gulf of Aden, Yemen). Soqotri is among the most archaic Semitic languages spoken today, whereas the oral literature of the islanders is a mine of original motifs and plots. Texts appear in transcription, English and Arabic translations, and the Arabic-based native script. Philological annotations deal with grammatical, lexical and literary features, as well as realia. The Glossary accumulates all words attested in the volume. The Plates provide a glimpse into the fascinating landscapes of the island and the traditional lifestyle of its inhabitants.

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.

Learn to read, write, and speak everyday Japanese with manga stories! If you enjoy manga, you'll love learning Japanese with this book. The language lessons are interspersed with entertaining manga comic strips, making it easy to learn and remember all the key vocabulary and grammar. With a focus on the casual speech used by young people in Japan, you'll find yourself feeling confident with speaking, reading, and writing Japanese quickly! Designed for self-study use by adult learners, this book is a fun resource for beginners--no prior knowledge of Japanese required! Readers will find: Help with learning to write and pronounce the 92 Hiragana and Katakana letters plus 160 basic Kanji characters Hundreds of useful words and phrases--from numbers and greetings to expletives and insults! Seven manga stories woven throughout the book, reinforcing your grasp of the language The basic vocabulary and grammar needed to communicate in Japanese! Hundreds of exercises with free online audio recordings by Japanese native speakers A bidirectional dictionary and answer keys for all the exercises **Recommended for language learners 16 year old & up. Not intended for high school classroom use due to adult content.**

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

In earlier times, people felt the need to leave a permanent record of who they were and what they stood for. Nowadays people tend to keep quiet about those things, at least in their final resting place. But many have found a new fascination in wandering about an old graveyard. They are often touched and moved by what they read there. Those people of former generations have much to say to us, although with great economy of words because each letter had to be chiseled in stone with hand tools.

"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.

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.

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.

Books printed in the fifteenth century have been the subject of much in-depth research. In contrast, the beginning of the sixteenth century has not attracted the same scholarly interest. This volume brings together studies that charter the development of printing and bookselling throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It presents new research and analysis on the impact of the Reformation, on how texts were transmitted and on the complex relationships that affected the production and sale of books. The result is a wide-ranging reappraisal of a vital period in the history of the printed book. Contributors include Zsuzsa Barbarics-Hermanik, Jurgen Beyer, Amy Nelson Burnett, Neil Harris, Brenda M. Hosington, Johannes Hund, Henning P. Jurgens, Justyna Kilianczyk-Zieba, Hans-Joerg Kunast, Urs Bernhard Leu, Matthew McLean, Andrew Pettegree, David Shaw, Christoph Volkmar, Hanno Wijsman and Alexander Wilkinson.

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 volume collects 33 papers that were presented at the international conference held at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in November 2015 to celebrate the centenary of Bedrich Hrozny's identification of Hittite as an Indo-European language. Contributions are grouped into three sections, "Hrozny and His Discoveries," "Hittite and Indo-European," and "The Hittites and Their Neighbors," and span the full range of Hittite studies and related disciplines, from Anatolian and Indo-European linguistics and cuneiform philology to Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, history, and religion. The authors hail from 15 countries and include leading figures as well as emerging scholars in the fields of Hittitology, Indo-European, and Ancient Near Eastern studies.

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.

Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.

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.

Johan David Akerblad (1763-1819) contributed to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic and is known as a predecessor of Jean-Francois Champollion. This intellectual biography offers a new and less heroic interpretation of the first reading of the Egyptian scripts. Akerblad, an exceptional linguist, was a diplomat and orientalist who spent several decades living in the Ottoman Empire, France and Italy. Of humble birth, he was a supporter of the French Revolution - something that stymied his career. His life cannot be understood in a purely Swedish national framework, and this study firmly situates him as an international scholar. The book discusses European expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean during the tumultuous decades around the year 1800, and traces Akerblad's momentous life in relation to the debates on 'orientalism,' the tradition of classical studies and the history of science.

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.