Few compositions provide as much insight into the structure of the Hittite state and the nature of Hittite society as the so-called Instructions. While these texts may strike the modern reader as didactic, the Hittites, who categorized them together with state treaties, understood them as contracts or obligations, consisting of the king's instructions to officials such as priests and temple personnel, mayors, military officers, border garrison commanders, and palace servants. They detail how and in what spirit the officials are to carry out their duties and what consequences they are to suffer for failure. Also included are several examples of closely related oath impositions and oaths. Collecting for the first time the entire corpus of Hittite Instructions, this accessible volume presents these works in transliteration of the original texts and translation, with clear and readable introductory essays, references to primary and secondary sources, and thorough indices.

Embrace the power of the divine in this beginner's guide to some of mythology's fiercest females and most legendary ladies Across thousands of years and countless civilizations, goddesses have been a powerful presence. Whether as leaders, mothers, warriors or lovers, these indomitable divinities have always been able to fascinate and seduce us. This pocket guide offers readers an engaging and accessible introduction to a selection of the most powerful and influential goddesses throughout ancient and modern history, retelling their stories and celebrating their awesome abilities. Each profile includes a concise history of the goddess and her origins, a summary of her main powers, a look at the goddess in myth and popular culture and an exploration of her best attributes. Learn about the Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war; Bastet, the Egyptian goddess of pleasure and protection; the beautiful Freyja, the Norse goddess of love, and many others. Let yourself be inspired and empowered by tales of feminine power, strength and wisdom in this pocketbook of dazzling deities.

Ovid's Fasti is a journey through ancient Rome, using the calendar as a guide. The reader of this poem tours the monuments of the Augustan-era city, witnesses both urban and rustic seasonal festivals, and commemorates the epic events of long-past history. The reader also experiences the passage of the year, as measured by the natural world: the rising and setting of constellations, the migration of birds, and the comforting rhythms of agriculture. Throughout, Ovid enlivens the narrative with myths, including Romulus and Remus, Callisto and Jupiter, Lucretia and Tarquinius, Hercules and Cacus, and many more. In doing so, he evokes the questions of what constitutes justice, or glory, or patriotism. The result is a lively tour of the Roman year-sometimes thoughtful, sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant or even farcical-that interweaves human customs into the natural world, and gives occasional glimpses of awe-inspiring divinities on the streets of Rome. This volume covers the first half of the Fasti (Books I-III), including the original Latin text and also a new translation in clear, idiomatic prose on facing pages. An introduction on Ovid's life and Augustan literature, as well as an incisive commentary with up-to-date bibliography, give the reader extensive background to interpret the text.

Anne Carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary classicists, poets and translators in the English language. In this book, Ruprecht explores the role played by generic transgressions on the one hand, and by embodied spirituality on the other, throughout Carson's ambitious literary career. Where others see classical dichotomies (soul versus body, Classical versus Christian), Carson sees connection. Like Nietzsche before her, Carson decries the image of the Classics as merely bookish, and classicists as disembodied intellects. She has brought religious, bodily erotics back into the heart of the classical tradition.

This volume offers new insights into ancient figurations of temporality by focusing on the relationship between gender and time across a range of genres. Each chapter in this collection places gender at the center of its exploration of time, and the volume includes time in treatises, genealogical lists, calendars, prophetic literature, ritual practice and historical and poetic narratives from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and why time is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male. Relying on theorists who offer ways to explore the connections between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots, pronouns, images or metaphors, the contributors tease out how time and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and Roman thought. Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity provides a rich and provocative theoretical analysis of time-and its relationship to gender-in ancient texts. It will be of interest to anyone working on time in the ancient world, or students of gender in antiquity.

First and foremost, Witchcraft or Wicca is a religion. In "The Sabbats, "Edain McCoy reveals the eight major holidays of this faith and the many ways in which they are celebrated.
There are two basic types of holidays. The first come at the Solstices and Equinoxes. The others divide the time between those dates in two, resulting in eight major holidays or Sabbats with approximately the same amount of days between them. The balance, here, gives the appearance of spokes in a wheel, so this cycle is commonly called the Wheel of the Year.
The holidays represent two things. First, the harvest cycle. Each holiday represents a time in the growth of crops. From planting to growth, from harvesting to letting the lands lie fallow in the cold winter, the festivals follow the agricultural cycles of ancient times. However, they also represent the eternal love of the God and Goddess, following the God's birth from the Goddess and his death before she gives birth to him again. This also follows the pattern of the Sun which moves from warm and high in the sky to cold and low in the sky.
The book is filled with ways you can follow the Wheel of the Year, whether you work with a coven, with your family, or by yourself. You will learn the secrets of ritual construction and handicrafts appropriate to each of the festivals. You will also learn recipes for traditional foods for each holiday and even songs appropriate to the Sabbats.
This is a wonderful, joyous book filled with color, information, and wisdom. If you are involved with Paganism in any way, this book is a must for your studies and practices. This book functions as both a resource and as a practical manual for the celebration of the holidays. Get your copy today.

This volume is the first monograph in English dedicated to the study of the Greek mythical hero Pelops. While popular in antiquity, Pelops' popularity has since faded; this book presents a comprehensive treatment of his character and legacy. Ancient tradition held that Pelops was the son of Tantalus and the ancestor of the Atreids, Agamemnon and Menelaos, who appear in the Homeric poems as leaders of the Greek forces against Troy. After arriving in Greece from the east, Pelops was eventually worshipped in Olympia, became the eponym of the Peloponnese, and was celebrated as one of the founders of the Olympic Games. However, his character is morally problematic, his family were heavily condemned, and few tales about Pelops exist. Patay-Horvath takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of this obscure figure, presenting and analysing written sources and depictions of Pelops, the etymology of his name, the history of his mythical family, and the afterlife of his myths. Drawing on folklore and ethnography, art and archaeology, linguistics and geography, this volume provides a detailed and accessible overview of both old and new theories about Pelops, his descendants, and his legacy. Transformations of Pelops is suitable for students and scholars of ancient Greek history and mythology, classical philology, and archaeology.

This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture's beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas' foundational theory of pollution as "matter out of place," using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture's cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE Let Them Eat Chaos, Kae Tempest's new long poem written for live performance and heard on the album release of the same name, is both a powerful sermon and a moving play for voices. Seven neighbours inhabit the same London street, but are all unknown to each other. The clock freezes in the small hours, and, one by one, we see directly into their lives: lives that are damaged, disenfranchised, lonely, broken, addicted, and all, apparently, without hope. Then a great storm breaks over London, and brings them out into the night to face each other - and their last chance to connect. Tempest argues that our alienation from one another has bred a terrible indifference to our own fate, but they counters this with a plea to challenge the forces of greed which have conspired to divide us, and mend the broken home of our own planet while we still have time. Let Them Eat Chaos is a cri de coeur and a call to action, and, both on the page and in Tempest's electric performance, one of the most powerful poetic statements of the year.

Offers an in depth comparative look at the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Primeval History, which allows students to view the Genesis within its Near Eastern context. Offers a fresh model for approaching this comparative task, which has at times been stifled by religious dogmatism, on the one hand, or disciplinary insularity on the other. Written in a lucid style with explanation of all key terms and themes, this book is suitable for students with no background in the subjects.

In the first half of the 2d millennium BCE, translation occasionally depicted semantically incongruous correspondences. Such cases reflect ancient scribes substantiating their virtuosity with cuneiform writing by capitalizing on phonologic, graphemic, semantic, and other resemblances in the interlingual space. These scholar-scribes employed an essential scribal practice, analogical hermeneutics, an interpretative activity grounded in analogical reasoning and empowered by the potentiality of the cuneiform script. Scribal education systematized such practices, allowing scribes to utilize these habits in copying compositions and creating translations. In scribal education, analogical hermeneutics is exemplified in the word list "Izi", both in its structure and in its occasional bilingualism. By examining "Izi" as a product of the social field of scribal education, this book argues that scribes used analogical hermeneutics to cultivate their craft and establish themselves as knowledgeable scribes. Within a linguistic epistemology of cuneiform scribal culture, translation is a tool in the hands of a knowledgeable scholar.

This book features detailed analysis of an ancient secret scroll from the Middle East known as the Rivers Scroll or Diwan Nahrawatha, providing valuable insight into the Gnostic Mandaean religion. This important scroll offers a window of understanding into the Mandaean tradition, with its intricate worldview, ritual life, mysticism and esoteric qualities, as well as intriguing art. The text of the Rivers Scroll and its artistic symbolism have never before been properly analyzed and interpreted, and the significance of the document has been lost in scholarship. This study includes key segments translated into English for the first time and gives the scroll the worthy place it deserves in the history of the Mandaean tradition. It will be of interest to scholars of Gnosticism, religious studies, archaeology and Semitic languages.

This book is an exploration of the ideals and values of the ascetic and monastic life, as expressed through clothes. Clothes are often seen as an extension of us as humans, a determinant of who we are and how we experience and interact with the world. In this way, they can play a significant role in the embodied and material aspects of religious practice. The focus of this book is on clothing and garments among ancient monastics and ascetics in Egypt, but with a broader outlook to the general meaning and function of clothes in religion. The garments of the Egyptian ascetics and monastics are important because they belong to a period of transition in the history of Christianity and very much represent this way of living. This study combines a cognitive perspective on clothes with an attempt to grasp the embodied experiences of being clothed, as well as viewing clothes as potential actors. Using sources such as travelogues, biographies, letters, contracts, images, and garments from monastic burials, the role of clothes is brought into conversation with material religion more generally. This unique study builds links between ancient and contemporary uses of religious clothing. It will, therefore, be of interest to any scholar of religious studies, religious history, religion in antiquity, and material religion.

The public/private distinction is fundamental to modern theories of the family, religion and religious freedom, and state power, yet it has had different salience, and been understood differently, from place to place and time to time. The volume brings together essays from an international array of experts in law and religion, in order to examine the public/private distinction in comparative perspective. The essays focus on the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean, in the formative periods of Greece and Rome and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Particular attention is given to the private exercise of religion, the relation between public norms and private life, and the division between public and private space and the place of religion therein.

Crushed by the Romans in the first century A.D., the ancient Druids of Britain left almost no reliable evidence behind. Because of this, historian Ronald Hutton shows, succeeding British generations have been free to reimagine, reinterpret, and reinvent the Druids. Hutton's captivating book is the first to encompass two thousand years of Druid history and to explore the evolution of English, Scottish, and Welsh attitudes toward the forever ambiguous figures of the ancient Celtic world. Druids have been remembered at different times as patriots, scientists, philosophers, or priests; sometimes portrayed as corrupt, bloodthirsty, or ignorant, they were also seen as fomenters of rebellion. Hutton charts how the Druids have been written in and out of history, archaeology, and the public consciousness for some 500 years, with particular focus on the romantic period, when Druids completely dominated notions of British prehistory. Sparkling with legends and images, filled with new perspectives on ancient and modern times, this book is a fascinating cultural study of Druids as catalysts in British history.

There are very few accounts of the afterlife across the period from Homer to Dante. Most traditional studies approach the classical afterlife from the point of view of its "evolution" towards the Christian afterlife. This book tries to do something different: to explore afterlife narratives in spatial terms and to situate this tradition within the ambit of a fundamental need in human psychology for the synthesis of soul (or "self") and universe. Drawing on the works of Homer, Plato, Cicero, Virgil, and Dante, among others, as well as on modern works on psychology, cartography, and music theory, Mapping the Afterlife argues that the topography of the afterlife in the Greek and Roman tradition, and in Dante, reflects the state of "scientific" knowledge at the time of the various contexts in which we find it. The book posits that there is a dominant spatial idiom in afterlife landscapes, a "journey-vision paradigm"-the horizontal journey of the soul across the afterlife landscape, and a synoptic vision of the universe. Many scholars have argued that the vision of the universe is out of place in the underworld landscape. However, looking across the entire tradition, we find that afterlife landscapes, almost without exception, contain these two kinds of space in one form or another. This double vision of space brings the underworld, as the landscape of the soul, into contact with the "scientific" universe; and brings humanity into line with the cosmos.

This book offers a fresh and challenging multi-disciplinary interpretation of Aristophanes' Frogs. Drawing on a wide range of literary and anthropological approaches, it seeks to explore how membership of Greek fifth-century society would have shaped one's understanding of the play, and, more specifically, of Dionysus as a dramatic figure.

This book is an interdisciplinary synthesis and interpretation about the experience of light as revealed in a wide range of art and literature from Paleolithic to Roman times. Humanistic in spirit and in its handling of facts, it marshals a substantial body of scholarship to develop an explication of light as a central, even dramatic, reality of human existence and experience in diverse cultural settings. David S. Herrstrom underscores our intimacy with light-not only its constant presence in our life but its insinuating character. Focusing on our encounters with light and ways of making sense of these, this book is concerned with the personal and cultural impact of light, exploring our resistance to and acceptance of light. Its approach is unique. The book's true subject is the individual's relationship with light, rather than the investigation of light's essential nature. It tells the story of light seducing individuals down through the ages. Consequently, it is not concerned with the "progress" of scientific inquiries into the physical properties and behavior of light (optical science), but rather with subjective reactions to it as reflected in art (Paleolithic through Roman), architecture (Egyptian, Grecian, Roman), mythology and religion (Paleolithic, Egyptian), and literature (e.g., Akhenaten, Plato, Aeschylus, Lucretius, John the Evangelist, Plotinus, and Augustine). This book celebrates the complexity of our relation to light's character. No individual experience of light is "truer" than any other; none improves on any previous experience of light's "tidal pull" on us. And the wondrous variety of these encounters has yielded a richly layered tapestry of human experience. By its broad scope and interdisciplinary approach, this pioneering book is without precedent.

This book provides the first systematic study of the role of animals in different areas of the ancient Greek religious experience, including in myth and ritual, the literary and the material evidence, the real and the imaginary. An international team of renowned contributors shows that animals had a sustained presence not only in the traditionally well-researched cultural practice of blood sacrifice but across the full spectrum of ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices. Animals played a role in divination, epiphany, ritual healing, the setting up of dedications, the writing of binding spells, and the instigation of other 'magical' means. Taken together, the individual contributions to this book illustrate that ancient Greek religion constituted a triangular symbolic system encompassing not just gods and humans, but also animals as a third player and point of reference. Animals in Ancient Greek Religion will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek religion, Greek myth, and ancient religion more broadly, as well as for anyone interested in human/animal relations in the ancient world.

This volume presents a case for how and why people in archaic and classical Greece worshipped Underworld gods. These gods are often portrayed as malevolent and transgressive, giving an impression that ancient worshippers derived little or no benefit from developing ongoing relationships with them. In this book, the first book-length study that focuses on Underworld gods as an integral part of the religious landscape of the period, Mackin Roberts challenges this view and shows that Underworld gods are, in many cases, approached and 'befriended' in the same way as any other kind of god. Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion provides a fascinating insight into the worship of these deities, and will be of interest to anyone working on ancient Greek religion and cult.

The first book-length comparative and interdisciplinary treatment of divine envy and vengeance in the biblical and classical worlds.

Prophecy was a wide-spread phenomenon in the ancient world - not only in ancient Israel but in the whole Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. This is demonstrated by documents from the ancient Near East, that have been the object of Martti Nissinen's research for more than twenty years. Nissinen's studies have had a formative influence on the study of the prophetic phenomenon. The present volume presents a selection of thirty-one essays, bringing together essential aspects of prophetic divination in the ancient Near East. The first section of the volume discusses prophecy from theoretical perspectives. The second sections contains studies on prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria and other cuneiform sources. The third section discusses biblical prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context, while the fourth section focuses on prophets and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Even prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls is discussed in the fifth section. The articles are essential reading for anyone studying ancient prophetic phenomenon.

This is a complete edition, with prolegomena, translation, and commentary of the first, "philosophical" part of Philodemus' De Pietate, preserved in papyri. Introducing a new method for reconstructing the fragmented papyrus rolls recovered from Herculaneum, this is the first edition based on the papyri themselves (where they still exist), rather than on faulty reproductions, and the first edition to bring together fragments hitherto thought to be from different rolls. It will also be the first translation of the work into any language. An innovative format presents on facing pages the technical details of the papyrus, and a conventional, continuous text with interpretive notes. The work itself comprises a polemical treatise on the gods, mythography, and religion, presenting a defence of Epicurus's view of religion as an outgrowth of cultural history, and a philosophical rationale for participation in traditional cult practices in order to further social cohesion.

The author discerns two distinct currents of personal religion, which he illustrates through striking instances of faith on the part of individual Greeks: popular piety, or the indirect approach to God through saints, idols, and images as intermediaries; and reflective piety, which seeks direct and immediate union with God himself.