Books by "H. Craig Melchert"
3 books found
The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia
by Mark H. Munn
2006 · Univ of California Press
Among maternal deities of the Greek pantheon, the Mother of the Gods was a paradox. Conflict and resolution were played out symbolically, Munn shows, and the goddess of Lydian tyranny was eventually accepted by the Athenians as the Mother of the Gods and a symbol of their own sovereignty.
"Jasanoff comes up with some of the strongest arguments yet made for assuming that Indo-European languages other than Hittite and Tocharian underwent a substantial period of common development, and this needs to be fitted into any model of the dispersal of the language family." James Clackson, Times Literary Supplement |d 05/03/2004 This book reconciles what is known of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system with the evidence of Hittite and the other early Anatolian languages. The decipherment of Hittite in 1917 and the recognition that it was an Indo-European language had dramatic consequences for conceptions of the Indo-European parent language. For most of the twentieth century, attention focused on the peculiarities of Hittite phonology, especially the consonant h and its implications for the evolving laryngeal theory. Yet the morphological 'disconnects' between Hittite and the other early languages are more profound than the phonological differences. The Hittite verbal system lacks most of the familiar tense-aspect categories of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. It also presents the novelty of the hi-conjugation, a purely formal conjugation class to which nearly half of all Hittite verbs belong. Repeated attempts to explain the hi-conjugation on the basis of the classical model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system have failed. The question is not whether the conventional picture of the parent language must be modified to account for the facts of Hittite, but how. In this outstanding book Professor Jasanoff puts forward a new and revolutionary model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system that promises to have a major impact on Indo-European studies. His strikingly original synthesis, reflecting a quarter-century-long study of the problem, is the most thorough and systematic attempt thus far to bridge the gap between Hittite and the other Indo-European languages.
Communities of Style examines the production and circulation of portable luxury goods throughout the Levant in the early Iron Age (1200–600 BCE). In particular it focuses on how societies in flux came together around the material effects of art and style, and their role in collective memory. Marian H. Feldman brings her dual training as an art historian and an archaeologist to bear on the networks that were essential to the movement and trade of luxury goods—particularly ivories and metal works—and how they were also central to community formation. The interest in, and relationships to, these art objects, Feldman shows, led to wide-ranging interactions and transformations both within and between communities. Ultimately, she argues, the production and movement of luxury goods in the period demands a rethinking of our very geo-cultural conception of the Levant, as well as its influence beyond what have traditionally been thought of as its borders.