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Canaanite And Aramaic Inscriptions
The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, are the primary extra-Biblical source for understanding of the society and history of the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arameans. Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. The older inscriptions form a Canaanite–Aramaic dialect continuum, exemplified by writings which scholars have struggled to fit into either category, such as the Stele of Zakkur and the Deir Alla Inscription. The Northwest Semitic languages are a language group that contains the Aramaic language, as well as the Canaanite languages including Phoenician and Hebrew. Languages The old Aramaic period (850 to 612 BC) saw the production and dispersal of inscriptions due to the rise of the Arameans as a major force in Ancient Near East. Their language was adopted as an international language of diplomacy, particularly during the late stages of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eshmunazar II Sarcophagus
The Eshmunazar II sarcophagus is a 6th-century BC sarcophagus unearthed in 1855 in the "Phoenician Necropolis", a hypogeum (underground tomb) complex in the southern area of the city of Sidon in modern-day Lebanon. The sarcophagus was discovered by members of the French consulate in Sidon and was donated to the Louvre. The Eshmunazar II sarcophagus has two sets of Phoenician inscriptions, one on its lid and the other on its trough, under the sarcophagus head. The lid engraving was of great significance upon its discovery; it was the first Phoenician language inscription to be discovered in Phoenicia proper, the most detailed Phoenician text ever found anywhere up to that point, and is today the second longest extant Phoenician inscription after the one discovered at Karatepe. Eshmunazar II (Phoenician: ', a theophoric name meaning 'Eshmun helps') was a Phoenician King of Sidon and the son of King Tabnit. His sarcophagus was likely carved in Egypt from local amphibolit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Near East
The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran ( Elam, Media, Parthia and Persis), Anatolia/ Asia Minor and the Armenian highlands (Turkey's Eastern Anatolia Region, Armenia, northwestern Iran, southern Georgia, and western Azerbaijan), the Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan), Cyprus and the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient Near East is studied in the fields of Ancient Near East studies, Near Eastern archaeology and ancient history. The history of the ancient Near East begins with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC, though the date it ends varies. The term covers the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in the region, until either the conquest by the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, that by the Macedonian Empire in the 4th century BC, or the Muslim co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malta
Malta ( , , ), officially the Republic of Malta ( mt, Repubblika ta' Malta ), is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago, between Italy and Libya, and is often considered a part of Southern Europe. It lies south of Sicily (Italy), east of Tunisia, and north of Libya. The official languages are Maltese and English, and 66% of the current Maltese population is at least conversational in the Italian language. Malta has been inhabited since approximately 5900 BC. Its location in the centre of the Mediterranean has historically given it great strategic importance as a naval base, with a succession of powers having contested and ruled the islands, including the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Aragonese, Knights of St. John, French, and British, amongst others. With a population of about 516,000 over an area of , Malta is the world's tenth-smallest country in area and fourth most densely populated sovereign co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cippi Of Melqart
The Cippi of Melqart are a pair of Phoenician marble cippi that were unearthed in Malta under undocumented circumstances and dated to the 2nd century BC. These are votive offerings to the god Melqart, and are inscribed in two languages, Ancient Greek and Phoenician, and in the two corresponding scripts, the Greek and the Phoenician alphabet. They were discovered in the late 17th century, and the identification of their inscription in a letter dated 1694 made them the first Phoenician writing to be identified and published in modern times. Because they present essentially the same text (with some minor differences), the cippi provided the key to the modern understanding of the Phoenician language. In 1758, the French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélémy relied on their inscription, which used 17 of the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet, to decipher the unknown language. The tradition that the cippi were found in Marsaxlokk was only inferred by their dedication to Heracles, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term "Hebrew" (''ivrit'') was not used for the language in the Bible, which was referred to as (''sefat kena'an'', i.e. language of Canaan) or (''Yehudit'', i.e. Judaean), but the name was used in Ancient Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts. The Hebrew language is attested in inscriptions from about the 10th century BCE, and spoken Hebrew persisted through and beyond the Second Temple period, which ended in the siege of Jerusalem (70 CE). It eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, spoken up until the fifth century CE. Biblical Hebrew as recorded in the Hebrew Bible reflects various stages of the Hebrew language in its consonantal skeleton, as well as a vocalization ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" '' Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. Hebrew: ''Tānāḵh''), also known in Hebrew as Miqra (; Hebrew: ''Mīqrā''), is the canonical collection of Hebrew scriptures, including the Torah, the [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hapax Legomenon
In corpus linguistics, a ''hapax legomenon'' ( also or ; ''hapax legomena''; sometimes abbreviated to ''hapax'', plural ''hapaxes'') is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works but more than once in that particular work. ''Hapax legomenon'' is a transliteration of Greek , meaning "being said once". The related terms ''dis legomenon'', ''tris legomenon'', and ''tetrakis legomenon'' respectively (, , ) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used. ''Hapax legomena'' are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are ''hapax legomena'', and another 10% ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Attested Language
In linguistics, attested languages are languages (living or dead) that have been documented and for which the evidence (attestation) has survived to the present day. Evidence may be recordings, transcriptions, literature or inscriptions. In contrast, unattested languages may be names of purported languages for which no direct evidence exists, languages for which all evidence has been lost, or hypothetical proto-languages proposed in linguistic reconstruction. Within an attested language, particular word forms directly known to have been used (because they appear in the literature, inscriptions or documented speech) are called attested forms. They contrast with unattested forms, which are reconstructions hypothesised to have been used based on indirect evidence (such as etymological patterns). In linguistic texts, unattested forms are commonly marked with a preceding asterisk (*). See also * Historical linguistics * List of languages by first written accounts *Spurious lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plautus
Titus Maccius Plautus (; c. 254 – 184 BC), commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus. The word Plautine refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his. Biography Not much is known about Titus Maccius Plautus's early life. It is believed that he was born in Sarsina, a small town in Emilia Romagna in northern Italy, around 254 BC.''The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature'' (1996) Ed. M.C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers, Oxford University Press, Oxford Reference Online According to Morris Marples, Plautus worked as a stage-carpenter or scene-shifter in his early years. It is from this work, perhaps, that his love of the theater originated. His acting talent was eventually discovered; and he adopted the names "Maccius ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poenulus
''Poenulus'', also called ''The Little Carthaginian'' or ''The Little Punic Man'', is a Latin comedic play for the early Roman theatre by Titus Maccius Plautus, probably written between 195 and 189 BC. The play is noteworthy for containing text in Carthaginian Punic, spoken by the character Hanno in the fifth act. Another remarkable feature is the sympathetic portrayal of the character of the Carthaginian Hanno at a time when only a few years previously the Romans had suffered huge losses in the 2nd Punic War fought against the Carthaginian general Hannibal (218–202 BC). The play shows signs of having been reworked, possibly for a second production, since there are two endings. Plot Agorastocles is in love with a girl named Adelphasium, who is a slave belonging to the pimp Lycus. Agorastocles, Adelphasium, and her sister Anterastilis were stolen as children from Carthage. Agorastocles was purchased as an adopted son, whereas the girls were sold as slaves to become prostitut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punic Language
The Punic language, also called Phoenicio-Punic or Carthaginian, is an extinct variety of the Phoenician language, a Canaanite language of the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages. An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia (modern Lebanon and western Syria), it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, and the Iberian peninsula and several Mediterranean islands such as Malta, Sicily and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity, from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD. Punic is considered to have separated from its Phoenician parent around the time that Carthage became the leading Phoenician city under Mago I, but scholarly attempts to delineate the dialects lack precision and generally disagree on the classification. History The Punics stayed in contact with the homeland of Phoenicia until the destruction of Carthage by the Roman Republic in 146 BC. At first, there ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
