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Namma Kudumbam
Nammu ( dENGUR = dLAGAB×ḪAL; also read Namma) was a Mesopotamian goddess regarded as a creator deity in the local theology of Eridu. It is assumed that she was associated with water. She is also well attested in connection with incantations and apotropaic magic. She was regarded as the mother of Enki, and in a single inscription she appears as the wife of Anu, but it is assumed that she usually was not believed to have a spouse. While Nammu is already attested in sources from the Early Dynastic period, such as the ''zame'' hymns and an inscription of Lugal-kisalsi, she was not commonly worshiped. A temple dedicated to her existed in Ur in the Old Babylonian period, she is also attested in texts from Nippur and Babylon. Theophoric names invoking her were rare, with that of king Ur-Nammu until recently being believed to be the only example. In the Old Babylonian myth ''Enki and Ninmah'', Nammu is one of the deities involved in the creation of mankind alongside the epony ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eridu
Eridu ( Sumerian: , NUN.KI/eridugki; Akkadian: ''irîtu''; modern Arabic: Tell Abu Shahrain) is an archaeological site in southern Mesopotamia (modern Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq). Eridu was long considered the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia.Leick, Gwendolyn,Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, (Penguin UK). Google Books 2002 ISBN 9780141927114 Located 12 kilometers southwest of Ur, Eridu was the southernmost of a conglomeration of Sumerian cities that grew around temples, almost in sight of one another. These buildings were made of mud brick and built on top of one another. With the temples growing upward and the village growing outward, a larger city was built. In Sumerian mythology, Eridu was originally the home of Enki, later known by the Akkadians as Ea, who was considered to have founded the city. His temple was called E-Abzu, as Enki was believed to live in Abzu, an aquifer from which all life was believed to stem. Archaeology The site contains 8 mounds: *Mound ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexical Lists
The cuneiform lexical lists are a series of ancient Mesopotamian glossaries which preserve the semantics of Sumerograms, their phonetic value and their Akkadian or other language equivalents. They are the oldest literary texts from Mesopotamia and one of the most widespread genres in the ancient Near East. Wherever cuneiform tablets have been uncovered, inside Iraq or in the wider Middle East, these lists have been discovered. History The earliest lexical lists are the archaic (early third millennium BC) word lists uncovered in caches of business documents and which comprise lists of nouns, the absence of verbs being due to their sparse use in these records of commercial transactions. The most notable text is LU A, a list of professions which would be reproduced for the next thousand years until the end of the Old Babylonian period virtually unchanged. Later third millennium lists dating to around 2600 BC have been uncovered at Fara and Abū Ṣalābīkh, including the ''Fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ningirima
Ningirima was a Mesopotamian goddess associated with incantations, attested already in the Early Dynastic period. She was also associated with snakes, fish and water. According to the god list ''An = Anum'' and other sources, she was regarded as a sister of Enlil. While suggestions that she was conflated with the mongoose deity Ninkilim can be found in modern literature, this theory finds no direct support in primary sources. Her importance declined in the second millennium BCE, but in some locations, such as Ur, she was still worshiped after the Achaemenid conquest of Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE. Character The typical early writing of the name, known from Tell Fara, Abu Salabikh and Ebla is d Nin-A.MUŠ.ḪA.DU, meaning "mistress of snake and fish water" in Sumerian. The sequence A.MUŠ.ḪA.DU could be read as ''girima''. Later the name was commonly spelled syllabically, for example ''dNi-gi-ri-ma''. A text from Lagash refers to her as the "great true-eyed one ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Water Basin
A drainage basin is an area of land where all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, the ''drainage divide'', made up of a succession of elevated features, such as ridges and hills. A basin may consist of smaller basins that merge at river confluences, forming a hierarchical pattern. Other terms for a drainage basin are catchment area, catchment basin, drainage area, river basin, water basin, and impluvium. In North America, they are commonly called a watershed, though in other English-speaking places, "watershed" is used only in its original sense, that of a drainage divide. In a closed drainage basin, or endorheic basin, the water converges to a single point inside the basin, known as a sink, which may be a permanent lake, a dry lake, or a point where surface water is lost underground. Drainage basins are similar but no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parthenogenesis
Parthenogenesis (; from the Greek grc, παρθένος, translit=parthénos, lit=virgin, label=none + grc, γένεσις, translit=génesis, lit=creation, label=none) is a natural form of asexual reproduction in which growth and development of embryos occur in a gamete (egg or sperm) without combining with another gamete (e.g., egg and sperm fusing). In animals, parthenogenesis means development of an embryo from an unfertilized Gametophyte, egg cell. In plants, parthenogenesis is a component process of apomixis. In algae, parthenogenesis can mean the development of an embryo from either an individual sperm or an individual egg. Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in some plants, algae, invertebrate animal species (including nematodes, some tardigrades, water fleas, some scorpions, aphids, some mites, some bees, some Phasmatodea and parasitic wasps) and a few vertebrates (such as some fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds). This type of reproduction has been induced artificially ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joan Goodnick Westenholz
Joan Goodnick Westenholz (1 July 1943 – 2013) was an Assyriologist and the chief curator at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. She held positions related to academic research at the Oriental Institute (University of Chicago), Harvard University, Ruhr University Bochum (Germany), New York University, Princeton University, and the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research at Jerusalem. She was one of the first people to research gender studies in relation to the Ancient Near East and she co-founded and edited the inter-disciplinary NIN – Journal of Gender Studies in Antiquity. Early life and education Westenholz was born in 1943 in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated at the age of 21 with a degree in anthropology. She completed her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 1971 and studied under Erica Reiner, A. Leo Oppenheim, I. J. Gelb, and Miguel Civil Miguel Civil (Miquel Civil i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Groundwater
Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available freshwater in the world is groundwater. A unit of rock or an unconsolidated deposit is called an aquifer when it can yield a usable quantity of water. The depth at which soil pore spaces or fractures and voids in rock become completely saturated with water is called the water table. Groundwater is recharged from the surface; it may discharge from the surface naturally at springs and seeps, and can form oases or wetlands. Groundwater is also often withdrawn for agricultural, municipal, and industrial use by constructing and operating extraction wells. The study of the distribution and movement of groundwater is hydrogeology, also called groundwater hydrology. Typically, groundwater is thought of as water flowing through shallow aquifers, but, in the technical sense, it can also contain soil moisture, perma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dingir
''Dingir'' (, usually transliterated DIĜIR, ) is a Sumerian word for "god" or "goddess". Its cuneiform sign is most commonly employed as the determinative for religious names and related concepts, in which case it is not pronounced and is conventionally transliterated as a superscript "d" as in e.g. dInanna. The cuneiform sign by itself was originally an ideogram for the Sumerian word ''an'' ("sky" or "heaven");Hayes, 2000 its use was then extended to a logogram for the word ''diĝir'' ("god" or "goddess")Edzard, 2003 and the supreme deity of the Sumerian pantheon ''An'', and a phonogram for the syllable . Akkadian took over all these uses and added to them a logographic reading for the native '' ilum'' and from that a syllabic reading of . In Hittite orthography, the syllabic value of the sign was again only ''an''. The concept of "divinity" in Sumerian is closely associated with the heavens, as is evident from the fact that the cuneiform sign doubles as the ideogram f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apsu
The Abzu or Apsu ( Sumerian: ; Akkadian: ), also called (Cuneiform:, ; Sumerian: ; Akkadian: — ='water' ='deep', recorded in Greek as ), is the name for fresh water from underground aquifers which was given a religious fertilising quality in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology. Lakes, springs, rivers, wells, and other sources of fresh water were thought to draw their water from the abzu. In Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, it is referred to as the primeval sea below the void space of the underworld (Kur) and the earth ( Ma) above. In Sumerian culture In the city of Eridu, Enki's temple was known as E2-abzu (house of the deep waters) and was located at the edge of a swamp, an abzu. Certain tanks of holy water in Babylonian and Assyrian temple courtyards were also called abzu (''apsû''). Typical in religious washing, these tanks were similar to Judaism's mikvot, the washing pools of Islamic mosques, or the baptismal font in Christian churches. In Sumerian cosmology ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genitive Construction
In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another (e.g. "John's jacket"), or some other type of connection (e.g. "John's father" or "the father of John"). A genitive construction involves two nouns, the ''head'' (or ''modified noun'') and the ''dependent'' (or ''modifier noun''). In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun '' modifies'' the head by expressing some property of it. For example, in the construction "John's jacket", "jacket" is the head and "John's" is the modifier, expressing a property of the jacket (it is owned by John). The analogous relationship in head-marking languages is pertensive. Methods of construction Genitive constructions can be expressed in various ways: By placing the dependent noun in the genitive case This is common in languages with grammatical case, e.g. Latin. For example, "Cicero's father" is ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ninimma
Ninimma was a Mesopotamian goddess best known as a courtier of Enlil. She is well attested as a deity associated with scribal arts, described in modern publications as a divine scholar, scribe or librarian by modern researchers. She could also serve as an assistant of the birth goddess Ninmah, and a hymn describes her partaking in cutting of umbilical cords and determination of fates. It has also been suggested that she was associated with vegetation. In the Middle Babylonian period she additionally came to be viewed as a healing deity. Nippur was Ninimma's main cult center, though she is also known from documents from other cities, such as Adab and Uruk. In known sources, she appears alongside deities such as Nisaba, who like her was associated with scribes, or other members of Enlil's court, such as Shuzianna and Ninkasi. She is sparsely attested in literary texts, with only two hymns dedicated to her presently known. She also appears in the myth ''Enki and Ninmah'' and in a v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sumerian Language
Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 3000 BC. It is accepted to be a local language isolate and to have been spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the area that is modern-day Iraq. Akkadian, a Semitic language, gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language in the area around 2000 BC (the exact date is debated), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD. Thereafter it seems to have fallen into obscurity until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets that had been left by its speakers. Stages The history of written Sumerian can be divided into several periods: *Archaic Sumerian – 31st–26th century BC *Old or Classical Sumerian – 26th–23rd century BC *Neo-Sumerian – 23rd–21s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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