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What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomastics – the studies of place names, or toponyms. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume, and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.
Illustrated with numerous case studies, this book is the first comprehensive overview of the related fields of toponymy and toponomastics.
This is a volume about the life and power of ritual objects in their religious ritual settings. In this Special Issue, we see a wide range of contributions on material culture and ritual practices across religions. By focusing on the dynamic interrelations between objects, ritual, and belief, it explores how religion happens through symbolic materiality. The ritual objects presented in this volume include: masks worn in the Dogon dance; antique ecclesiastical silver objects carried around in festive processions and shown in shrines in the southern Andes; funerary photographs and films functioning as mnemonic objects for grieving children; a dented rock surface perceived to be the god’s foo...
This book focuses on Kalabría as an ancient land of Italy from its origin to the early Middle Ages. The place name referred to the Salento peninsula, also called Messapia, as part of present-day Puglia and later to the land of the Bruttii, now the region of Calabria. This work is the first to carefully evaluate linguistic and historical studies in a comprehensive and monographic form. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the systematic combination of Linguistics and Landscape History guides the research step by step. The sample represents a new significant methodological instance that merges Toponymy, History, Archaeology, Topography, and Philology.
The Routledge Handbook of Asian Linguistics provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which Asian languages should be conceptualized as a whole, the distinct characteristics of each language group, and the relationships and results of interactions between the languages and language families in Asia. Asia is the largest and the most populous continent on Earth, and the site of many of the first civilizations. This Handbook aims to provide a systematic overview of Asian languages in both theoretical and functional perspectives, optimally combining the two in intercultural settings. In other words, the text will provide a reference for researchers of individual Asian languages or languag...
Onomastics is an area of scholarly interest that has grown considerably in importance in recent years. Consequently, the 27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, held in 2021 in Kraków, Poland, gathered scholars from all over the world, active in all subfields of onomastic enquiry, as well as those exploring the areas bordering on other disciplines of the humanities. It thus became a venue for presenting state-of-the-art research in the study of proper names, proposing novel approaches and opening new vistas for future research. The present work is the first of the three volumes of conference proceedings that were the fruit of the congress. Devoted to place naming, it contains 33 ...
Food is such a friendly topic that it’s often thought of as a “hook” for engaging visitors – a familiar way into other topics, or a sensory element to round out a living history interpretation. But it’s more than just a hook – it’s a topic all its own, with its own history and its own uncertain future, deserving of a central place in historic interpretation. With audiences more interested in food than ever before, and new research in food studies bringing interdisciplinary approaches to this complicated but compelling subject, museums and historic sites have an opportunity to draw new audiences and infuse new meaning into their food presentations. You’ll find: A comprehensive...
This book is available as open access through the Knowledge Unlatched programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. We need to talk about Hippocrates. Current scholarship attributes none of the works of the 'Hippocratic corpus' to him, and the ancient biographical traditions of his life are not only late, but also written for their own promotional purposes. Yet Hippocrates features powerfully in our assumptions about ancient medicine, and our beliefs about what medicine – and the physician himself – should be. In both orthodox and alternative medicine, he continues to be a model to be emulated. This book will challenge widespread assumptions about Hippocrates (and, in the process, about the history of medicine in ancient Greece and beyond) and will also explore the creation of modern myths about the ancient world. Why do we continue to use Hippocrates, and how are new myths constructed around his name? How do news stories and the internet contribute to our picture of him? And what can this tell us about wider popular engagements with the classical world today, in memes, 'quotes' and online?
Anahita was the most important goddess of pre-Islamic Iran. From her roots as an ancient Indo-European water deity her status was unrivalled by any other Iranian goddess throughout the course of three successive Iranian empires over a period of a thousand years. The first scholarly book on Anahita, this study reconstructs the Indo-European water goddess through a comparison of Celtic, Slavic, Armenian and Indo-Iranian myths and rituals. Anahita's constantly-evolving description and functions are then traced through the written and iconographic records of Iranian societies from the Achaemenid period onwards, including but not limited to the Zoroastrian texts and the inscriptions and artistic representations of the great pre-Islamic Iranian empires. The study concludes by tracing survival of the goddess in Islamic Iran, as seen in new Persian literature and popular rituals. Manya Saadi-nejad demonstrates the close relationship between Iranian mythology and that of other Indo-European peoples, and the significant cultural continuities from Iran's pre-Islamic period into the Islamic present.
Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa...