I have read cunningly written text the Sumerian of which is obscure and the Akkadian difficult to clarify. I have examined stone inscriptions from before the flood that are blocked up, sealed, mixed up.

Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria, seventh century B.C.

Found on the The Cuneiform Digital Palaeography Project Website

Eros: From Hesiod’s Theogony to Late Antiquity
10 December 2009 - 5 April 2010
Museum of Cycladic Art: Eros: From Hesiod’s Theogony to Late Antiquity

Some 272 objets d’art, including masterpieces from more than 50 international museums which date from the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD, tell the story of love in antiquity. The exhibition has sought to survey the changing perceptions of Eros from the 8th century BC, when he is seen as a powerful god, to Roman times when, less potent, under the name of Cupid he becomes a mere companion to Venus.

Eros, the great loosener of limbs, was many things: irresistible, tender, beautiful, excruciating, maddening, merciless and bittersweet. Eros is the Greek god of love and fertility. In early mythology, Eros is a primeval god, born of Chaos. It was Eros who brought together Uranus, sky, and Gaia, earth, the original father and mother. In later traditions, Eros is the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love and beauty. Some myths say that Eros’s father was Ares, god of war.In earlier art and literature, Eros was depicted as a strong, athletic, young man. However, he was gradually portrayed as younger and younger, until in Hellenistic times, he was being portrayed as a child or baby, with wings, and a bow and arrow.

Attic red-figure krater depicting the abduction of Europa.  Zeus, transformed into a white bull, carries the Phoenician princess on his back.  Hermes leads, showing them the way to the island of Crete, while the winged Eros accompanies them.

Ancient figurines were toys not mother goddess statues, say experts as 9,000-year-old artefacts are discovered

By David Derbyshire
Amazing artefacts: Many of the figurines resemble animals like sheep and goats

They were carved out of stone and squeezed out of clay 9,000 years ago, at the very dawn of civilisation. Now archaeologists say these astonishing Stone Age statues could have been the world’s first educational toys.

Nearly 2,000 figures have been unearthed at Catalhoyuk in Turkey - the world’s oldest known town - over the last few decades. The most recent were found just last week. Made by Neolithic]] farmers thousands of years before the creation of the pyramids or Stonehenge, they depict tiny cattle, crude sheep and flabby people.

In the 1960s, some researchers claimed the more rotund figures were of a mysterious large breasted and big bellied “mother goddess”, prompting a feminist tourism industry that thrives today. But modern day experts disagree. They say the “mother goddess” figures - which were buried among the rubbish of the Stone Age town - are unlikely to be have been religious icons.

Many of the figures thought to have been women in the 1960s, are just as likely to be men.

Archaeologist Prof Lynn Meskell, of Stanford University, said: “The majority are cattle or sheep and goats. They could be representatives of animals they were dealing with - and they could have been teaching aides. “All were found in the trash - and they were not in niches or platforms or placed in burials.”

Out of the 2,000 figurines dug up at the site, less than five per cent are female, she told the British science Festival in Surrey University, Guildford. “These are things that were made and used on a daily basis,” she said. “People carried them around and discarded them.”

Catalhoyuk is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Established around 7,000 BC, it was home to 5,000 people living in mud brick and plaster houses. Their buildings were crammed so tightly together, the inhabitants clambered over the roofs and used ladders to get into their homes. The town dwellers were early farmers who had domesticated a handful of plants and kept wild cattle for meat and milk. Cattle horns were incorporated into the walls of their homes.

The town contains the oldest murals - paintings on plastered walls. Unlike later towns, there is no obvious hierarchy - no homes for priests or leaders, no temples and no public spaces. The dead were buried in spaces under homes, rather than in cemeteries. Some researchers believe it was an equalitarian society.

The town survived for around 2,000 years. It is not known what happened to its inhabitants, but they may have been killed by invaders or driven away by the loss of nearby farmland.

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I also recommend the book:

The Myth of the Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future

Tags: toolsof the trade

“SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Satire’s column’s prose itself. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for “Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one.”

Full essay: Tense Present. Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage by David Foster Wallace.

To be continued …

The Society of Biblical Literature is the oldest and largest international scholarly membership organization in the field of biblical studies. Founded in 1880, the Society has grown to over 8,500 international members including teachers, students, religious leaders and individuals from all walks of life who share a mutual interest in the critical investigation of the Bible.

Website>> The Society of Biblical Literature.

“The SBL Handbook of Style is precisely what is needed for the next generation or two or three of scholars in our field and for everybody in the chain from author to editor to printer, including all the half steps in between. I hope that The Handbook will draw together everybody who publishes in this field to agree to adopt it as the bible for publishing scholarly works in our discipline. having a uniform standard, and a detailed exposition of the rules and the whys and the wherefores of this intricate business, will go a long way toward clarifying and simplifying the work of both writer and reader of these erudite products. I could not be more enthusiastic about a volume that I can recommend to one and all, and to which I can send innocent, ignorant, and recalcitrant authors and editors, and all the rest.” ? David Noel Freedman, Professor of History, and Chair in Hebrew Biblical Studies, University of California, San Diego

“The SBL Handbook of Style is an astonishing book, a true ?one-stop? reference for authors preparing manuscripts in biblical studies and related fields. It covers an amazing range of topics, from what every literate scholar should know (but may not) to what only the most erudite expert in an obscure subfield of the discipline would be likely to know. Do you need to know how to cite an Internet publication? Whose job it is to prepare the index and secure permissions? How to alphabetize Abraham ibn Ezra (and why)? What the abbreviation of AAeg stands for? It’s all here. This volume should substantially reduce the incidence of tears and tantrums that so often beset the process of manuscript preparation. Before long biblical scholars will wonder how we ever got along without this indispensable reference work. Every graduate program should make The SBL Handbook of Style a required text.” ? Carol A. Newsom, Professor of Old Testament, Emory University

SBL Handbook of Style
Patrick H. Alexander, Kutsko, Ernest, Decker-Lucke
ISBN156563487X
Price: $24.95

Publication Date: April, 2003

Available at the SBL Website.

He makes reference to Why Blog? / Does Blogging Matter? posted on the Ancient World Bloggers Group at the end on May, which refers to many other interesting links and comments.