Skip to main content
Vai all'homepage della Commissione europea (si apre in una nuova finestra)
italiano it
CORDIS - Risultati della ricerca dell’UE
CORDIS

Repetition, Parallelism and Creativity: An Inquiry into the Construction of Meaning in Ancient Mesopotamian Literature and Erudition

Descrizione del progetto

Contribuire alla storia intellettuale dell’antica Mesopotamia

Spesso ci si riferisce all’antica Mesopotamia, il territorio delimitato dai fiumi Tigri ed Eufrate, come alla culla delle civiltà, in quanto ha rappresentato il primo esempio di società istruita e urbana. Il progetto REPAC, finanziato dall’UE, migliorerà la nostra comprensione di questa civiltà esaminando la relazione tra forma e funzione strutturali nelle composizioni letterarie e scientifiche della Mesopotamia. L’attenzione del progetto sarà incentrata sulla ripetizione e sul parallelismo come strumenti di strutturazione ed elaborazione del significato e dimostrerà le sue basi nell’«ermeneutica analogica» culturo-specifica. Il lavoro del progetto farà comprendere meglio lo sforzo creativo dell’antica Mesopotamia.

Obiettivo

REPAC is a contribution to the intellectual history of Ancient Mesopotamia, one of mankind’s earliest civilizations. The project investigates the relationship between textual form and function in Mesopotamian literature and scholarly compositions. It focuses on exact and variant repetition as a text structuring device and demonstrates that the use of repetition is grounded in a fundamental aspect of the worldview of Mesopotamian learned scribes. REPAC studies literary, magical and mantic texts written on clay tablets inscribed in the Cuneiform script in the Akkadian language dating from the first millennium BCE. Parallelism, refrain, ring composition and similar types of regular, part-repetitive patterning occur on all levels of these erudite textual genres. Textual elements which are separate but yoked together through contiguity and similarity were a major vector for poetic creativity, rhetorical effectiveness and inventiveness in argumentation. Repetition in its various forms was used not only as a means of aesthetic ornamentation. In mantic texts, it opened a way to understand the world through analogical reasoning. Literary texts constructed arguments by elucidating different aspects of their theme through sequences of parallel, but slightly divergent, statements. In magical rituals, repetition was used for magical action through the construction of persuasive analogies. The ubiquity of textual repetition was rooted in the scribes’ belief in the meaningful and causally effective interconnection of words, concepts and things sharing an element of similarity. No sustained effort at understanding this worldview and the importance of analogy as a principle of Mesopotamian literary and scholarly method has ever been made. The project fills this major knowledge gap. It will lead to a significantly improved understanding of the creative effort of Ancient Mesopotamia.

Campo scientifico (EuroSciVoc)

Parole chiave

Programma(i)

Argomento(i)

Meccanismo di finanziamento

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

Vedi tutti i progetti finanziati nell’ambito di questo schema di finanziamento

Invito a presentare proposte

(si apre in una nuova finestra) ERC-2018-STG

Vedi tutti i progetti finanziati nell’ambito del bando

Istituzione ospitante

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Contributo netto dell'UE
€ 1 494 198,00
Indirizzo
UNIVERSITATSRING 1
1010 Wien
Austria
Regione
Ostösterreich Wien Wien
Tipo di attività
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Collegamenti
Costo totale
€ 1 494 198,00

Beneficiari (1)