Dan Levene

'This is a qybl' for overturning sorceries’; Form, formula - threads in a web of transmission

This volume brings together thirteen studies by as many experts in the study of one or more ancient or medieval magical traditions, from ancient Mesopotamia and Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt to the Greek world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Medical traditions and chronic disease in Ethiopia: a story of wax and gold?

Effective medical care for non-communicable diseases (NCD) remains lamentably poor in Ethiopia and many low-income countries. Consequently, where modern medicine does not reach or is rejected, traditional treatments prevail. These are fragmented and esoteric by nature, and their understanding of illness is so fundamentally different that confusion proliferates when attempts are made to introduce modern medical care. Ethiopia is host to a variety of longstanding medical belief systems that coexist and function together, where modern medicine is often viewed as just another choice. This multiplicity of approaches to illness is accompanied by the Ethiopian custom of weaving layers of meaning, often contradictory, into speech and conversation – sometimes referred to as ‘wax and gold’, the ‘wax’ being the literal and the ‘gold’ the deeper, even hidden, meaning or significance. We argue that engagement with traditional belief systems and understanding these subtleties of meaning could assist in more effective NCD care.

The anatomy of a search and mining system for digital humanities

Samtla (Search And Mining Tools with Linguistic Analysis) is an online integrated research environment designed in collaboration with historians and linguists to facilitate the study of digitised texts written in any language. It currently supports the research of two corpora: the Genizah collection held by the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit in Cambridge University, and a collection of Aramaic incantation texts from late antiquity. In contrast to standard search engines and text mining systems that rely on the bag-of-words representation of text, Samtla provides the retrieval and discovery of fuzzy text patterns/motifs (aka “formulae” to historians), which is achieved through applying a character-based n-gram statistical language model built on top of a powerful generalised suffix tree data structure. This paper brie y describes the major components of Samtla and their underlying techniques.

Finding Parallel Passages in Cultural Heritage Archives

It is of great interest to researchers and scholars in many disciplines (particularly those working on cultural heritage projects) to study parallel passages (i.e., identical or similar pieces of text describing the same thing) in digital text archives. Although there exist a few software tools for this purpose, they are restricted to a specific domain (e.g., the Bible) or a specific language (e.g., Hebrew). In this article, we present in detail how we build a digital infrastructure that can facilitate the search and discovery of parallel passages for any domain in any language. It is at the core of our Samtla (Search And Mining Tools with Linguistic Analysis) system designed in collaboration with historians and linguists. The system has already been used to support research on five large text corpora that span a number of different domains and languages. The key to such a domain-independent and language-independent digital infrastructure is a novel combination of a character-based n-gram language model, space-optimized suffix tree, and generalized edit distance. A comprehensive evaluation through crowdsourcing shows that the effectiveness of our system’s search functionality is on par with the human-level performance.

Recycling economies, when efficient, are by their nature invisible”. A first century Jewish recycling economy 2013 2013-01-01 Brill 39 65 0 1 1 2016-06-24 1598764573 27841 10.1007/BF02778298 Journal lipoperoxide in liver tissues obtained by needle biopsy in various liver diseases i with special reference to the relationship between its difference in liver diseases and histological findings Lipoperoxide in liver tissues obtained by needle biopsy in various liver diseases (I) with special reference to the relationship between its difference in liver diseases and histological findings 1971 1971-06-01 Springer Nature 142280747 6 1 74 74 0 0 0 Gastroenterologia Japonica 2016-06-24 1973929391 25894 10.1016/0095-8522(53)90030-0 Journal statistical thermodynamics of a one dimensional polymer chain incorporating energy and entropy effects Statistical thermodynamics of a one-dimensional polymer chain incorporating energy and entropy effects 1953 1953-08-01 Academic Press 105390777 8 4 465 473 4 11 11 Journal of Colloid Science 2016-06-24 2416332177 27826 10.1007/BF02454005 Journal die unterbindung der arteria iliaca interna bei unstillbarer blutung nach schweren beckenfrakturen Die Unterbindung der Arteria iliaca interna bei unstillbarer Blutung nach schweren Beckenfrakturen 1968 1968-11-01 Langenbecks Arch Chir 133324295 322 1 1102 1108 1 0 0 Langenbeck's Archives of Surgery 2016-06-24 2263570345 24590 american legion commander expresses great disappointment at plans to close hot springs va hospital American Legion Commander expresses great disappointment' at plans to close Hot Springs VA Hospital

This article provides the cross referencing of archaeo-metallurgical finds with late antique Jewish texts to provide glimpses of sophisticated Jewish metal recycling technologies. The cross-disciplinary approach offers information that each discipline on its own cannot provide. Archaeological analysis shows complex alloys that have hitherto been considered to have been achieved from the mixing of freshly mined and smelted constituents. The texts, however, offer a unique record that shows an established recycling industry which has never been matched to the material find.

Jewish Aramaic Curse Texts from Late-Antique Mesopotamia

The corpus of Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia is perhaps the most important source we have for studying the everyday beliefs and practices of the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Pagan communities on the eve of the Islamic conquests. In Jewish Aramaic Curse Texts from Late-Antique Mesopotamia, Dan Levene collects and analyses a selection of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls. While such texts are usually apotropaic or healing in purpose, those collected here are distinctive in that their purpose was to curse or return curses against human adversaries. This book presents new editions of thirty texts, of which fourteen are edited here for the first time, with an introduction, commentary, analysis and glossaries, as well as photographs.