Monday, September 21, 2020

Review of Thavapalan, The meaning of color in ancient Mesopotamia

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: The meaning of color in ancient Mesopotamia.
Shiyanthi Thavapalan, The meaning of color in ancient Mesopotamia. Culture and history of the ancient Near East, 104. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 524 p.. ISBN9789004415379 €163,00.

Review by
Ulrike Steinert, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz. usteiner@uni-mainz.de

[...]

In conclusion, The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia is a ground-breaking, methodologically innovative, and insightful work. It makes an important contribution to the fields of color studies, historical semantics, and to the history of technologies, enriching our current understanding of Mesopotamian worldviews, languages and material culture. The book will be a valuable resource not only to Assyriologists, but, due to its comparative perspective, also to historians, linguists, and readers interested in the interrelations between language, thought, and culture.
For more on language and color perception in antiquity, see here and links. And for recovering the original color on an ancient monument, see here and links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.