Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Where It All Began The Mesopotamian Origins of Writing, Printing and Publishing

Where It All Began The Mesopotamian Origins of Writing, Printing and Publishing LOGOS 252 LOGOS 21/3-4 © 2010 LOGOS In the 1950’s, as a law-student at Leiden Univer- sity, I started to collect Near Eastern artefacts in a modest way. At that time I was very impressed by ancient legal documents and especially by the Code of Hammurabi (1696-1654 BC) as carved on an eight-foot stele of polished basalt, now displayed at the Louvre. On its upper part the Babylonian King stands in the attitude of prayer facing the Sun-god Shamash, supreme chief justice, seated on his throne. A little later I acquired a small black seal, two centimeters high, on which – to my amazement and delight – in miniature a rather similar scene was cut with a King in front of a God, seated on a small throne. The real thrill of discovery hit me many years later during my work as a publisher at Wolters Kluwer, when I realized that cylinder seals were in fact the fi rst examples of intaglio print- ing, millennia before the ‘invention’ of woodcut/ woodblock-printing and Gutenberg, Caxton and Coster. I started to collect seals in earnest with more discerning selectivity. Still later I wrote a thesis about communication science, innovation and http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Logos Brill

Where It All Began The Mesopotamian Origins of Writing, Printing and Publishing

Kist, Joost
Logos , Volume 21 (3-4): 252 – Jan 1, 2010
Download PDF
3 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/where-it-all-began-the-mesopotamian-origins-of-writing-printing-and-MOam3u3TuH

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2010 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0957-9656
eISSN
1878-4712
DOI
10.1163/095796511X560231
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

LOGOS 252 LOGOS 21/3-4 © 2010 LOGOS In the 1950’s, as a law-student at Leiden Univer- sity, I started to collect Near Eastern artefacts in a modest way. At that time I was very impressed by ancient legal documents and especially by the Code of Hammurabi (1696-1654 BC) as carved on an eight-foot stele of polished basalt, now displayed at the Louvre. On its upper part the Babylonian King stands in the attitude of prayer facing the Sun-god Shamash, supreme chief justice, seated on his throne. A little later I acquired a small black seal, two centimeters high, on which – to my amazement and delight – in miniature a rather similar scene was cut with a King in front of a God, seated on a small throne. The real thrill of discovery hit me many years later during my work as a publisher at Wolters Kluwer, when I realized that cylinder seals were in fact the fi rst examples of intaglio print- ing, millennia before the ‘invention’ of woodcut/ woodblock-printing and Gutenberg, Caxton and Coster. I started to collect seals in earnest with more discerning selectivity. Still later I wrote a thesis about communication science, innovation and

Journal

Logos – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2010

There are no references for this article.