Oxford Oxford University Press 2019 Hard cover New. Contains: Unspecified. Includes unspecified. Intended for professional and scholarly audience.

Hardback. New. How did people in the ancient world experience their attempts to communicate with divine powers? This volume seeks to re-examine divination in ancient Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, and Chinese cultures and to identify and elucidate previously understudied aspects of ancient divinatory experience and practice. ISBN 0198844549 9780198844549 [GB]

ISBN10: 0198844549, ISBN13: 9780198844549, [publisher: Oxford University Press] Hardcover
[Dallas, TX, U.S.A.] [Publication Year: 2019]

Oxford Oxford University Press 2019 Hard cover New. Contains: Unspecified. Includes unspecified. Intended for professional and scholarly audience.

ISBN10: 0198844549, ISBN13: 9780198844549, [publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford] Hardcover Hardcover. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This volume sets out to re-examine what ancient people - primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures - thought they were doing through divination, and what this can tell us aboutthe religions and cultures in which divination was practised. The chapters, authored by a range of established experts and upcoming early-career scholars, engage with four shared questions: What kindsof gods do ancient forms of divination presuppose? What beliefs, anxieties, and hopes did divination seek to address? What were the limits of human 'control' of divination? What kinds of human-divine relationships did divination create/sustain? The volume as a whole seeks to move beyond functionalist approaches to divination in order to identify and elucidate previously understudied aspects of ancient divinatory experience and practice. Special attention is paid to the experiences ofnon-elites, the perception of divine presence, the ways in which divinatory techniques could surprise their users by yielding unexpected or unwanted results, the difficulties of interpretation with whichdivinatory experts were thought to c ...
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