Understanding the role that etiquette plays in regulating individual interactions and group cohesion can provide new insights into how and why cultures evolve.
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“Our analysis of etiquette suggests these were not religious gestures, as previously thought,” he adds. “Rather, the clasping hands gesture indicated that the hands had been active and that duties were successfully achieved. The pointing finger was simply a means of indicating specific sections within inscribed texts or images.” This work enabled Portuese to redefine etiquette in Assyria – a word that only emerged in France in the 1580s – as a set of conventions that regulate interactions between individuals."
“We were able to develop the fundamental idea that people adhere to etiquette rules, in ancient Mesopotamia as much as today, out of fear of being excluded or ostracised from a group,” he notes. “Fear, in essence, is the real reason driving individuals to adopt and adapt to social rules.”
In a collaboration between Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and the University of Baghdad, an ancient Babylonian hymn dating back over two millennia has been rediscovered and fully deciphered.
The new AI tool “Palaeographicum” is revolutionizing research into the cultures of the Ancient Near East: It identifies individual variations of cuneiform signs—a huge step forward for academia.
The Shamash Gate in ancient Nineveh has revealed rare evidence of two violent chapters separated by more than 2,500 years: the fall of the Assyrian capital in 612 B.C. and the battle to free Mosul from ISIS in 2017.
Swiss-Assyrian artist Shamiran Istifan is receiving widespread acclaim for her latest exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, where her installations explore themes of beauty, migration, identity and censorship through striking visual symbolism.
In a major policy announcement, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi declared that facilitating the return of Assyrians who fled the country during two decades of conflict is now a "national and government priority."
A new academic study offers one of the most extensive multidisciplinary examinations to date of the historical relationship between the designations Assyria, Syria, and Syriac–a question that has occupied historians for centuries.
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