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[German version] (Elamite haltamti; Sumerian elam( a), graphically ‘explained’ as NIM.KI, ‘Upper Land ’; Akkadian elamtu; Hebrew ēlām). The name was adopted in the West with the Bible (Gen 14) serving as intermediary. The geographical boundaries of E. varied but the core region was the lowland of modern Ḫuzestān (Khuzistan) with  Susa (settled since about 4,000 BC), later also the Iranian highland ( Persis) centred on Anšan (the largest known Proto-Elamite site [2. 123]; modern Tappe Malyān, 42 km west of  Pers…

[English version] The concept of property as it developed in Classical Roman law was crucial in the development of European law, to the shaping of civil law in regard to the apportioning of a thing to a person. The concepts of dominium and proprietas, widespread and used together in Roman legal terminology from the 1st cent. BC, characterized a legally comprehensive relationship of control, containing rights of disposal and use, by a person over a thing. Dominium was distinguished from possessio, the mere de facto control of a thing, and from the rights that entitled only to ha…

Koch, Heidemarie (Marburg) [German version] A. Prehistory (CT) During the Roman Principate and Dominate, public speech experienced a loss of importance (with the possible exception of the genus demonstrativum) [21. 236f.]. Within the network of official letters and letter-like documents that to some extent took their place, the tendency emerged to prepare the "pragmatic centre" [19. 17, 22] of the text motivationally through increasingly voluminous, ceremonially stylised proemial sections. The chancellery officials (often …

[German version] I. Terminology The modern term perspective has its origin in the concept of ars perspectiva expounded by L.B. Alberti in 1435 in his treatise De Pictura (1,18-21) [1]. According to this, the painter gazes through a window at an object which is traced and then located in three dimensions in an empty 'spatial box'. The outline visible on the plane of the window is the perspectival projection [8. 121; 10. 79-82]. Ancient theory of art has no equivalent for the term perspective, since it has no concept of an …

[German version] An agglutinative language without relationship to any other languages; a possible relationship to Dravidian remains unproven [5]. Whether the Ḫamazi languages, which were mentioned in Sumerian texts of the late 3rd millennium BC, are part of the same language family as Elamite is uncertain. Elamite was deciphered (decipherment) with the aid of Achaemenid  trilingual texts, especially the inscription of  Darius' [1] I ( Bisutun). The grammar and meaning of many words is still obscu…

[German version] I. Ancient Orient, Egypt, Old Testament In the ancient Orient, the curse is considered to be a magically effective utterance by which the speaker destroys enemies or objects of their sphere, excludes them from the community or at the very least reduces their vitality. How effective this is depends upon the status of the speaker, the social context and the use of set phrases. There is no evidence of colloquial curses in the Near East and hardly any from Egypt. In the Near East set curse phrases are preserved from the mid 3rd millennium onward i…

[German version] The SL are a language family that emerged from the Indo-European proto-language via Proto-Slavic ( c. 500 BC to AD 500) and Proto-Balto-Slavic (debated). On its genetic relationship, cf. Old Church Slavonic (OCS) mati, Greek μήτηρ/ mḗtēr, Latin māter < Proto-Indo-European (PIE) * méh2tē( r); OCS trje, Greek τρεῖς/ treȋs, Latin trēs < PIE *tréi̯es. It is divided into South Slavonic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian), West (Slovak, Czech, Sorbian, Polish) and East Slavonic (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian). Other SL inc…