ABSTRACT

Taking as a point of departure Nelson Goodman’s idea that it is the frames of reference and the descriptions that refer within those frames that make for ways of worldmaking, this paper considers descriptions of the world attested in Akkadian cuneiform texts as a way to approach the Babylonia literati’s notion of ‘world.’ In this corpus, descriptions of world-parts display mereological themes of complementarity, correspondence, and the relation of counterparts. Meronyms, or names for parts of the one whole (we would say ‘world,’ or ‘universe’), and the part-whole relationships they indicate, are of importance to this inquiry into worldmaking.

摘要

以纳尔逊·古德曼 (Nelson Goodman) 的观点为出发点，即参考框架和这些框架内的描述构成了创造世界的方式，本文将阿卡德语楔形文字文本中对世界的描述视为接近巴比伦的一种方式文人的“世界”观念。在这个语料库中，世界部分的描述显示了互补性、对应性和对应关系的分体主题。Meronyms，或整体部分的名称（我们会说“世界”或“宇宙”），以及它们所指示的部分-整体关系，对于这个对世界形成的调查很重要。