Fwd: [HASTRO-L] Conference: Living the Lunar Calendar

> Van: "STEELE J.M." <j.m.steele@...>
> Datum: 17 april 2009 17:48:16 GMT+02:00
> Aan: HASTRO-L@...
> Onderwerp: [HASTRO-L] Conference: Living the Lunar Calendar
> Antwoord aan: History of Astronomy Discussion Group <HASTRO-
> L@...>
>
> Living the Lunar Calendar: Time, Text and Tradition
>
> The Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, January 30th - February 1st, 2010
> Tu B'Shvat 5770
>
> Call for Papers
>
> The "Living the Lunar Calendar" Conference -- held under the full moon
> of the Jewish festival of the New Year for Trees-- will investigate
> the place of calendar reckoning in human society and culture. Focusing
> on the Moon as a marker of the passage of time, the conference will
> address a wide variety of issues regarding the application of
> astronomical and calendrical rules to everyday life, and beyond to the
> shaping of cultural identity.
>
> The lunar calendar with its irregular pattern of 29/30 day months,
> requiring an uneven number of months to match the passage of an annual
> solar/stellar cycle brings with it a measure of uncertainty. It can be
> observed that the Moon is at one and the same time both constant and
> unpredictable, leading civilizations to adopt divergent modes of
> reflection on the stable and unstable components of their existence in
> time. With the Moon, time does not only exist in nature, but needs to
> be regulated by man. Human measures of day, month, and year, must live
> with these uncertainties. In cultures that use the lunar calendar, one
> must find answers to such mundane questions as: "When does the month,
> the year, begin? How are salaries and interest to be calculated over
> months of uneven length and years of unequal months?  Is the date in
> one city the same in all cities?"
>
> More generally, cultures had to account for the apparent anomaly in
> nature, defining just how much human involvement is required in fixing
> the central concepts of time. This ideological dilemma joined forces
> with the political and societal conflicts in antiquity, both within
> the great empires as well as smaller ethnic and cultural entities. The
> calendar thus participated significantly in the formation of
> civilization and identity.
>
> We will gather at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem (BLMJ) and the site
> of Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, to address these types of
> issues in sessions covering the cuneiform Ancient Near East, Egypt,
> Ancient Israel, The Greco-Roman World, Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
> the Far East, Africa, and Mesoamerica. Central focus will be given to
> the ancient world, but with an open eye towards later periods. Papers
> are invited by scholars on the following general topics:
>
>    * Everyday Life in Lunar Regulated Societies
>    * Calendrical Principles, especially in regard to harmonizing the
> Lunar Calendar with other systems such as the Egyptian civil calendar,
> the Julian Calendar, the Jewish sectarian system of 364 day years.
>    * Cultural Statements about the Moon, the Sun, the Stars and the
> concept of Time.
>    * Anthropological, Sociological, and Philosophical trajectories of
> the above.
>
> Submission of papers are invited by the Academic Organizing Committee:
>
> Jonathan Ben-Dov (Haifa University), Wayne Horowitz (The Hebrew
> University), John Steele (Brown University), Filip Vukosavovic (BLMJ),
> and should consist of a title and abstract of no more than 200 words.
> Papers relating solely to issues of chronology will not be considered.
>
> Presentations will be between 25-45 minutes including time for
> questions, and are to be delivered in English. Papers from the
> conference will be published in electronic form. The deadline for
> submissions is 31st July, 2009.
>
> The conference will be held under the auspices of the Bible Lands
> Museum Jerusalem and The CAENO Foundation, and will include three days
> of sessions and events at the Museum, with an afternoon and evening at
> Qumran. Technical details will be provided at a later date. For
> further information and submission of abstracts, please contact
> curatorial@....