Classification from Antiquity to Modern Times: Sources, Methods, and Theories from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Hardcover, viii + 349 pages, NOT ex-library. Mild handling wear only. Book is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This volume brings together interdisciplinary studies on the history, theory, and practice of classification from antiquity to the modern era. Divided into three parts (classification in ancient times, modern perspectives, and conceptual tools), it investigates how systems of categorization have developed, varied, and persisted across historical periods, languages, cultures, and scientific domains in order to understand how humans organize knowledge, impose structure on experience, and negotiate shared conceptual frameworks. The first part explores classification in antiquity, beginning with Jochen Althoff's analysis of Hesiod's Theogony, which illustrates how early Greek cosmological texts structured knowledge through genealogical categorization and imposed order on mythic origins. Orly Goldwasser examines lexical acculturation and semantic integration in Egyptian, Sumerian, and Nahuatl, demonstrating how language contact reshaped classification schemes. Sonja Gerke investigates animal classification in Ancient Egypt, highlighting how symbolic, ritual, and utilitarian values informed taxonomies. Iolanda Ventura, whose chapter provides a comparative account of different systems of medicinal categorization, traces pharmacological classification from Greco-Roman antiquity to the 12th century, focusing on medical texts and materia medica, with attention to ritual practices and magical formulas. Pommerening continues this theme with a study of Egyptian medical remedies, analyzing how drug properties and effects were systematically categorized based on practical and conceptual dimensions. The second part shifts to modern contexts. Walter Bisang examines grammatical classification across languages, contrasting context-sensitive and context-free grammatical systems and identifying potential universals of classification. Joachim W. Kadereit, writing from a biological perspective, compares taxonomic and molecular-genetic approaches to naming and classifying living organisms, highlighting epistemological tensions. Roy Ellen contributes two chapters: the first discusses how humans ascribe agency and life to tools and artifacts; the second addresses theoretical questions in cognitive anthropology and ethnobiology, such as the stability of folk taxonomies and the relationship between linguistic labels and conceptual categories. The final section introduces tools for analyzing classification. Dietrich Busse presents frame theory as a method for modeling and interpreting conceptual structures. His discussion includes frame semantics and frame networks, and their usefulness and limitations for analyzing complex or historically layered concepts. Frederik Elwert and Simone Gerhards propose semantic network analysis as a heuristic device for tracing conceptual relationships in historical corpora, with examples from Egyptology. Their method combines automated network analysis with close reading to reconstruct classification patterns embedded in ancient texts. Common themes across the chapters include the contextuality of classification, its representation across modalities (language, visual schema, artifacts), and its evolution through interaction between social practice and theoretical abstraction. The volume also reflects a shift from viewing classification as a formal system to understanding it as a situated process involving negotiation between cognitive prototypes, empirical constraints, and disciplinary conventions. The wide-ranging sources - from Greek mythology to modern biology and computational linguistics - illustrate the continuity and transformation of classificatory thinking, particularly for readers interested in the conceptual foundations of ordering knowledge and the cross-cultural variability of classification systems. …