Preface to The ritual sphere in cultic texts and practices

This volume contains the Proceedings of the International Conference „The ritual sphere in cultic texts and practices from the Ancient and Early Mediaeval East in a comparative linguistic and historical perspective”, convened by the University of Verona in co-operation with the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Multilingualism Research Group. The discussed topics by the authors in their contributions are reaching from the philological, linguistic to socio-cultural and historical problems of ritual texts and practices, cross-culturally or in a specific ethnic-cultural tradition (Babylonian, Iranian, Hittite, Near-Eastern cultures, see PANAINO; ZADOK). Especially the perspective of the organization of knowledge has been a strong highlighted topic as far as lists, catalogues and classification systems between orality and spirituality are concerned. Among this knowledge, ritual texts embody and transmit the religious experience and the social pragmatics in each context of mostly multilingual pre-modern societies.