Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Agnès Garcia-Ventura is Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is the coeditor of Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East, also published by Eisenbrauns. Lorenzo Verderame is Associate Professor of Assyriology at Sapienza University of Rome. He is the author and coeditor of several books, including Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond.

Introduction: Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies: An Introduction

Lorenzo VERDERAME / Agnès GARCIA-VENTURA



Part I. The Edge of the Abyss: the Study of Antiquity under the Totalitarism Threat

1. Hittite Studies at the Crossroads: Albrecht Goetze’s and Hans Gustav Güterbock’s Flight from Nazi Germany

Silvia ALAURA

2. Language and Race in Assyriology: from Benno Landsberger to Wolfram von Soden

Sebastian FINK

3. Assyriology in Nazi Germany: the Case of Wolfram von Soden

Jakob FLYGARE

4. Carthage the Deceitful and Perfidius Albion: the Phoenicians and the British in Fascist Italy

Pietro GIAMMELLARO

5. The sharing out of Antiquities in Syria during the Interwar Period: Sir Leonard Woolley’s Excavation at Tell Sheikh Yusuf (Al Mina).

Patrick Maxime MICHEL

6. “Die Assyriologie nicht weiter unberücksichtigt bleiben dürfte…”: On the (Non-)Existence of Assyriology at the German University in Prague (1908–1945)

Ludìk VACÍN / Jitka SÝKOROVÁ



Part II. Intellectual History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies: some Case Studies

7. Notes on the History of the Historiography of Cuneiform Mathematics

Carlos GONÇALVES

8. Feudalism and Vassalage in Twentieth-Century Assyriology

Emanuel PFOH

9. Nation-building in the Plain of Antioch, from Hatti to Hatay

Eva VON DASSOW



Part III. From our Stories to the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

10. The Historiography of Assyriology in Turkey: A Short Survey

Selim Ferruh ADALI / Hakan EROL

11. Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Portuguese Academia: a Love-affair under Construction

Isabel ALMEIDA

12. Near Eastern Archaeology and the Czech-speaking Lands

Petr CHARVÁT

13. Tintin in Mesopotamia. The Story of Belgian Assyriology (1890-2017)

Katrien DE GRAEF

14. Assyriology in Iran?

Parsa DANESHMAND

15. Assyriology in China

Changyu LIU

16. Looking for a Tell. The Beginnings of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Barcelona

Jordi VIDAL



Part IV. Current Prospectives, Future Perspectives

17. Big Data, Big Deal: Use of Google Books Ngram Viewer and JSTOR Data for Research for Charting the Rise of Assyriology

Steven W. HOLLOWAY

18. The Future of the Past. How the Past Contributes to the Construction of Syrian National Identity

Ahmed Fatima KZZO



Notes on Contributors

Index of Authors