Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies:

Abstract

From January to May 2016 the editors of the present volume organized at “Sapienza,” Università degli Studi di Roma, a series of lectures and workshops under the title Storia degli studi sul Vicino Oriente Antico.1 In that occasion we used “storia degli studi” in a broad sense, as a label encompassing a myriad of perspectives and topics of study, sharing as common denominator a reflexive approach toward the study of the past and, more specifically in our case, the study of the ancient Near East. As a result of this broad scope, the series included about thirty lectures and presentations dealing with four main topics: first, the reception of the ancient Near East in popular culture; second, the reconstruction of the Near Eastern past through archaeology; third, the historiography of ancient Near Eastern studies; fourth and last, approaches to intellectual history through a selection of issues and topics most commonly discussed in ancient Near Eastern studies. The essays dealing with the first and second topics, those linked to the socalled reception studies, have been collected and edited by the present writers in the volume Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond.2 Those dealing with the third and fourth topic, those linked with the history of ancient Near Eastern studies, are the ones collected and edited in the present volume. Before summarizing the structure and content of the book, a few words are in order about how we understand the relationship between historiography and intellectual history, as well as about the way the diverse authors approach their topics of study in this collection of essays. As mentioned above, the common denominator of “storia degli studi” understood in a broad sense is the reflexive approach to the disciplines and to the research devoted to the study of the past. This reflexive approach includes what we may define as several research branches or even, in some cases, as several stages of the same (at least potentially) research perspectives. On the one hand, there is the research about the history of a given academic discipline. This research, at least in its first stages, has a more descriptive character, as it aims at collecting the basic data about who developed certain studies, and about the years, conditions, and institutions in which this research was developed. This first descriptive approach is often devoted to the reconstruction of the way a discipline, ancient Near Eastern studies in our case, has been founded