These Bones Live!

T he invitation to step back and reflect on my own research and to consider its relation to my field in a broader sense has me standing in a three-way mirror, reflecting, first, my own immediate interest in Babylonian intellectual culture; second, how cuneiform knowledge, especially of the heavenly phenomena, relates to the history of science; and third, how politics have shaped and continue to shape our knowledge of the ancient Near East, from the beginnings of its rediscovery in the period of the British and French colonial presence in the region to the present day specter of ongoing looting and the out-and-out destruction of Near Eastern antiquities. Our formation of knowledge about the distant past is all too entangled with the present. Even under the best of circumstances what is excavated from the lands that were the ancient Near East represents a mere fraction of that historical reality, as Daniel Smail in this volume vividly describes with reference to the European medieval world. For the ancient Near Eastern context, things have not substantially changed since A. L. Oppenheim pessimistically stated: