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Like literature, religion is a topic about which most people believe to speak informed and competently, because we all have been exposed to it in one way or another. In fact, things are not that simple, if we think of religion encompassing more than just faith and include aspects of divinity, institutions, community, practice, and theology. This talk will trace Assyriological approaches to ancient religions in Mesopotamia and address the question of intellectual and religious history by tackling it through the lens of our own scholarly history since the decipherment of the cuneiform script in the second half of the 19th century. For the most part, in Assyriology, there are no real schools of approaches towards the history of religion, as one could define them, for instance, for topics such as sedentarization and urbanism, law, or economics. Rather, we can observe moments, when individual scholars touching upon topics of ancient Near Eastern religion would also engage with an interdisciplinary discourse occurring outside Assyriology in the fields of history of religion, anthropology, literary theory, intertextuality and narratology as well as art history and visual theory.

The lecture, presented at La Maison Française, is held in conjunction with the exhibition Devotion and Decadence: The Berthouville Treasure and Roman Luxury from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, on view at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th St., from October 17 to January 6. Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and La Maison Française. NO RSVP REQUIRED