ISAW Hosts Workshop "Hic Sunt Dracones: Creating, Defining, and Abstracting Place in the Ancient World"
On Friday, October 28th, ISAW hosted a one-day workshop, Hic Sunt Dracones: Creating, Defining, and Abstracting Place in the Ancient World, organized by Visiting Assistant Professor Gina Konstantopoulos. The workshop's major theme was on the creation of borders and frontiers in the ancient Near East, Biblical World, and ancient Mediterranean. It particularly focused on the intersection between actual borders, created through trade and military interaction, and the process of fictionalizing the lands that lay beyond them, or inventing entirely new lands.
The workshop featured a broad range of scholars, with presentations that considered the nature of borders in Sumerian literature, Hittite geography, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and Biblical texts, among others. At the close of the workshop, all participants gathered for a discussion on the talks as a whole, underlining connections between the presentations that will hopefully be highlighted in the workshop's planned publication.
Detail of Lenox Globe ("Hic Sunt Dracones")