"Tell Asmar, Abu Temple. Early Dynastic Sculpture Hoard." The hoard is nowadays divided between the Baghdad Museum, Iraq. The Oriental Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum.
Imperial Religious Politics, Local Administration, and Individual Participation: Lived Religion Between Polytheism and Monotheism in the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
ISAW
This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
What kind of socio-political and economic changes had to occur to uproot millennia-old structures of control of religious practice by political centers and local priestly elites? What does the loss of indigenous rulership in the wake of Persian and Hellenistic-Roman conquests mean for the social and religious life of the individual in ancient Mesopotamia? What was the “social and religious capital” of early Christianity, for instance, that even family structures could break apart due to the individual’s choice to follow the claim for exclusive devotion and adherence to one God only? In my talk I am going to argue that the rise of so-called monotheistic religions begins nearly five hundred years before the Common Era and that individual identity and self-definition in relation to the social community – human and divine – was primarily a process of experience and lived practice in particular social political, economic, and religious settings. It is the collapse of these settings that paved the way for the emergence of new forms of religiosity.
Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. Her research interests include the political, intellectual and religious history of the ancient Near East, materialities of culture, literature, formation of textual communities, transmission of cultural memory, ritual performance and ritual texts, text and image, and knowledge production. Her publications include several books on the cultural and religious history of ancient Mesopotamia, among them more recently Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, 2011, Religion and Ideology in Assyria, 2015, a volume of collected articles Materiality of Divine Agency, 2015 co-edited with Karen Sonik, and Myth, Text, and Image: A Narrative Reading of the World, 2026. She is heading a project on editing Akkadian Rituals for the series Writings from the Ancient World and is editor-in-chief of Ancient Literature for Old Testament Studies. Currently working on two monographs The Image in the Context of Knowledge Production and Lived Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia.
The lecture will be followed by a reception.
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