Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond

Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond

This book is an enthusiastic celebration of the ways in which popular culture has consumed aspects of the ancient Near East to construct new realities. The editors have brought together an impressive line-up of scholars-archaeologists, philologists, historians, and art historians-to reflect on how objects, ideas, and interpretations of the ancient Near East have been remembered, constructed, reimagined, mythologized, or indeed forgotten within our shared cultural memories. The exploration of cultural memories has revealed how they inform the values, structures, and daily life of societies over time. This is therefore not a collection of essays about the deep past but rather about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Lorenzo Verderame is professor of Assyriology at "Sapienza" University of Rome. His publications include an edition of the first six chapters of the astrological series Enūma Anu Enlil (Le tavole I-VI della serie astrologica Enūma Anu Enlil, 2002) and overviews of Sumerian and Akkadian literature (Letterature dell'antica Mesopotamia, Firenze Le Monnier Universita, 2016) and civilization (Introduzione alle culture dell'antica Mesopotamia, Milano Mondadori Education, 2017). He is the epigraphist in chief of Italian Archaeological Expedition to Tell Zurghul, ancient Nigin (Iraq). Agnes Garcia-Ventura is currently lecturer at the University Autonoma od Barcelona (Spain). She is the editor of several volumes, including Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East (with Saana Svard, Eisenbrauns and Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018) and What's in a Name? Work Force and Job Categories in the Ancient Near East (Ugarit-Verlag, 2018).