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Paul Delnero Futures Seminar - The Johns Hopkins University October 20, 2011

The Future of Assyriology

In thinking about the future of my discipline, Assyriology, it seemed reasonable to start

by looking back at what people in the field have said about this topic in the past. After a

quick look at a few journals and conference volumes, I realized that the question has been

addressed so often, by so many different scholars at so many different times, that it would

be impossible to collect even a small percentage of what has already been said and

synthesize it in a meaningful way in a ten-minute talk. Indeed, every generation of

scholars, from the beginning of the discipline in the mid-19th century until the present,

has confronted the issue at least once a decade, with such ritualistic consistency, that the

very frequency with which this exercise has been performed begins to seem more

significant than what was actually said on any of these occasions.

Beyond the volume of breath that has been spent and the ink that has been spilled on the

subject, however, what is truly striking is the recurrence of nearly identical themes

throughout these discussions. Rather than to trace these themes everywhere they have

been repeated, I would like to focus on two of the most well known discussions as

representative of the others. The first, entitled "Assyriology: Why and How?", is the

introduction to A. Leo Oppenheim's now classic book Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of

a Dead Civilization published in 1964. The other is a lecture given in 1982 by the

esteemed French Assyriologist Jean Bottero, which he called "In Defense of a Useless

Science". Already in the titles of the two works, what is perhaps the most common thread

in discussions of the future of Assyriology is already apparent. The question "why?" and

the phrase "in defense of" - not to mention the word "useless"! - reflect the defensive

posture Assyriologists usually adopt when faced with this issue. Both titles imply that the

legitimacy of the discipline has been called into question and suggest that it must justify

its right to exist, or at least offer an apology for why some scholars continue to spend

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their lives studying it. The defense offered by Bottero at the beginning of his lecture is

the most astonishing, and even if it was not intended to be taken literally, it contains a

sentiment that is nonetheless authentic and is worth quoting in full:

"Assyriology made me neutral ... In this day and age, when so many people spend their

lives by getting involved in other people's affairs ... by persecuting them or even worse,

this is a great advantage - at least for other people. The discipline to which I have devoted

myself has made me especially incapable of intervening in the lives of my

contemporaries, as I have turned all of my attention to the past. I do not know what wise

man once said that there are two large categories of scholars, one that speeds up the

world and brings its end nearer by its discussions ...; the other that goes back in its

curiosity to the origins of the world and as a result leaves the universe and its inhabitants

in peace. Without doubt Assyriologists fall into the second group."

Having defined the "usefulness" of Assyriology in such profoundly negative terms,

Bottero returns to the question of the discipline's utility at the end of his lecture and gives

it a much more positive spin. A similar trajectory is followed by Oppenheim who also

begins by surveying the limitations of the field, only to conclude by reaffirming its

importance. Before returning to their optimistic conclusions, however, Oppenheim and

Bottero's criticisms deserve to be examined in more detail, as they are echoed in many

treatments of the topic, in the past and more recently.

In keeping with the defensiveness implicit in the titles, each of the authors formulates

their statements about the future of the discipline as problems that must be overcome in

order to ensure the survival of the field. Not infrequently, the solutions proposed to these

problems also contain a justification for why Assyriology should be considered

important. The first of these problems can be described under the heading:

1) "So many texts, so little time".

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A little known fact outside the discipline is that the number of cuneiform texts is

enormous. Counting only the texts written in Sumerian and Akkadian, the two primary

languages that were written and spoken in Mesopotamia, there are a minimum of 250,000

that are currently known. These texts span the entire three millennia from 3200 BC when

cuneiform writing was invented until the 2nd century BC, the last period from which

large numbers of cuneiform texts are preserved. Although approximately nine-tenths of

these are administrative records, which are themselves invaluable sources for

reconstructing economic and social history, there are also a substantial number of epics,

myths, cultic rituals, royal inscriptions, and texts of other types including the earliest

known law collections, astronomical diaries, and medical prescriptions. In a conference

held on the future of Assyriology a few years ago in Germany, the Assyriologist Michael

Streck estimated the number of words in all the known texts to be at least 13,000,000.

This would make the cuneiform corpus slightly larger than the corpus of Latin texts,

which has been estimated to contain approximately 10,000,000 words. Taking into

account that this number will continue to increase as more texts are discovered in Iraq,

there are more written sources from Mesopotamia than any one scholar could possibly

read during the course of a career, and there is more historical data in this nearly limitless

amount of textual documentation than the scholars in a tiny discipline like Assyriology

could ever hope to process and synthesize. The problem for Bottero, Oppenheim, and

many others then, is how we, as a small group, could ever command this vast amount of

written evidence and make it available to people within and outside the discipline. The

justification for the field implicit in this problem of course is that without Assyriology the

content of these sources and the light they shed on one of the world's oldest civilizations

would remain unknown.

The second problem Oppenheim and Bottero identify is:

2) The need for interdisciplinarity and a more theoretically informed methodology.

It is not a secret that Assyriologists are frequently accused by colleagues in other

disciplines of not being aware of developments in other fields, and derided as scholars

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wedded to an antiquarian form of philology inherited from 19th century German

positivists like Leopold von Ranke. To quote Adele Berlin, a Biblicist with a strong

background in Assyriology, at the conference "The Study of the Ancient Near East in the

21st Century", organized by Glenn Schwartz and Jerrold Cooper at this university twenty

years ago: "Assyriologists ... suppose that when all joins have been made, all lacunae

filled, and the last volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary published, the need for

hermeneutics will be obviated". While remarks like this are quite common coming from

scholars outside the field, what is less well known is that they are even more common

coming from Assyriologists. Writing in 1964, Oppenheim already warned that unless

Assyriology began to incorporate the work done in other fields, particularly cultural

anthropology and political science, it would marginalize itself out of existence.

Oppenheim wasn't the first to express this view and he certainly wasn't the last. In many

studies of different aspects of Mesopotamian history and culture, there are frequent calls

to apply the methods of contemporary literary criticism, historiography, cultural studies,

and critical theory to our areas of enquiry, and sharp criticisms of scholars who fail to do

so. The typical line of defense taken in response to this criticism is that as desirable as

interdisciplinarity would be, learning the necessary methods is not possible without

sacrificing the time required to acquire the ability to read and interpret Mesopotamian

texts correctly. Akkadian and Sumerian, and the cuneiform writing system that was used

to write them, are highly complex and only partially understood. Moreover, basic tools

like a complete dictionary or reliable grammar of Sumerian are still lacking, and it takes

years of intensive training and decades of experience reading texts to reach the point

where it is possible even to translate them accurately. This being the case - so the

argument goes - interdisciplinarity is nice in theory, but nearly impossible in practice, as

there is still too much basic work that remains to be done first. The defense of the

discipline that typically arises from this problem is that the content of the texts we

interpret is relevant to the work that is being done in other disciplines, and given

sufficient time and resources to improve our understanding Assyriology would have a lot

to contribute to interdisciplinary discussions.

The third and final problem, which is closely related to the second, is:

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3) The isolation and obscurity of the field.

The study of ancient Mesopotamia is considered to be an exotic pursuit, and

comparatively few people outside the discipline know much about what Assyriologists do

or about the civilization they study. When the first volume of the Pennsylvania Sumerian

Dictionary, the volume for the letter B, was published in 1984, the first printing sold out

almost immediately. An article about this ground-breaking project in the New York

Times had made it the must-have Christmas gift on the east coast that year. Clearly, the

reason for this was not that people were finally available to satisfy their overwhelming

desire to look up the Sumerian verb "bala", but instead because there was nothing more

likely to produce a laugh at a Manhattan cocktail party than the possession of a book

perceived to be unrivalled in its quaint obscurity and exoticism. Since Mesopotamia is

generally not a part of most high school curricula and there are few recent books on the

subject that have succeeded in capturing the popular imagination, it is not surprising that

there is little knowledge or awareness of it. Oppenheim and Bottero, as well as many

other Assyriologists, lay the responsibility for this at our own feet. It is argued that the

language we use in our work is technical and nearly impossible to understand for non-

specialists. Moreover, we typically publish in journals with names like the "Journal of

Cuneiform Studies" and "Zeitschrift fuer Assyriologie" that are seldom read by people

outside the field. The problem then is to find a way to communicate what we do to a

broader audience, and the defense of the field it contains is that in so doing we will

educate others about the riches of our subject.

With these three seemingly insurmountable problems to confront, what hope is left for

us? The answer to this question is in the way these problems have been formulated and

not in the problems themselves, which are more apparent than real. Although all these

issues should be taken seriously, at no time in the history of the discipline, and especially

not today, have any of them been more than only partially true. While there are more

texts than a small group of scholars could ever hope to study, at every point in the short

history of the field, Assyriologists have published a staggeringly large percentage of the

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ever-growing number of written sources. There is not a single corpus from any period in

Mesopotamian history that has not been the continued object of scholarly examination

and publication. To give only two recent examples, a team of French scholars under the

direction of Dominique Charpin and Jean-Marie Durand have made available over 10,000

of the 13,000 letters from the royal correspondence discovered at the Syrian city of Mari;

and an international consortium of scholars based in Copenhagen, Leiden, Ankara, and

Paris have compiled an electronic database with nearly all of the 22,000 or more Old

Assyrian letters documenting a period of intense long-distance trade with the Anatolian

city of Kanesh. Similarly, it is patently not the case that Assyriologists have turned their

back on developments in other disciplines and avoided incorporating them into their

work. Scholars like Niek Veldhuis have successfully applied Bourdieu's conceptions of

habitus and cultural capital and Paul Connerton's work on performance and memory to

elucidate the role of scribal education in elite identity formation in Old Babylonian

Mesopotamia; and Marcus Hilgert has effectively utilized Bruno Latour's Actor-Network

Theory and recent anthropological work on object agency to develop a method he calls

"Text Anthropology" which can be used to situate Mesopotamian documents in the web

of social and cultural practices in which they were entangled. There is also nobody

studying Sumerian grammar today that does not keep up with the relevant literature in

comparative linguistics. Lastly, there has never been a time when Assyriologists have not

made an effort to make their work known and available to a broader public. Professor

Robson was the co-founder and one of the most active collaborators involved in the

Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, a website that has put scholarly

translations of nearly the entire corpus of Sumerian literary compositions on-line as a

resource that is used daily by thousands of specialists and non-specialists alike. She

continues to provide this invaluable service for first millennium Akkadian corpora with

her most recent websites "Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Period" and "The

Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia". All of these examples are the rule

and not the exception, and can be easily multiplied.

So what then is the future of Assyriology and how should we approach it? And it is here

that we return to Bottero. After beginning with the negative assessment of Assyriologists

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finding their use in staying out of the way, he and Oppenheim attribute a much more

positive function to the discipline. Bottero observes that as a field that is concerned with

human beings and society, Assyriology belongs to the "totality of sciences that form a

system where nothing can be left out without compromising the whole". Restored to its

rightful place alongside the other fields in the humanities, he argues that Assyriology is a

site of resistance that should oppose any tendency to quantify its value or assign a place

to it in the hierarchy of disciplines that are more likely to be profitable. He concludes by

giving a new meaning to the term "useless", which he had previously defined so

negatively, with the words:

"Yes, the university of sciences is useless; for profit, yes, philosophy is useless,

anthropology is useless, archaeology, philology, and history are useless, oriental studies

and Assyriology are useless, entirely useless. That is why we hold them in such high

esteem!"

In other words, when we contemplate the future of Assyriology and its sister disciplines

over these next two days, we are very much discussing the future of the humanities as a

whole, and not just the place of one small discipline within it.

Thank You