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Delnero The Future of Assyriology
Delnero The Future of Assyriology
Paul Delnero
Futures Seminar - The Johns Hopkins University
October 20, 2011
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."
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:
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 third and final problem, which is closely related to the second, is:
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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