Connected Pasts, Modern Entanglements: Current Problems and Future Directions for Assyriology

Abstract

Assyriology remains a relatively new discipline (at least by academic standards). Although the memory of Mesopotamia is found throughout Classical and biblical material, the discipline itself is rooted in the excavations of major sites in Iraq beginning in the mid-1800s onwards, and the decipherment of Akkadian in 1857 unlocked the vast array of cuneiform texts. These early efforts were inextricably intertwined with biblical studies, as some of the first cuneiform texts to be translated concerned events known from the Hebrew Bible. Assyriology thus exists as a relatively young field that has only even more recently begun to stand entirely on its own. As a result of ongoing excavations and the durable nature of the tablets themselves, Assyriology is also a field in a constant state of flux: there are far more texts than scholars to read them, and entirely new material is published every year. Additionally, it requires extensive training to work with this vast corpus, one that stretches over two thousand years, multiple languages, different genres, and perhaps a million tablets in museum collections, some half of which have never been published. This paper analyses the complicated history and challenges of the field and argues that, to thrive, Assyriology must work to bridge the gap between the production of difficult, specialized knowledge and more general public scholarship, entangling itself again—if willingly, this time—to work in other fields and new directions of study.