Description
Book SynopsisThis book is an enthusiastic celebration of the ways in which popular culture have 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. Black & white illustrations throughout.
Table of ContentsForeword, Paul Collins
Preliminary Considerations, Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Lorenzo Verderame
Visual Arts
Pedro Azara and Marc Marín
Mesopotamia in Miró. Miró in Mesopotamia
Jean M. Evans
Case Studies in the Popular Reception of the Tell Asmar Sculpture Hoard
Silvana Di Paolo
Images of Ruins as Metaphorical Places of Transformation: The Case of Persepolis
Performing Arts
Kerstin Droá-Krupe
Artaserse: An Ancient Oriental Ruler on Modern Opera Stages?
Valeska Hartmann
When Imitation Became Reality: The Historical Pantomime Sardanapal (1908) at the Royal Opera of Berlin
Daniele Federico Rosa
Ye Go to Thy Abzu: How Norwegian Black Metal Used Mesopotamian References, Where It Took Them from, and How It Usually Got Them Wrong
Film and Television
Kevin McGeough
"Babylon's Last Bacchanal": Mesopotamia and the Near East in Epic Biblical Cinema
Eva Miller
He Who Saw the Stars: Retelling Gilgamesh in Star Trek: The Next Generation
Lorenzo Verderame
Evil from an Ancient Past and the Archaeology of the Beyond: An Analysis of the Movies The Exorcist (1973) and The Evil Dead (1981)
Novels and Comics
Jana Myná?ová and Pavel Ko?ínek
The Ancient Near East in Czech Comics and Popular Culture: The Case of Jáchym and the Printer's Devil
Luigi Turri
Gilgamesh, The (Super)Hero
Francesco Pomponio
Mystery Literature and Assyriology
Ryan Winters
Ancient Aliens, Modern Cosmologies: Zecharia Sitchin and the Transformation of Mesopotamian Myth
Archaeologist in the Middle
Davide Nadali
The (In)visibility of Archaeology
Juan-Luis Montero Fenollós
Imagining the Tower of Babel in the Twenty-First Century: Is a New Interpretation of the Ziggurat of Babylon Possible?
Silvia Festuccia
Athletic Disciplines in the Ancient Near East: Representation and Reconstruction
Afterword. Memory and Memories: From the Ancient Near East to the Modern West
Frances Pinnock
Contributors
Subject Index
