Visualizing Emotions in the Ancient Near East

The history of emotion is an important interdisciplinary research field,
not least because it touches fundamental questions about the distinction
between psychobiology-based universals and socio-cultural,
path-dependent and thus relative peculiarity. Conceptual incongruities
between what is today understood as emotion and various views on
emotions in antiquity should not distract from the fact that, while
emotions do have a history, they substantially belong to all human
experience as such.





Visual media and images open perspectives for transcultural research
that differ from the testimony of texts. Their study can thus make a
major contribution to a better understanding of emotions in the Ancient
Near East. How where gestures, body posture, facial expressions etc.
visualized in images from Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt and what
role does the visualization play in communicating emotions?





The first part of the present volume takes concrete examples as a
starting point and discusses the fundamental question whether or not
emotions were represented and can thus be studied in Ancient Near
Eastern art. Approaches and arguments are controversial: Some authors
argue that there are no visualizations of emotions, but only cultural
roles and ritual embodiments. Their view is contrasted by other
contributors, who assume that one may detect non-verbal expressions
hiding emotions in visual respresentations and that it is crucial to
specify the appropriate tools and methodologies to interpret them in an
adequate way.





The second part offers five additional theoretical reflexions from
comparative, linguistic and art-historical perspectives. With such a
broad interdisciplinary approach including Assyriology, Egyptology, Near
Eastern archaeology and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament studies, the volume
offers a large panorama of the most important research positions on a
fundamental topic.





The book results from workshop discussions held in June 2015 during the
61st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Bern and Geneva.
Contributors include John Baines, Dominik Bonatz, Izak Cornelius,
Margaret Jaques, Othmar Keel, Sara Kipfer, Florian Lippke, Silvia
Schroer, Andreas Wagner, Elisabeth Wagner-Durand, and Wolfgang Zwickel.