Reaching out to the Public about the Ancient Near East

By: Amanda H. Podany

The terrible human toll and the recent destruction of archaeological sites have kept the Near East at the top of the headlines. But just what are students really being taught about the ancient world?

According to state curriculum standards, just about every child in the United States learns about the history of the ancient Near East at some point. Unfortunately, Mesopotamia is often lumped in with the other “ancient river valley civilizations.” Students are simply required to learn the “development” and “characteristics” (for example, in Texas) or an itemized list of categories: religion, government, language, economy (as in Virginia). The generic nature of these categories suggests that the writers of some state curriculums themselves have little idea of what distinguished the earliest civilizations or made them significant, besides just coming first.

California curriculum standards list a few more specifics, telling the teacher to help students “trace…the emergence of cities,” “understand the relationship between religion and the social and political order in Mesopotamia,” “know the significance of Hammurabi’s Code,” and “trace the evolution of language and its written forms.” I’ve worked for many years with history teachers in California, and I’ve found that they often struggle with helping their students master these standards about ancient Mesopotamia.

Teachers themselves may be puzzled. What is the significance of Hammurabi’s Code, they wonder. Although some books on Mesopotamia for children are reliable, many textbooks include errors. Teachers appreciate any guidance ancient Near Eastern scholars can give them.

In popular curriculum guides that teachers find online (excluding outstanding ones produced by, for example, the British Museum and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago), three thousand years of Mesopotamian history are often reduced to a series of “firsts.” The Big Names in these breathless summaries are Sargon (he used chariots to conquer Sumerians and create the first empire!), Hammurabi (he wrote the first laws!), the Hittites (they created the first peace treaty and were the first to use iron weapons to conquer their foes!), Ashurbanipal (he led a terrifying military machine and assembled the first library!), and Gilgamesh (he was the subject of the first epic poem!). Not only is this all hopelessly simplified, it’s largely wrong. Just about anything that scholars in the field can write, post, or film about the ancient Near East is therefore useful and relevant to history teachers.

The ancient Near East remains a mystery to many, even among our academic colleagues. Undergraduates enrolling in my classes on the ancient Near East often confess to knowing nothing at all. Even Sargon and Hammurabi failed to stick in their memories from high school or college survey classes. To some, Gilgamesh is the name of a character in a Japanese video game! If our field is to continue to be relevant and to attract students, and to give them a larger, richer sense of the past, we cannot sit back and wait for them to come to us.

As a profession we must try harder to engage the public. The first, old-fashioned way is through print publications. Eric Cline and Princeton University Press have succeeded admirably with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. It has a catchy title, it’s written in an accessible style for a general reader, the publisher invested in a trailer for YouTube, Cline wrote op-ed pieces tying the subject to the present situation in the Middle East, and he went on a book tour and did interviews. The end of the Bronze Age might not have been an obvious candidate for the topic of an international bestseller, but the book became one.

In spite of frequent prophecies of doom for the future of books, bestsellers still find a big audience —we don’t need to fictionalize or summon ancient astronauts in order to make the ancient past fascinating. Books need not be surveys; well-written studies of specific people, ancient innovations, and events can open up the richness of ancient Near Eastern history to readers. Letters, royal inscriptions, treaties, contracts, court cases, and more provide vivid details that are simply unknown in other fields of ancient history.

The second obvious way to engage the public is on the Internet. Students (and secondary teachers) now often assume that everything they need for their research is a click away. The field of Ancient Near Eastern studies has made huge strides in this area, as a result of the magnificent work of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus) , Etana (Electronic Tools and Near Eastern Archives), and other online repositories of cuneiform texts, which have transformed the work of Assyriologists and Sumerologists. But for now these sites are largely designed for scholars and remain somewhat inaccessible to others.

A future project might be to create a site that would link to multiple sources in translation on the existing cuneiform sites (with more recent, reliable translations highlighted and separated from nineteenth and early twentieth-century translations). A link from the translation to an image of the tablet itself, perhaps with words highlighted in the image, would certainly interest readers, who are fascinated by how the cuneiform system works. The CDLI wiki is promising, as are a number of features of the other sites.

Given the proliferation of ANE websites and the various search techniques one has to master in order to locate sources on them, an online guide or master list linking to all the sites might be enormously helpful. Rather than being organized by website, it could be organized by document type or era. The Internet Ancient History Sourcebookat Fordham University provides a model, with links to accessible secondary and primary sources in English.

The proposed site could go far beyond the usual selections of laws, myths, and epics. An online guide to ancient Near Eastern websites and sources, designed for teachers, undergraduates, and lay readers, could also direct readers to books, articles, museums, archaeological sites, and research projects. Perhaps an editorial board of scholars and teachers could screen material for reliability and inclusion.

Increasingly, our students get their news not from newspapers (one student asked me in class recently “Do they still deliver those?”), or from television, cable, radio, or even from Internet news outlets, but from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. Stories reposted to these sites from sources like Reddit or Buzzfeed spread quickly, creating individualized newsfeeds.

ASOR has done a good job of becoming part of this new world, currently having over 10,000 followers on Facebookand over 1,500 on Twitter. Other sources for information about the ancient Near East include the Ancient History Encyclopedia with 273,000 Facebook followers and Biblical Archaeology Review with 300,000. But these pale next to the 1.4 million followers of Archaeology Magazine and (more distressingly), the 1.2 million followers of the Ancient Aliens television show.

Scholars themselves could be more aggressive about posting news of recent discoveries and publications on major social media sites, about recruiting followers for ASOR’s Facebook and Twitter pages, and about sharing and re-tweeting those posts. It might be hard to match the clout of “Ancient Aliens,” but the more reliable scholarship that is circulating and engaging a wider public, the better.

Television may be “old media,” but high-profile documentaries on PBS and BBC do a wonderful job of presenting recent scholarly findings in an accessible way. They also often post curriculum materials on their websites in association with the documentaries. The Ancient Near East has not been the subject of a major documentary (let alone a series of them) in many years. Now would seem to be a good time to propose such a series.

Although it is currently impossible to film in most of the Middle East, archival footage could be used. The public’s interest might be engaged, particularly because of the recent disastrous destruction of archaeological sites. Unfortunately, many cable “documentaries” only feed the perception that the ancient Near East is only important as a background to the Bible or as a stopping point for all those aliens who built the pyramids. Those of us who have been interviewed for such programs have often regretted the decision after seeing the final product.

So, supposing we do all this–propose new books and documentaries, create teacher-friendly websites, provide content for social media (and continue to offer old-fashioned in-person public lectures and professional development workshops)–what exactly should their focus be?

From working with teachers, I have a sense of what they (and presumably their students) seem to find most fascinating. They want to know about cuneiform—How do we read it? What does it say? Student are also amazed to learn that the ancient Mesopotamians had a legal system that aimed for fairness and justice, and that cared about witness testimony and evidence. They are happy to have their assumptions overturned and to discover the ancient world was not one long, bloodthirsty war, and that diplomacy developed as early as state-supported warfare. They are often floored to learn that hundreds of thousands of documents survive, more than for any other field of ancient history, and that these reflect not just the lives and concerns of kings and priests, but the worlds of people in many walks of life. They are fascinated by archaeological discoveries and the ways in which the finds can be analyzed.

All this evidence helps to create in the minds of students a three-dimensional sense of the ancient Near East and an understanding that its history is a continuing investigation, not a list of famous firsts to be memorized.

Amanda H. Podany is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.