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Envisioning the Past Through Memories. How Memory Shaped Ancient Near
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 Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity

Series Editor:
Martin Bommas, University of Birmingham

Advisory Board:
Geoffrey Cubitt, University of York
Franco D’Agostino, University of Rome La Sapienza
Christopher Smith, British School at Rome
Christopher Wickham, University of Oxford

Other titles in this series:

Cultural Memory and Identity in Ancient Societies, edited by Martin Bommas
Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World, edited by Martin Bommas,
Juliette Harrisson and Phoebe Roy

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 Envisioning the Past Through
Memories
How Memory Shaped Ancient Near Eastern
Societies

Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity:

Volume 3

Edited by Davide Nadali

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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 Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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London New York
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www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2016

© Davide Nadali and Contributors, 2016

Davide Nadali and Contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
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from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or
the authors.

British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-47422-396-6
ePDF: 978-1-47422-398-0
ePub: 978-1-47422-397-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Series: Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity, volume 3

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain

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 Contents

Series Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
List of Illustrations ix
List of Contributors x
Introduction  Davide Nadali 1

1 Preserving the Memory of the Mythical Origins: The King’s

Role Between Tradition and Innovation  Paolo Matthiae 7

2 The Emergence of Writing and the Construction of Cultural

Memory in Egypt  Federico Contardi 21

3 Community and Individuals: How Memory Affects Public and

Private Life in the Ancient Near East  Davide Nadali 37

4 Embodying the Memory of the Royal Ancestors in Western

Syria during the Third and Second Millennia BC: The Case
of Ebla and Qatna  Nicola Laneri 53

5 The Historical Memory of the Late Bronze Age in the

Neo-Assyrian Palace Reliefs  Mehmet-Ali Ataç 69

6 Prioritized Presence: Rulers’ Images in the Neo-Assyrian Palace

as Devices of Elite Ideological Memory  Amy Rebecca Gansell 85

7 The Many Falls of Babylon and the Shape of Forgetting 

Seth Richardson 101

8 War Remembrance Narrative: Negotiation of Memory and

Oblivion in Mesopotamian Art  Silvana Di Paolo 143

9 From Ancient Egypt to the Mississippi Delta: A Comparative

Approach to Cultural Memory and Forgetting  Martin Bommas 163

Index 183

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 Series Preface

Culture as a set of shared attitudes, values and practices that characterizes a

group or society – modern as well as ancient – is to a large extent based on the
construction and transmission of memories. Differing from collective and
individual approaches to the past, cultural memory describes a process that
emerges from distant and collateral events and only appears in standardized
forms once a group or society has agreed upon them. Memory is a phenomenon
that – by definition – is directly related to the present. When dealing with
ancient societies, cultural memory as a tool can be used to disclose and identify
this contemporary presence of the past within ancient societies. When
investigating cultural memory of past societies, key questions are how and
what ancient societies remembered about events that shaped the formation of
their identity, and how they built on agreed memories to create a collective
present. The term ‘cultural memory’ was first introduced in 1992 by the German
Egyptologist Jan Assmann in his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift,
Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (translated in
English as Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and
Political Imagination), in which he further developed the theory of collective
memory, first established in 1950 by the French philosopher and sociologist
Maurice Halbwachs in La mémoire collective (translated in English as On
Collective Memory). Although Assmann’s approach was soon adopted by
linguists, sociologists and anthropologists, ancient historians and classicists
only slowly incorporated this term into the vocabulary of their disciplines.
Today, 19 years later, Historical Studies and contiguous disciplines are
increasingly reconsidering the question of history versus memory, rethinking
history’s border zone. The use of competing terms such as ‘collective memory’,
‘social memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ – all discussing the ways in which
individuals remember the past and at the same time define their social
experience and involvement – has led to confusion about how social
connections work and where priorities lie when human beings construct their

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 Series Preface vii

relationship with the past. As historians, we are unable to access the mental
process of culturally defined memory of the past but only how memory is
embodied in texts and objects. This new series is designed to investigate the
role of physical remains or rather material memories such as written and
archaeological sources that were regarded to have had symbolic significance
by ancient societies. By identifying the ways in which the collective past was
remembered by ancient societies as cultural memory encoded in archaeological
and written data, this series will address and respond to the challenges that
come with this term when used uncritically. Social memory, if pushed too far,
inevitably represents a theoretical and idealizing picture of the past in the past,
if the influences of conflict and the use and abuse of power of groups over
others are not taken into account. Diverse recollections of the past can
deconstruct cultural memory and hamper its integration into a collective past.
In order to allow cultural memory to construct a collective past, groups of
power can encourage and promote remembering, marginalize individual
memories, initiate reinterpretation or even actively instruct forgetting. Cultural
Memory and History in Antiquity aims to reveal the mechanics of social
connections in order to understand better the sources of collective pasts and
to identify their continuative drifts rather than the connections established
between generations. The motor of cultural memory is actively practised
memory based on an agreed set of data, rather than tradition. In tracing shifts
of meaning within ancient society, both cultural memory and cultural
forgetting offer purposeful tools to identify the courses of history through
both elite and non-­elite perspectives.
Martin Bommas,
Series Editor

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 Acknowledgements

The papers collected here were presented at the international congress ‘Value
and Power of Memory in Ancient Societies’, held in Rome at the Sapienza
University (25th–26th November 2013). The conference was possible thanks
to the financial support of the Sapienza University with the ‘Congressi e
Convegni’ annual grant.
I wish to thank all participants for their contributions and the stimulating
debates; special thanks are for Martin Bommas (University of Birmingham)
and Bloomsbury Publishing for publishing the proceedings in the series
Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity.

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 Illustrations

2.1: Bone label from Abydos tomb U-j (Dreyer 1998: 125, Fig. 103). 24
2.2: Left: Year label of Den, Abydos (Petrie 1900: pl. XV.16); Right:
Palermo Stone (fourth register) (Wilkinson 2000: Fig. 1). 25
4.1: The hypothetical journey for the coronation of the royal couple
within the ancient city of Ebla (after Ristvet 2011: Fig. 5). 57
4.2: Reconstruction of the Royal Hypogeum of Qatna (after Pfälzner
2007: Fig. 31). 60
5.1: Drawing of the relief depicting the Sea Peoples Battle of
Ramesses III at the so-­called Nile mouths, Medinet Habu.
Epigraphic Survey, Medinet Habu 1, pl. 37. 70
5.2: Orthostat relief depicting an Assyrian attack against a foreign
city, Panel B 3a, Room B (throne room), Northwest Palace of
Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud (Kalhu). Photo: author. 74
6.1: Relief orthostat depicting Ashurnasirpal II holding a bow and
preparing to pour a libation over a slain lion. North-West Palace,
Nimrud, ca. 865–860 BC. Gypsum, h. 86.8 cm, l. 225.5 cm. © The
Trustees of the British Museum (BM 124535). 85
6.2: Relief orthostat depicting, in bottom register, Ashurbanipal
holding a bow while pouring a libation over four slain lions.
North Palace, Nineveh, ca. 645–640 BC. Alabaster, interior h. of
register 44.4 cm, l. 95 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum
(BM 124887). 86

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 Contributors

Mehmet-Ali Ataç studied Architecture, Art History and Archaeology, earning

his PhD from Harvard University in 2003. He is the author of The Mythology
of Kingship in Neo-Assyrian Art (Cambridge, 2010), Art and Immortality in the
Ancient Near East (Cambridge, forthcoming) and several essays on the art and
thought of ancient Mesopotamia. He is Associate Professor of Classical and
Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College.

Martin Bommas is Reader in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham.

He studied Egyptology, Classical Archaeology and Near Eastern Archaeology
at the Universities of Heidelberg (Germany) and Leiden (the Netherlands).
He became field director at the excavations on Elephantine Island when he
was 23, and Research Fellow in a philological research project on Mortuary
Liturgies with Jan Assmann four years later. After his PhD he became Assistant
Professor at the University of Basel (Switzerland) before he arrived at
Birmingham in 2006. He had visiting appointments at the Universities of
Heidelberg, Basel, Rome, Venice and Sheffield. Among more recent publications
are Das Alte Ägypten, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (Darmstadt, 2011) and
Cultural Memory and Identity in Ancient Societies, CMHA 1 (London, 2011) as
editor.

Federico Contardi (PhD in Egyptology, Sapienza University of Rome

and Free University of Berlin) participated as a research associate to
international projects at the University of Heidelberg and for the Italian
Research Council (CNR). He taught Egyptology in Italy (Rome, Udine) and
Germany (Berlin, Tutorium). He is a team member (epigraphist) for the
archaeological mission of the University of Rome at Thebes-West (TT 27) and
at the temple of Hathor at Philae. Currently he is a research associate for the
VÉGA (Vocabulaire de l’Égyptien Ancien) project at the University Paul-
Valéry, Montpellier.

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 Contributors xi

Silvana Di Paolo is a researcher at the Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo

Antico (CNR-Italy). Her research interests cover the archaeology and art
history of Mesopotamia and Syria on the one hand, and of ancient Cyprus on
the other hand (2nd–1st millennia BC). Her work focuses on crafts in the
artisanal and visual culture shared among the Ancient Near Eastern polities.
She has written extensively on the relationship between art and power, location
and styles of workshops, and social meaning of works of art. She is currently
finalizing the multi-­author Implementing Meanings: the Power of the Copy
Between Past, Present and Future for publication in the series Altertumskunde
des Vorderen Orients, and working on new projects titled Transmission of
Knowledge and Culture in Antiquity: The Concept of Translation in Arts and
Crafts and The ‘Art’ of Making: The Artisanal Production in the Ancient Near
East and Cyprus.

Amy Rebecca Gansell received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture
from Harvard University in 2008, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Emory
University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Gansell is
Assistant Professor of Art History in the Art and Design department at
St. John’s University in New York City, where she teaches courses on cultural
heritage and ancient and non-Western art. She has published articles in the
Cambridge Archaeological Journal and Journal of Archaeology Science, and
is currently working on a book about the visual and material presence of
Neo-Assyrian queens.

Nicola Laneri teaches Archaeology and Art History of the Ancient Near East
at the University of Catania. Since 2003, he has been the director of the
Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project. In 2000, he was nominated
Fulbright Research Scholar at the Department of Anthropology of the
University of Columbia. Since 2001, he has been a member of the ISMEO/
IsIAO. In 2003–2004, he was appointed Visiting Professor at the Middle East
Technical University of Ankara (Turkey). In 2005, he acted as a Research
Fellow in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. He has published
more than eighty scientific articles in journals and books such as The
Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project 2003–2013 Final Report: Chronology
and Material Culture (Bologna, 2015), Archeologia della morte (Rome, 2011),

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 xii Contributors

Biografia di un vaso (Salerno, 2009), I costumi funerari della media vallata

dell’Eufrate durante il III millennio a.C. (Naples, 2004), and the edited volumes
Performing Death: The Social Analysis of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient
Near East and Mediterranean (Chicago, 2007), Looking north: The socioeconomic
dynamics of northern Mesopotamian and Anatolian regions during the late third
and early second millennium BC (Wiesbaden, 2012) and Defining the Sacred:
Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion in the Near East (Oxford, 2015).

Paolo Matthiae is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology and Art History of the

Ancient Near East in Sapienza University of Rome, and Fellow of the Accademia
dei Lincei (Rome), Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris),
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna), Royal Swedish Academy (Stockholm)
and Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (Berlin). He has received the Ad
Honorem Doctorate from the Universities of Madrid and Copenhagen. In
1996 he was nominated Knight of the Great Cross of the Italian Republic, the
highest Italian honour. Since 1964, he has been the director of the Italian
Archaeological Expedition to Ebla (Syria). Since 1998, he has been the
Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the International Congress of the
Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Among his many publications (eighteen
books and more than 230 articles in scientific journals) are Ebla. An Empire
Rediscovered (London, 1978), Il sovrano e l’opera. Arte e potere nella Mesopotamia
antica (1994), L’arte degli Assiri (Rome/Bari, 1996), La storia dell’arte dell’Oriente
antico, 3 vols (Milan, 1996–2000), Prima lezione di archeologia orientale
(Rome/Bari, 2008), Gli Archivi Reali di Ebla (Milan, 2010), Ebla, la città del
trono. Archeologia e storia (Turin, 2010) and Distruzioni, saccheggi e rinascite.
Gli attacchi al patrimonio artistico dall’antichità all’Isis (Milan, 2015).

Davide Nadali has been teaching Near Eastern Archaeology at the Sapienza
University of Rome since 2012. He received his PhD in Near Eastern
Archaeology at the Sapienza University of Rome (2006) and was postdoctoral
fellow at the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Florence, from 2008 to
2010.
Since 1998 he has been a member of the Italian Archaeological Expedition
at Ebla (Syria), while since 2014 he has been co-­director of the Italian
Archaeological Expedition to Tell Surghul/Nigîn (Iraq).

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 Contributors xiii

He is the Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Time Through

Colours: Analysis of painted artifacts in their archaeological, historical and
sociological contexts’, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and
Research. He has published several articles on Mesopotamian and Syrian
archaeology and art history, and one book on Assyrian reliefs (Percezione dello
spazio e scansione del tempo. Studio della composizione narrativa del rilievo
assiro di VII secolo a.C., CMAO 12 (Rome, 2006). He is co-­editor (together
with Andrea Polcaro) of the handbook Archeologia della Mesopotamia antica
(Rome, 2015) and (together with Maria Gabriella Micale) of the volume
How Do We Want the Past to Be? On Methods and Instruments of Visualizing
Ancient Reality (Regenerating Practices in Archaeology and Heritage 1)
(Piscataway, 2015).

Seth Richardson is an Assyriologist and historian who works on the Old

Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BC), state collapse, early state sovereignty,
cuneiform documents, and cultural issues of divination, divine icons and
ancestor cult. He is the author of more than two dozen scholarly articles and
the editor of two historical works, Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform
World (Winona Lake, 2010) and Sennacherib at the Gates of Jerusalem (Leiden/
Boston, 2014). He earned his PhD at Columbia University in 2002, was
Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the University of
Chicago from 2003 to 2012, and is currently the Managing Editor of the
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, also at the University of Chicago.

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31659.indb 14 13/04/2016 09:24
 Introduction
Davide Nadali

Memory is an essential factor in the everyday lives of social groups and

individuals: indeed, as human beings, we use practical memory in all actions,
from the simplest to the most complex sets of activities and combinations of
behaviours. When speaking of memory in general, we think of the automatic
processes of reasoning, explaining and narration: how does memory work in
storytelling? And, as a necessary prerogative, how does memory work in the
learning of a known story and an uninterrupted tradition? Is memory such an
automatic mechanism? Indeed, memory is a constructed system of references,
in equilibrium, of feeling and rationality. When looking at the English
expression, to memorize is ‘to learn by heart’; we can thus perceive this special
link between heart and mind; they are not to be separated and looked at
independently (thus replicating what Antonio Damasio labelled ‘Descartes’
Error’), but rather as the necessary counterparts in a dialogue that discloses the
process of creating and using memory to build shared memories and traditions.1
In this respect, the definition of ‘cultural memory’ points exactly to the
cultural value of memory in explaining the present as a derivation from the
past, and is therefore a necessary fundamental stone for the future of a society.
Memory affects all cultural activities and production, and interdisciplinary
analyses should endeavour to detect how memory is involved in every aspect
of human culture, how it is differently employed and, finally, how different uses
of memory affect the historical, religious and political meaning of a story or
monument.2 Within the definition of ‘culture of memory’ we therefore
encompass the culture(s) memory produces and fosters: in fact, memory is not
only a passive repository of information (a place, an object or a thing that
collects other places, objects and things) but it also works as an active and

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 2 Envisioning the Past Through Memories

agentive element within the society, in a constant interplay between the past
(what happened) and the present (what is happening).
Because the multiple natures of memory involve every human activity,
physical and intellectual, this volume intends to promote analyses and
considerations about memory by focusing on various cultural activities and
productions of Ancient Near Eastern societies, from artistic and visual
documents, to epigraphic evidence and archaeological data (via excavations
and surveys of the archaeological landscape).
Far from being merely hypothetical and abstract, the perception, function
and representation of memory have a practical and concrete resonance in the
culture and actions of ancient societies. Firstly, all human actions and activities
happen in time, as we live in time and are consequently affected by time.
Although the nature of time is external and immaterial, memory can thus work
to embody the flow of time as a peculiar human condition in all activities and
thoughts. For example, particular actions, or more specifically rites, must occur
in prescribed times, and their accomplishments acquire value and significance
only if associated with that prescribed ‘ritual’ time, according to coded
(mnemonic and automatic) activities that must be precisely repeated: this
repetition is based on memory, the memory of actions and gestures, as well as
the memory of the rite itself and its finalities. Memory is both the subject and
object of human action: it is both the cause and the effect of human thought. At
the same time, memory is at the origin of a visual and literary product (images
and words work in fostering memories). Which memory comes first? How do
the natures of memory interact? Did the traditional narrated memory stimulate
the need to fix and materialize the past through the codification in images and
words? Memory seems in some way more linked to the past, but it often
becomes a condition for the future: indeed, even today, we claim the importance
and necessity of preserving and telling memory for future generations. Neo-
Babylonian kings promoted ‘archaeological’ excavations of the ancient buildings
of the city of Babylon: ancient documents show the memory of the building
itself, the memory of the city and, in a wider context, the memory of the last
dynasty ruling Babylon. This anchor to the past guarantees the present and is a
distinctive marker for the future: memory is a both a social and cultural
indicator, an inner natural peculiarity of human beings who remember what
they were, reflect on what they are and plan how they will be.3

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 Introduction 3

In particular, following the definitions of ‘linguistic turn’ and ‘pictorial turn’,4

one could in fact speak of a ‘mnemonic turn’ for what concerns both the
construction and even the destruction of the memory within a society;
consequently, it is important to analyse not only what memories tell, but also
how ancient societies remembered and commemorated their past and how
memory was thus visually and verbally represented.
Memory, as a social and cultural construct and product, can be performed:
indeed, it needs to be performed. How was memory performed in past
societies? How was the past remembered? And how was cultural memory used
as a fundamental substratum for the future of a society? Memory is a mental
concept exteriorized by means of images and words that function as social and
public display; at the same time, those external features recall an inner memory,
or an embodied memory, helping the process of embodiment and enactment.
The external representation of memory can thus remind the inner personal
memory and contribute to the perception of belonging to a common (shared)
cultural memory; once memory is disembodied (externally represented and
performed), it refers to the common mnemonic heritage of a society (inside
the body and mind of each individual). Through a comparative study that also
takes into consideration modern attitudes and performances of memory, one
might investigate the emotional impact of the representation and performance
of memory on ancient societies and, as a consequence, the value of memory in
the living present and in the construction of the future.
The relationship between memory and history is a preferred topic in ancient
studies: indeed, after the seminal work by Jan Assmann,5 many studies followed,
applying and debating the definition of ‘cultural memory’. In fact, memory has
been analysed according to several different perspectives: it sometimes seems
that it has been analysed more according to our own perspectives rather than
through the perspective of the ancient people, shifting from a memory marked
(by the culture that produced it) to ascribed (by the analysts). For this reason,
memory has been inflected in different ways – cultural, social, political,
historical, mythical, collective and individual – and, probably, many other
acceptations exist and will be suitably created by future researchers. However,
it often follows that these definitions, each one describing and pointing to a
specific value of memory according to its use and exploitation in the ancient
societies by the ancient people, are sometimes used as synonyms in current

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 4 Envisioning the Past Through Memories

literature; but it must be carefully pointed out that they describe specificities of
the memory within the ancient societies.
As a direct consequence, to whom do the evidences of memory of the past
we study belong? We rely upon the memories that survived and have been
handed down and which we therefore consider official and primary; at the
same time, we must not forget the silent evidence of memories that have
disappeared in the past (that have been purposely cancelled), or that simply
have not yet been recovered. However, silent memories do not automatically
imply the absence of memory: their silence might only be temporary, and new
research could fill the gap. Conversely, the void of memory could be the result
of systematic and voluntary choices made in the past: it is not necessarily due
to the interventions of others and enemies, but the same society could have
deliberately chosen to omit a memory when presenting a new course and
perspective for the future.
It is also evident that the majority of memories belong to the ruling class of
an ancient society, the part of the society that was able to hand down (or even
impose) a memory by having access to the tools to do it (writing, monumentality
of works, architecture, power of intervention into the landscape). In this
respect, the memory of one single person (the king) or of a restricted group of
people becomes the official memory, or at least the one we consider as official;
therefore definitions such as ‘collective memory’ must take into account the
idea of community. Is it really a community? Does memory belong to the entire
community? How was memory concretely perceived and shared in the past by
the different social levels of the population?
Relating to the ruling class, specifically to kings and pharaohs, memory is
often confused with ideology and propaganda, as the references to memories
are used as a coercive power that is imposed onto others (to the detriment of
the others’ memories). As ideology (political and religious) doubtless influences
the creation and handing down of a memory, this does not necessarily imply a
propagandistic use or purpose: the two plans must be kept separate, as
propagandistic implications are often the result of analysts’ (mis)interpretations,
rather than the intentions of the past culture.
Memory is a delicate matter: analyses can run the risk of oversimplifying
the nature and use of memory, on the one hand, or of modifying the data to
create models and labels, on the other; as historians, archaeologists and

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 Introduction 5

philologists, we must treat memory carefully. Indeed, we operate as doctors of

the memory and attention must be paid to the way in which we collect and
recover mnemonic data, study and interpret mnemonic signs, and preserve
memories. Conservation is a very special and fragile matter. As Liverani says:
‘Agli archivi di tavolette ancora leggibili subentrano gli “archivi” di bullae che
avevano sigillato rotoli di papiro ormai disfatti. E l’attuale rivoluzione
informatica va a tutto vantaggio dell’effimero, ma i dischetti di vent’anni fa già
non li leggiamo più.’6 This is also valid for other types of mnemonic documents,
works of art and architecture: we rely upon new systems of archiving and
preserving memories, but these new systems of conservation do not always
allow access to all of the available ancient documents. Replica and new forms
of transmission of knowledge attempt to keep ancient memories alive, but we
often face the deliberate destruction of ancient monuments (monumentum
from the Latin verb monere ‘to remind’). We run the risk that these destructions
affect the memories of the past, and even our replicas, though precise and
accurate, cannot precisely substitute the original.

Notes

1 Damasio 1994; 2010.

2 Assmann 1992.
3 Winter 2000.
4 Mitchell 1994; 2005.
5 Assmann 1992.
6 Liverani 2010: 53. Translation: ‘The still readable archives of tablets are substituted
by the “archives” of bullae that had once sealed scrolls of papyrus that were so
badly decayed. The current revolution of informatics is all in favour of the
ephemeral: in fact, we no longer read the floppy disk of twenty years ago.’

Bibliography

Assmann, J., 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität
in fruhen Hochkulturen, München (English transl. Cultural Memory and Early
Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge 2011).

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 6 Envisioning the Past Through Memories

Damasio, A., 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain,
New York.
Damasio, A., 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, New York.
Liverani, M., 2010. ‘Parole di bronzo, di pietra, d’argilla’ in: Scienze dell’Antichità 16,
27–62.
Mitchell, W.J.T., 1994. Picture Theory, Chicago.
Mitchell, W.J.T., 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images,
Chicago.
Winter, I.J., 2000. ‘Babylonian Archaeologists of The(ir) Mesopotamian Past’, in:
P. Matthiae et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the First International Congress of the
Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Rome, 1785–1798.

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