140226 SE Mesopotamian Literature (Reading of Literary Texts) (2023W)

The course will explore themes and questions related to the study of ancient divinatory practices in a cross-cultural manner by focusing on the rich textual evidence stemming from ancient Mesopotamia and early China. The study of divination in Ancient Mesopotamia and early China has developed rapidly in recent years and has witnessed a progression from systematization and publication of material towards more analytical approaches. Recent studies have focused on divination’s conceptual underpinnings, as well as its embeddedness in deep-rooted patterns of religious and socio-political organization. Participants in this class will be offered an overview of the most recent scholarship on divination in early cultures, in particular in ancient Mesopotamia and early China. They will learn about the many different ways in which divination was performed in ancient Mesopotamia and early China and how divination was conceptualized in these two cultures. By the end of the course, participants in this class will have read (in translation) several examples of Mesopotamian and Chinese divinatory texts and will be able to discuss differences and common features.
The following main topics will be treated in the class: 1) Divination: definition and general principles; 2) Divinatory sources; 3) Methods of divination; 4) Divination practitioners (‘diviners’); 5) Divination and worldview (‘intellectual operations’); 6) Divination and scribal cultures.
While texts obviously come bound in multifaceted cultural, historical, linguistic peculiarities, this class will attempt to explore features that are intelligible and ideally heuristically relevant cross-culturally and diachronically.
The contents of this class will be taught through power point presentations and weekly classroom discussions of primary sources and secondary literature. The power point presentations and additional reading material will be uploaded on Moodle weekly.
PLEASE NOTE: The class is open to interested students with different backgrounds: text readings will be provided in translation and will be selected on the basis of the audience's needs and interests.