The Current Study of the Ancient Near East in Spain Trends and Context

Agnès Garcia-Ventura; Josué J. Justel

doi:10.1086/731395

The Current Study of the Ancient Near East in Spain Trends and Context

Agnès Garcia-Ventura, Josué J. Justel

Departament de Ciències de l'Antiguitat i de l'Edat Mitjana

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Resum

In the nineteenth century in Spain there was a growing interest in the civilizations of the East—those located to the east of the Mediterranean. However, in Spain this interest did not translate into a consolidation of cuneiform studies in academia as it had done in other countries. In this article we offer some clues to help understand these two circumstances by providing an overview of the study of the ancient Near East in the Iberian Peninsula. In our analysis we shall pay special attention to Spain, and also highlight the connections with its neighbor Portugal and with the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries of Latin America, where this field of studies has expanded notably in recent decades.

Idioma original	Anglès
Pàgines (de-a)	150-157
Nombre de pàgines	8
Revista	Near Eastern Archaeology
Volum	87
Número	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1086/731395
Estat de la publicació	Publicada - 1 de set. 2024

Accés al document

10.1086/731395Llicència: C In Copyright

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abstract = "In the second half of the twentieth century in Spain, the study of the archaeology and epigraphy of the ancient Near East progressed slowly and unevenly. As a consequence of the Franco dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, Spain (like its neighbour Portugal) remained largely isolated from the intellectual trends that had been taking hold in other European countries and in the Americas (see Fontana 1986; for a more recent analysis, see Casanova and Gil Andres 2014). This period, however, did not constitute a break with the previous tradition, either in the study of antiquity in general (Wulff Alonso and Alvarez Marti-Aguilar 2003; Gracia Alonso 2009) or in the particular case of the ancient Near East (Garcia-Ventura and Vidal 2012). In fact, there had only been isolated attempts to set up a tradition of studies of the ancient Near East at that time, and the precarious state of the universities at the end of the dictatorship made it difficult for sporadic endeavors to flourish and help consolidate the discipline (see the article by Vidal in this issue). This is evidenced by the absence of chairs of history of the ancient East even today: These subjects were classified under the general discipline of ancient history, which, of course, focused predominantly on Greece and Rome. There were no specialists in Spain or Portugal who devoted themselves exclusively to the study of archaeological or epigraphic sources from the ancient Near East, with the sole exception of biblical scholars.",

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