How Mesopotamia Became Western

Abstract Long before Mesopotamia’s vast material remains began to reemerge under the archaeologist’s pick and shovel in the mid-nineteenth century, the region occupied a significant but peculiarly phantasmic place in Western thought. The cities of Nineveh and Babylon, and the first millennium BCE empires of Assyria and Babylonia more generally, were widely known from references in the Bible and diverse ancient Greek sources—but as these sources also described the destruction of these once-great empires, it was little imagined that any very consequential traces of them had survived. In the 1840s, however, the first large-scale excavations in the region uncovered extraordinarily substantial material remains from Assyria’s royal capitals. When the most spectacular of these were shipped to Paris and London for public display, they seized public as well as scholarly attention. Then-contemporary ideas of the history of the world were forced to confront and ultimately assimilate the astonishing materiality of Mesopotamia’s ancient civilizations. The present study examines the consequences of this early assimilation for how we have come to study and understand Mesopotamia today, with particular attention to the subfields of literature and the visual arts and aesthetics.