The Ancient Near East and the Bible as Cultural Memories of the West

Abstract Before the rise of modernity, the West understood the ancient Near East primarily through biblical narratives and Classical sources, where it served as a foundational ‘other’ for Graeco-Roman and Christian traditions. The rise of modernity reinterpreted the Bible and the ancient Near East through the lenses of rationalism, secularism, and historicism within a Western framework still deeply shaped by its Christian roots. Driven by archaeology, philology, but also travel writing, all of which produced particular imaginative geographies of the Orient and proto-ethnographic descriptions of its peoples, this process generated new forms of knowledge that moved beyond religious memory towards a material and symbolic appropriation of the past. This article fleshes out how the Bible and the ancient Near East as intellectual traditions were transformed through different iterations of cultural memories which were created to support the West’s narrative of its own origins, exploring how identity and otherness were negotiated and Westernized through this historical process.