"Within this disciplinary organisation the term that came to be the acceptable name for Iraq in the Pre-Islamic period was ‘Mesopotamia.’ This revival of a name applied to the region in the European Classical tradition came to underscore the Babylonian/Assyrian position within the Western historical narrative of civilisation as the remoter, malformed, or partially formed, roots of European culture which has its telos in the flowering of Western culture and, ultimately, the autonomous modern Western man. Thus the term Mesopotamia refers to an atemporal rather than a geographical entity, which is, in the words of the renowned Mesopotamian scholar, A. Leo Oppenheim (1964), a ‘Dead Civilisation.’ This civilisation had to be entirely dissociated, by name, from the local inhabitants and contemporary culture in order to facilitate the portrayal of the history of human civilisation as a single evolutionary process with its natural and ideal outcome in the modern West. (Bahrani 1999: 165)"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Columbia University facultyPeople from BaghdadIraqi women academicsIraqi archaeologistsIraqi Assyriologists
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zainab_Bahrani
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Zainab Bahrani
7 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Zainab Bahrani →
Related Quotes
"The acquisition of monuments and works of art that were shipped to London, Paris and Berlin in the mid-nineteenth cen…"
"Since human civilisation was thought to originate in Mesopotamia, and this civilisation was transferred from the East…"
"Archaeology, like other human sciences such as anthropology and history, allowed a European mapping of the subjugated…"
"This obsessive desire to disassociate the past of the region from its present and to present it instead as a primitiv…"
"The image of Mesopotamia, upon which we still depend, was necessary for a march of progress from East to West, a conc…"
"The creation of a historical narrative in which space and time became transcendental horizons for the Being—Mesopotam…"
"For him delicious flavors dwell In books as in old Muscatel."
"And in the evening, everywhere Along the roadside, up and down, I see the golden torches flare Like lighted street-la…"
"Song like a rose should be; Each rhyme a petal sweet; For fragrance, melody, That when her lips repeat The words, her…"
"The Corn Belt is a gift of the gods—the rain god, the sun god, the ice god and the gods of geology. In the middle of …"