Studying the Ancient Near East is to look into a mirror that reflects as much of us as it does of the past. The first difficulty in doing research, many of us noted, lies in the categories themselves. Concepts like religion, empire, myth, or even identity are modern constructs that come with a weight of assumptions, boundaries, and expectations that rarely fit the worlds we aim to study. We walk the border of the old and the new, bring antiquity to our categories, our languages, our paradigms, and the concepts stare back at us. They keep asking us who we are to name them so.
These words and their associations are modern inventions. They are tools that promise us clarity but often impose and reinforce boundaries that never even existed. Some in our team are concerned with how difficult it is for one to define religion in modern times but drawing a neat line between the sacred and the profane, belief and practice in ancient times is as stable as a line drawn into sand on a beach. To call something religious in the Ancient Near East is to risk drawing a false line between the sacred and the mundane.
What troubles some of our researchers is how the whole idea of religion, as a construct shaped by centuries of Abrahamic thought, colonizes ancient material. It comes to us with assumptions of people believing in a unified way, of gods occupying the same cognitive space as our faith. Reading the hymns and incantations, even administrative texts, welcomes us into a world where practice matters more than profession and where temples served not as simply religious buildings, but rather centers of production, redistribution, and power. The political and the spiritual, the economic and the ritual, were all woven together in a dense web of relationships. The sacred was not a sphere but a texture.
Likewise, applying modern ideas of the state or institution to empires and kingdoms of the ancient world can be misleading. These societies did have administrative systems, but not necessarily the kind of bureaucratic rationality we associate with modern states. We are accustomed to picturing imperial structures as coherent, top-down and neat hierarchies. But the empires of the Ancient Near East were porous, contingent webs of negotiated relationships.
As scholars, we build constellations out of fragments. Researching the Ancient Near East means constantly negotiating between what we think we know and what the sources still withhold from us. Our categories are not clean windows but perhaps more like lenses, sometimes cloudy, sometimes distorting. Being reflexive means that we need to keep cleaning and focusing that lense, aware that it will never be perfectly clear.
As one of our colleagues put it:
Perhaps the best we can do is to let the evidence speak in its own complexity, rather than in our own vocabulary.
Studying the ANE from within our own academic traditions is inheriting their architectures of thought. The binaries of East and West, modern and ancient, secular and sacred are imminent when conducting research. Recognizing these binaries is the first act of resistance. Reflexivity becomes more a necessity than a virtue. Modern anthropology or sociology can rely on interviews, fieldwork, and data from living populations. Our researchers point out that in WORK-IT and the field in general we, instead, work with absence. With a record that speaks mostly in the voice of elites, and rarely in that of the common people.
For our team to be reflexive is to not fall into paralysis. The goal isn’t to recover what was but instead approach the ancient world as a partner in conversation rather than an object of study. If the temple is both a factory and a sanctuary, if the empire is both a hierarchy and a web, then our language, as well, is able to evolve and stretch. The words we use must be able to hold multiplicity, contradiction, and silence without collapsing them into familiar forms.
To challenge falling into norms, to not get paralyzed, some of our team members respond by collaborating and networking with scholars from the regions we study, others by listening to other languages of interpretation. Some work through methodology. Slowing down, letting the evidence retain its ambiguity and resist our categories, allowing uncertainty to remain visible. The task isn’t to disregard our position, but rather to make it clear that we acknowledge that our gaze isn’t neutral.
Reflexivity, in this sense, is less a final stance than an ongoing discipline, a willingness to question the tools we use to think, to sit with the gaps in our knowledge and to remember that the ancient world does not owe us coherence.