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Babylonian temple rituals

Vak
2023-2024

Admission requirements

This course is open to Master and Research Master students in Classics and Ancient Civilisations (track Assyriology, or students from other tracks with a good command of Akkadian and cuneiform script)

Description

Central to Babylonian temples was the care and feeding of the gods’ statues. In this course, we will study how temples organised the work that was needed to care for the gods. Conceptualizing the cult as an operative chain extending both before and after rituals, we will be able to uncover the wider social and political impact of rituals, even if most of them were carried out by a select group of priests far from the public eye. How did responsibilities interlock and how were performances controlled? How did changes in society and in the political sphere affect the organisation of the cult? We will peruse a wide array of sources, textual as well as archaeological, in order to answer these questions. Our period of study will be 750 BCE – 75 CE, a time when the relevance of Babylonian temples to imperial administrations changed drastically.

Topics to be discussed are:

  • daily cult and festive calendar

  • making a ritual landscape in city and countryside

  • actors and audiences

  • textualization of rituals

  • administration, control and punishment

  • temple ritual as political arena

Course objectives

Learning outcomes:

  • understanding the challenges and limitations of the textual and archaeological sources concerning Babylonian temples;

  • enlarging reading and interpretative competence of cuneiform texts;

  • reflecting on theories of ritual and their applicability on ancient Babylonian corpora;

  • broadening knowledge of the social and political history of Babylonia in a globalizing world, 750 BCE – 75 CE;

  • practicising critical assessment of secondary literature;

  • enhancing presentation and writing skills

Timetable

The timetables are available through My Timetable.

Mode of instruction

Seminar

Assessment method

Active participation in class
Oral presentation, with handout or powerpoint
Essay (5000-6000 words)
The requirements for MA and ResMA students are differentiated: ResMA students are expected to come up with their own original research topic, choose a corpus to work on, find literature etc.; MA students may expect more help in choosing their texts and finding literature, and their papers may lean more heavily on existing scholarship on the given corpus.

Assessment

Active participation in class
Oral presentation, with handout or powerpoint
Essay (5000-6000 words)
The requirements for MA and ResMA students are differentiated: ResMA students are expected to come up with their own original research topic, choose a corpus to work on, find literature etc.; MA students may expect more help in choosing their texts and finding literature, and their papers may lean more heavily on existing scholarship on the given corpus.

Weighing

Paper 60%
Presentation 20%
Class participation 20%
The final grade for the course is established by determining the weighted average of all assessment components, with the additional requirement that all parts must be sufficient.

Resit

If the overall mark is unsatisfactory, the paper can be repeated after consultation with the lecturer. The marks for the oral presentation and the class participation will still count in such a case.

Inspection and feedback

How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.

Reading list

Relevant literature for the sessions will be made available via Brightspace.
The following titles might be useful for a first orientation:

  • P.-A. Beaulieu, The Pantheon of Uruk (Leiden, 2003)

  • C. Debourse, Of Priests and Kings: the Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Leiden/Boston, 2022)

  • M. Kozuh, The sacrificial economy (Winona Lake, 2014)

  • B. Still, The social world of the Babylonian priest (Leiden, 2019)

  • C. Waerzeggers, The Ezida temple of Borsippa: Priesthood, cult, archives (Leiden, 2010)

Registration

Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website

Registration À la carte education, Contract teaching and Exchange

Information for those interested in taking this course in context of À la carte education (without taking examinations), eg. about costs, registration and conditions.

Information for those interested in taking this course in context of Contract teaching (with taking examinations), eg. about costs, registration and conditions.
For the registration of exchange students contact Humanities International Office.

Contact

  • For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.

  • For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: [Naam Onderwijsadministratie](link naar contactgegevens OA)

Remarks

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