Gods on Clay: Ancient Near Eastern Scholarly Practices and the History of Religions

My project examines the scholarly use and adaptation of a cannonical list of gods from Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Syria. By focusing on the list as a component of the traditional scribal curriculum and its transformation into a structure for organizing learned knowledge, I try to shed light on the importance of scholarly practices for understanding documents of a purportedly religious nature and, in so doing, raise concerns regarding historiogrpahical method in the contemporary study of religion.