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

In the framework of the Working Group "The Learned Practices of Canonical Texts," Aaron Tugendhaft's project examined the scholarly use and adaptation of a canonical 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, he tried to shed light on the importance of scholarly practices for understanding documents of a purportedly religious nature and, in so doing, raised concerns regarding historiographical method in the contemporary study of religion.