Borders, frontiers, and the lands that lay beyond them were created and defined through a variety of physical, geographical, and moreover, social and cultural means in Mesopotamia. This talk centers on the ways in which one such distant land, the Cedar Forest (tir eren orqišti erēni) was construed in Sumerian and Akkadian textual sources, as well as in artistic representations, throughout the second and first millennia BCE. The image of the Cedar Forest finds its foundations in Old Babylonian literary…

"Daniel Varoujan’s Pagan Songs shocked readers when it was published in 1912. Russian Armenian critics condemned its frank descriptions of eroticism as pornographic and disapproved of its poetic paganism as a symptom of the "nationlist disease". For its unsympathetic view of Christianity and its glorification of the pagan era, the Armenian church considered it criminally anti-Christian, while feminists claimed Varoujan objectified women by depicting them as “being created for the sexual gratification of men”. On the occasion of the first…

Sponsored by The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Cosponsored by The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Since the late 1940s, the approximately 1,000 manuscripts discovered in caves alongside the Dead Sea – popularly called the Dead Sea Scrolls – have been reshaping in significant ways study of the Bible and ancient Judaism. Often left out of discussions about the scrolls are the approximately 30 Jewish literary works written in Aramaic. This talk will introduce the…