Mind Your Manners: Behavioral Conventions From Mesopotamia and Beyond

During the European Middle Ages and in Renaissance courts and cities, writers and intellectuals began to reflect on manners, etiquette and pro-tocol practices, leaving an abundance of precepts on conduct and so-cially acceptable behavior for many levels and genders of society. The ancient Western Asia does not provide us with written treatises of this kind that explicitly address such practices, but an examination of textu-al sources, archaeological evidence, and visual artefacts may support today scholars reconstructing behavioral conventions, manners, norms of conduct, etiquette, and protocols in ancient societies. The contribu-tions in this volume attempt to reconstruct various aspects of social interaction—meetings, gestures, postures, proxemics, choice of lan-guage, table manners, and hygiene practices—by drawing on all the disciplines through which ancient Mesopotamia and its neighboring regions (including Elam, Achaemenid Persia, Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt) can be studied: philology, archaeology, and art history. At the same time, they adapt approaches and insights from other fields such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. In doing so, the papers in this volume seek both to establish a foundation for a largely neglected area of research and to offer a point of departure for readers interested in the multifaceted world of everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia and its surrounding regions.