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Does the Study of Ancient Near East History Have any Sense Today? Three Reasons and Some Reflections

ABSTRACT

In general terms, the study of Ancient Near East History is questioned under the pretext that it does not respond to ‘national’ interests, that is, such knowledge is futile, absurd or unnecessary because it is far from Latin American history as well as - and more specifically - of the reality and the needs of the present. However, Ancient Near East History can become an extremely fertile and operational field to study and research if we avoid its delimitation based on certain historiographic and anthropological prejudices that are still present in academic media. In this paper, we propose some considerations about the relevance of the study of Ancient Near East History as a kind of ‘laboratory’ from which it is possible to think a whole set of sociocultural characteristics different from our contemporaneity modes of social experience and to recognize the diversity of ways in which human experience can materialize throughout history.

Keywords:
Ancient Near East; History; social relevance

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