The Senses in the Ancient Near East

The senses are our window on the world, the lens through which we come to know our environment. Most of us take for granted that we are looking out the same window as everyone else, but the way that each of us interprets and classifies the sensations we experience is mediated by our culture. Even the paradigm of five senses is arbitrary and comes to us not from modern science but from ancient Greek philosophy.

Drawing on evidence from textual and artistic sources, this project considers questions like: How did the people of the ancient Near East understand the way their senses functioned? What types of sensory phenomena are represented in the sources and why? And what are the methodological issues that the modern scholar confronts when investigating the senses in the ancient world?

This research brings the ancient Near East into dialogue with the evolving field of sensory studies, which prioritizes the human experience of sensation and invites scholars to move beyond the physiological study of the senses to an examination of their cultural meanings.