OVERVIEW
REPAC is short for “Repetition, Parallelism and Creativity: an Inquiry into the Construction of Meaning in Ancient Mesopotamian Literature and Erudition”. The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 803060). REPAC is an ERC Starting Grant project running from 2019 to 2024. The research team is led by the Principal Investigator Dr. Nicla De Zorzi and it will include, over the whole course of the project, four post-doctoral researchers and two PhD candidates.
REPAC investigates repetition and parallelism as structuring and meaning-making devices in Akkadian literature and scholarly writing, aiming to demonstrate their grounding in a culture-specific “analogical hermeneutics” which pervades the core texts of Ancient Mesopotamian culture. In the final phase of the project, we will highlight the specifics of the Mesopotamian evidence by comparing analogical hermeneutics in Ancient Mesopotamian literature and scholarly writing with parallel textual patterning in the closely related corpus of Biblical poetry and, as an absolute first, in the Ancient Chinese literary and philosophical corpus.
ABOUT REPAC
The project is envisaged as a contribution to the intellectual history of Ancient Mesopotamia. Its goal is to study a key feature of the mentality and world-view of the learned scribes who produced the core works of Mesopotamian culture.
Our sources are literary and scholarly texts written in the Babylonian language on clay tablets in the Cuneiform script. The topical range of these compositions extends from literary gems such as the Gilgamesh Epic to lengthy compendia of a highly technical nature on magic and divination.
We aim to reveal the “analogical hermeneutics” embedded in these compositions. That is to say, we seek to a culture-specific literary and scholarly method in which analogical thinking plays a fundamental role. REPAC’s working hypothesis is that the composition of the most important literary and scholarly texts from Ancient Mesopotamia was strongly influenced by processes of analogical inference and that these processes can be brought to light by focusing on a structuring device whose widespread use in Ancient Mesopotamian erudite compositions has never been investigated before: textual repetition.
In Ancient Mesopotamian literature and erudite text production, repetition in its several forms occurred not only as an aesthetic ornament. Grounded in the pragmatics of the texts, it served as a springboard for the construction of meaning through analogy. REPAC will demonstrate this on the basis of a corpus drawn from three major genres, literature, magical texts, and divinatory compendia. We are the first to investigate repetition in all its facets as a single phenomenon and to highlight the role of analogical reasoning in framing the scribal world-view that accounts for its importance and ubiquity. Analogical reasoning and the power attributed to analogy in general draw on a culture-specific belief in the interconnectedness of words, concepts, and things sharing an element of similarity.
Ancient Mesopotamia can be placed firmly within a continuum of cultures which are characterized by world-views based on interconnections formed by similarity and displaying a predilection for analogical reasoning, but specifics need to be established. In the project’s comparative component, this worldview is elucidated further through the lens of comparative evidence from other cultures, in particular Ancient China.
Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient China stand out among ‘analogist’ cultures in general. These two complex agrarian societies have obvious parallels in chronology and socio-economic and political structure. Crucially, and in contrast to almost all other ‘analogist’ cultures, in both cultures textual repetition and analogical reasoning are heavily dependent on the nature of the non-alphabetic script used. REPAC will investigate these similarities.
Another area of comparison is represented by repetition and parallelism in Biblical poetry. While profiting from the methodology of Biblical studies, REPAC will open up a scarcely used reservoir of comparative Babylonian material for the study of repetition in Classical Hebrew poetry: the project’s text corpora will provide proxy data for modelling the functions of repetition and parallelism in ways that cannot be achieved based on the Biblical material alone.
Methodology
REPAC adopts a combination of methods grounded in philology, textual criticism, and historical interpretation. The project aims at reconstructing, if not an entire mode of thought, than the way in which a certain historically conditioned mode of thought gave shape to a whole range of erudite textual genres of one of the principal civilizations of antiquity.
Objectives
REPAC has four specific objectives, which are linked to four interrelated work packages and a specific set of research questions:
- REPAC will investigate comprehensively the role played by repetition as a structuring device in Akkadian literature and scholarly writing. Studying textual elements which are separate but yoked together through contiguity and similarity, the project will reveal repetition as a major vector for poetic creativity, rhetorical effectiveness, and inventiveness in argumentation.
- REPAC will establish the functions of repetition in context, i.e., with respect to genre, pragmatics and linguistic function. In particular, it will clarify the role played in literature by repetition beyond the level of poetic ornamentation; it will provide a study of ritualistic forms involving similarity- and analogy-based repetition; it will elucidate the power of similarity-based textual patterning and analogical reasoning in divination.
- REPAC will clarify how repetition and analogical reasoning reflect a vision of the world as permeated by correspondences between its parts resulting from bonds of similarity.
- REPAC will create a dialogue with relevant neighbouring fields of study regarding the investigation of repetition and parallelism and of the underlying worldviews.
Work Packages
Find our page on CORDIS here.