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Acknowledgments
This book was carried out during 2020 and took shape while developing my postdoctoral project on Reception of Mesopotamian Antiquity at CHAM – Centre for the Humanities of NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities where I was awarded a grant (FCSH/CHAM/HIS/04666/1 BPD) through the strategic project sponsored by FCT (UID/HIS/04666/2013 and UID/HIS/04666/2019).
I am grateful for the support I received from colleagues who contributed with helpful ideas, providing advice, and above all by reviewing drafts of paragraphs or entire chapters. In particular, my gratitude goes to Isabel Gomes de Almeida for reading and commenting on the manuscript and to Carla Alferes Pinto for reviewing parts of the book. My thanks also go to Wiley’s editors Todd Green for the enthusiasm with which he welcomed the idea and Andrew Milton for his help and patience in answering all my questions. I would also like to thank Inês Pinto Coelho, Cristina Brito, Professors João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, Helena Trindade Lopes and specially Professor Francisco Caramelo, who encouraged the writing of this book from the start and conveyed me the fascination for ancient Mesopotamia.
For all the information and the stills provided, thanks are also due to several institutions: Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Gaumont-Pathé Archives, The Museum of Modern Art, The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, WSM Art Metropolis in the person of Bertina Schulze-Mittendorff.
To my family, above all, I owe a debt of gratitude for all the support and encouragement. My last words go to my dearest niece, Mafalda, who has given me the motivation when I needed the most.
Introduction: Reception of Mesopotamia and the Cinema Lens
0.1 Reception Studies and Cinema
Studies on Reception of antiquity are relatively recent. Charles Martindale first included Reception Theory in the field of Classical Studies in 1993 with Redeeming the Text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception. The Professor of Latin from the University of Bristol was inspired by the research line inaugurated by the Constance School, with scholars such as Wolfgang Iser and especially Hans Robert Jauss, who, in the 1960s, boosted the field named Aesthetic of Reception. Jauss postulated that the observer of a work of art should be given an active role. In broad terms, he considered that the work of art was not a static or timeless phenomenon.1 In his own words, “A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence.”2 Martindale thus resorted to this seminal work to introduce new conceptions in the study of the Classics, claiming, like Jauss before him, that an author has no control over his work since it does not have an immutable meaning, always depending on the interpretations made about it and hence subjected to the cognitive role of the observer/reader, the “active principle.”3
To Martindale, the fact that reception presupposes the active participation of the reader, being himself an essential part in the relationship between present and the past and its prolific dialogue,4 differentiates it from other sorts of analyses. Indeed, reception contrasts with other concepts that can also be applied to the study of the past, although with different meanings and uses, that is: “tradition”
