Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC)

The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) engages in the interdisciplinary study and teaching of the cultures and peoples of the Near East (often called the Middle East) as they have expressed themselves in languages, texts, and literatures, including written and oral sources, as well as art, architecture, archaeology, and material objects. Our studies encompass the geographic region that stretches from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula through the eastern Mediterranean to Arabia and Iran.

The areas we study primarily include Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel/Palestine, greater Syria, Arabia, Iran and the Persianate world, and Anatolia and Turkey. We teach ancient and modern languages including Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Kurdish. We endeavor in teaching and research to explore past and present social contacts across communities and places. In this way, we push boundaries and frontiers within and beyond the Middle East.

Our department upholds a conscious commitment to scholarship within the University of Pennsylvania and the world. We seek to sustain a community that is diverse in terms of gender, national origin, ethnicity and race, religion, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, and more. The intellectual life of the Department is collaborative and flourishes from its culture of inclusion, which aspires to make everyone feel welcome. We aim to build connections to scholars across the University of Pennsylvania campus and elsewhere at local, national, and international levels as we exchange ideas and spread knowledge. This commitment to collegiality, inquiry, and exploration makes our department a vibrant center for the humanistic study of the Middle East from ancient times to the present.

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  • Publication
    Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context
    (1971) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Definitions of folklore are as many and varied as the versions of a well-known tale. Both semantic and theoretical differences have contributed to this proliferation. The German Volkskunde, the Swedish folkminne, and the Indian lok sahitya all imply slightly different meanings that the English term "folklore" cannot syncretize completely.1 Similarly, anthropologists and students of literature have projected their own bias into their definitions of folklore. In fact, for each of them folklore became the exotic topic, the green grass on the other side of the fence, to which they were attracted but which, alas, was not in their own domain. Thus, while anthropologists regarded folklore as literature, scholars of literature defined it as culture.2 Folklorists themselves resorted to enumerative,3 intuitive,5 definitions; yet, while all these certainly contributed to the clarification of the nature of folklore, at the same time they circumvented the main issue, namely, the isolation of the unifying thread that joins jokes and myths, gestures and legends, costumes and music into a single category of knowledge.
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  • Publication
    Review of Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess
    (1969) Ben-Amos, Dan
    In this work Patai proposes to trace the historical development of the female deity in Jewish religion and mysticism. He bases his study of this figure on anthropological-psychological theory and substantiates his ideas with a battery of archeological, historical, cultural, and literary evidence assembled chronologically. Occasionally Patai resorts to comparative methodology.
  • Publication
    New Trends in Folklore
    (1975) Ben-Amos, Dan
  • Publication
    Review of Raphael Patai, Man and Temple in Jewish Myth and Ritual
    (1969) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Patai's Man and Temple was originally researched and written during the thirties and the forties, when the myth and ritual approach to the study of religions was at its peak.
  • Publication
    Review of Moses Gaster, The Exempla of the Rabbis; Being a Collection of Exempla, Apologues and Tales Culled from Hebrew Manuscripts and Rare Hebrew Books
    (1969) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Among the numerous folkloristic publications of Moses Gaster (1856-1939)m The Exempla of the Rabbis stands out as a major contribution that has withstood controversy and new developments in scholarship. It is a standard work in Jewish folklore and a basic tool for research in haggadic-midrashic literature; moreover, Gaster's extensive erudite annotation and abundant references to European and Asian traditions make the book indispensable for folktale research in general. It has long been out of print, and this new edition is a timely publication.
  • Publication
    Jewish Folk Literature
    (1999) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Four interrelated qualities distinguish Jewish folk literature: (a) historical depth, (b) continuous interdependence between orality and literacy, (c) national dispersion, and (d) linguistic diversity. In spite of these diverging factors, the folklore of most Jewish communities clearly shares a number of features. The Jews, as a people, maintain a collective memory that extends well into the second millennium BCE. Although literacy undoubtedly figured in the preservation of the Jewish cultural heritage to a great extent, at each period it was complemented by orality. The reciprocal relations between the two thus enlarged the thematic, formal, and social bases of Jewish folklore. The dispersion of the Jews among the nations through forced exiles and natural migrations further expanded the themes and forms of their folklore. In most countries Jews developed new languages in which they spoke, performed, and later wrote down their folklore.
  • Publication
    Obituary: Dov Noy (1920-2013)
    (2014-01-01) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Dov Noy was my teacher, but not mine alone. He introduced folklore into Jewish Studies, and Jewish folklore into the discipline of folklore. Stith Thompson (1885-1976) integrated Dov Noy's dissertation (as Dov Neuman) "Motif-Index of Talmudic-Midrashic Literature" (1954) into the second edition of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature and established its subject, and Dov Noy himself, firmly in the international community of folklore scholars. Upon the completion of his studies at Indiana University, Noy joined the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1955 and began offering courses in folklore in the Hebrew Literature and the Yiddish departments. He was an inspirational teacher who attracted students and motivated them to continue the systematic research and teaching of Jewish folklore, and they have done so at the Hebrew University and in other Israeli universities. He himself taught Jewish folklore in American and Canadian universities, and inspired scholars, writers, and storytellers to explore and revive the art of storytelling in Jewish societies.
  • Publication
    The History of Folklore and the History of Science
    (1977) Ben-Amos, Dan
    We have to recognize a very important methodological problem that is involved in the study of the history of folklore. By turning to the history of the discipline as a subject of research we embark into a different discipline, namely history of science, and thus assume new responsibilities. As a matter of fact, at present the history of science is a recognized discipline with its departments, books and textbooks, journals and national and international conventions that provide the framework for scholarly exchange. At the University of Pennsylvania we have a department, History and Sociology of Science, devoted precisely to this subject matter.
  • Publication
    Straparola: The Revolution That Was Not
    (2010-01-01) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Inspired by Ruth Bottigheimer's 2002 book, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition, this article examines her proposition that the sixteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola invented the "rise tale," in which a lowly hero or heroine climbs the socioeconomic ladder with the help of a magical benefactor. It investigates Bottigheimer's evidence for this claim as well as her argument that Straparola's literary invention was a projection of the emerging Italian middles class in the sixteenth century. Contrary to Bottigheimer's proposition, it is found that tales with similar form were told in classical Greece and in medieval Europe and that the belief in magical fairies was known in Europe long before Straparola's time.