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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Now showing 1 - 10 of 146
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    Review of Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual
    (1970-04-01) Ben-Amos, Dan
    The ten essays that comprise this volume deal with the ritual symbols of the Ndembu people of Zambia, south-central Africa. All except one were previously published within the last ten years. Most of them excel in analytical rigor, detailed ethnographic description, and provide stimulating theoretical suggestions. Now that these essays have been assembled in a single volume, Victor Turner's approach emerges as a fruitful research method. It could well be one of the most significant contributions any anthropologist has made to folklore studies in the past decade.
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    Bettelheim Among the Folklorists
    (1994) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Psychoanalysis and folklore have been uneasy bedfellows. Any psychoanalytic interpretation of folktales makes folklorists twist and turn. Their reactions have ranged from ambivalent acceptance to unequivocal rejection. Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, are ever too ready to consider such a reaction as denial, or at least avoidance of the "true" meaning of fairy tales. As a psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim could have bridged between the two disciplines with his book The Uses of Enchantment (1976). His valuation of orality, his erudite familiarity with the classical sources of European folktales, and his sheer love for the fairy tale, qualified him for mediating the two disciplines. Surely, Bettelheim did not conceive of himself as a broker between two intellectual fields. However, by writing such a book this role was inevitably thrust upon him. The assessment of his success or failure requires, first, the examination of the theoretical, methodological, and attitudinal conflicts between folklore and psychoanalysis. Secondly, there is a need to clarify the charges of plagiarism that were brought against Bettelheim, and finally a need to evaluate his methodological contribution to the psychoanalytic interpretation of the fairy tale.
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    Story Telling in Benin
    (1967) Ben-Amos, Dan
    One of the most significant traditions of African artists is that of the storyteller. This traditional figure remembers the legends and history of the tribe and village and passes them on to later generations in a linking of oral continuity. Modern phenomena are destroying the social cohesion in which this art form flourished, and although linguists and anthropologists are now endeavoring to record as many stories as possible, many, it is feared, have already been lost.
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    Meditation on a Russian Proverb in Israel
    (1995) Ben-Amos, Dan
    My father spoke in proverbs, but for many years I did not notice. Only after I completed my graduate studies in folklore and began teaching, did I become aware of the idioms in his conversation. Without being a religious person he interlaced his anecdotes and narratives with proverbs, biblical verses, and parables from the talmuds. I began to pay attention. A few years later, when I visited my parents in Israel, my father, who was a construction worker, told me that in retirement he tried to make a business deal but failed. Yet in spite of his naiveté in such matters, he came through that experience unscathed. "The Lord protects the simple [minded]" (Psalms 116:6). He concluded his story with a touch of self-irony, and then explained, "why 'the simple [minded]'? Because smart people can take care of themselves." When my mother's health declined, he tended to her at home, and at the same time struggled to maintain his regular busy schedule of volunteer activities in several local organizations. Not one to complain openly, he wrote me in a letter the following parable, hardly realizing its history. "A Jew has complained before God about his share of troubles. He complained so much until God got tired of him and showed him the troubles other people in the world had, and told him to select out of these any trouble that would suit him best. After observing all these afflictions the Jew chose his own old troubles—at least with those, he felt, he was familiar."1
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    Review of David Assaf, The Regal Way: The Life and Times of R. Israel of Ruzhin
    (2000-01-01) Ben-Amos, Dan
    Hagiography and history tell their stories at cross-purposes. While hagiography glorifies, even sanctifies its heroes, history strips them of their traditional greatness, seeking to bare the factual truth to which documents and testimonies attest. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the history and study of Hasidism. Legends (shevahim) are the building blocks of the Hasidic tradition, in which the rabbi is a leader, a miracle worker and a storyteller. He is the narrating subject, who, in turn, becomes the object of stories subsequent generations tell.