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The ancient town of Edfu sits on a sandstone outcrop on the west bank of the Nile, protecting it from annual floods. It has been excavated since 2001 by University of Chicago professor Nadine Moeller. - By By
OI marks 100 years
of discovery in the
ancient Middle East
Exactly 1 century ago, a few lone scholars began arguing a controversial idea: Western civilization had its roots not in Greece and Rome, as academics had maintained for centuries, but further back—in the sun-drenched lands of the ancient Middle East.
That idea was at the center of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago when it was founded in 1919. Over the course of the next 100 years, the OI has changed how humans understand their own history through groundbreaking work in archaeology, linguistics, and historical and literary analysis—work that continues today in Chicago and across the Middle East.
“The ancient Middle East is part of our origin story. This is the place where humans created the first villages, cities and eventually empires, and along the way developed essential technologies that form the basis of today’s world, such as the domestication of plants and animals and the invention of writing,” said Christopher Woods, the John A. Wilson Professor and director of the OI, and a leading scholar of Sumerian language and writing. “In many cases, what was created in Mesopotamia influenced our world, and the OI’s work over the past century has been essential to understanding these cultural threads.”
Scholars at the OI laid the foundations for the modern study of the ancient Middle East, with the work assuming an extraordinary array of forms: innovative, field-defining excavations and research projects across the Middle East; linguistic research that furthers the decipherment of ancient languages; the creation of cultural encyclopedias for long-lost civilizations; state-of-the-art satellite and digital imaging methods for the discovery of ancient settlements; and centers for the documentation and preservation of the region’s imperiled cultural heritage. The work continues today through excavations and research projects led by OI scholars in places such as Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan, as well as scholarship to reconstruct histories, literatures and religions of long-lost civilizations.
The research of the OI has uncovered new ways of seeing what connects humans and why—providing insights and perspectives not just into the ancient world but on the challenges we still face today, from environmental change to immigration to disruptive technologies.
“There, in the Fertile Crescent, human beings forged something remarkable: a collective identity and life,” Woods said. “To become “we,” they had to decide who leads, which ideas and behaviors to encourage and which to punish, and where they stood together in the world and in the cosmos—in other words, how to become humans, together.”
“The ancient Middle East is part of our origin story. This is the place where humans created the first villages, cities, and eventually empires
—Prof. Christopher Woods, director of the OI
Our ancient history has been buried by the very ones claiming to uncover it.
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