that transmitted for the first time a more realistic image of this civilization. All these different aspects were, in some way, collected by film producers and screenwriters.
The second part of our book will focus on the analysis of the films themselves. To this end, we decided to divide the study into several chapters that deal with different aspects of this civilization. in Chapter 6, we will study the architecture and landscape of Mesopotamia, focusing on three different poles: the palace, the temple, and the tower. The interest is to understand how each of them has a message to convey about the society and the governing elite. In fact, in a certain way, in the architecture, in its grandeur, aesthetics, and construction, is mirrored the civilization, and as such it constitutes a discursive prop of cinema, carrying a message that should be absorbed by the viewer. In Chapter 7, the political, religious, and social life of the land between the rivers will be the focus. The interplay between the government and the population, as well as the relationship between priesthood and monarchy, gives us clues as to the reasons that led to Mesopotamia’s final downfall. What matters most is to understand the character’s behavior. And in this regard the fascist conduct of the Mesopotamian monarchs transported the viewers of the mid-1950s, for instance, to the recent past. At the same time, the idolatrous behavior of the high priests demonstrated this civilization’s lack of a strong religious moral. It is thus necessary to understand the political and religious message that cinema had to offer about antiquity and how it exposed the anxieties of its own time, both about faith and about leadership. In Chapter 8, the fundamental point of analysis will be the representation of women and their role. The portrayal of women on screen accompanied the development of the movements of female emancipation and the reservations society had in relation to these. The idea of a subversive Oriental woman and an obedient Western one helped to understand the degenerative character of Mesopotamia, in what might be considered an implicit orientalist message. Judith and Semiramis helped to expose this contrast, as well as the goddess Ishtar and the rituals performed in her honor. All contributed to the idea that the Mesopotamian woman was in need of saving and correction, an aspect that reflected society itself.
Hence, we have opted for an analysis of film content and not of production. Nevertheless, Chapter 4 will be dedicated to the study of the cinematographic centers, especially Hollywood and Cinecittà, of how they dealt with the political and social transformations that occurred throughout the twentieth century, and how they constrained or not their creations.84 As we know, Mesopotamia, Babylon, and the characters associated with them have the extraordinary ability to easily metamorphose, assuming themselves as a linguistic resource, camouflaging themselves in different-style figures often used to express situations that are alien to them, but in which they are reviewed. Thus, either we find them as a metaphor, as a euphemism, or as an allegory. This will also be a focal point of our analysis, especially with regard to such films that we categorized earlier as Mesopotamia in film and which will be covered in Chapter 5. Indeed, out of Mesopotamia came the biblical metaphor “whore of Babylon” applied to many contexts and visible in various cinematographic productions. Everything that was evil was likely to have emerged from the land between the rivers. Evil, consummated in the figure of the Devil or the Antichrist, is one of the aspects that will be studied and that underline very well the twentieth-century conception on Mesopotamia.
To finalize, we include Chapter 9, named “Farewell Babylon, Farewell Nineveh,” which, in addition to summarizing some of the ideas presented throughout the work, addresses how the fall of Babylon and Assyria has always been associated with the excesses of their population and monarchs, and the consequent divine punishment that fell upon them. Through this final chapter, we also intend to highlight how Mesopotamia has always been presented in the cinema as the other, both from a cultural (expressing an implicit orientalism) and from a religious point of view (its polytheism opposing the European and American Judeo-Christian matrix). Cinema was, in fact, marked by these two perspectives: the Westernism that was in its blood and the idea of its salvific faith.
Notes
1 1 Vargas 2020, p. 94.
2 2 Jauss 1982, p. 21.
3 3 Martindale 2013, p. 174.
4 4 Martindale 2007, p. 298.
5 5 Idem, p. 301.
6 6 Hardwick 2003, p. 2.
7 7 Porter 2008, pp. 471–472.
8 8 By text we should understand any vehicle passible of conveying meaning, be it a book, a sculpture, or a musical piece. In the specific case of our book, the texts under analysis will be the films.
9 9 Apud, Jauss 1982, p. 21.
10 10 Burnett-Betsch 2016, p. 3.
11 11 Porter 2008, p. 469.
12 12 This book was preceded by Lorna Hardwick’s Reception Studies, published for the first time in 2003.
13 13 Hardwick and Stray 2008, p. 1.
14 14 Idem, Ibidem.
15 15 With the volume Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond (Garcia-Ventura and Verderame 2020).
16 16 Garcia-Ventura and Verderame 2020, p. 2.
17 17 Bohrer 2003.
18 18 Brusius 2012.
19 19 Malley 2012.
20 20 Regarding Reception on Mesopotamia, vide Garcia-Ventura, Verderame 2020, p. 2.
21 21 Porter 2008, p. 469.
22 22 Gadamer 2004, p. 197. About the idea of “chain of receptions,” vide Vargas 2020, pp. 94 and 96.
23 23 Hardwick 2003, p. 4.
24 24 Hardwick and Stray 2008, p. 1.
25 25 Martindale 2006, p. 2.
26 26