The two hermeneutics

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Bibliography and hermeneutics

Each bibliographical item includes in any website of the cluster is in itself a hermeneutic effort, because each is founded in a search for meaning. This is true even when the degree of explicitness in formulating the guiding principles followed by the author is minimal or often non-existent. There is always, in fact, a generalized system of principles that guides the author’s research, however inarticulate it may be.

A goal of our approach is to bring out these methodological presuppositions, and to show the way in which they condition the work of each author.

We may distinguish, in a bibliographical work, two distinct hermeneutic levels.

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The first hermeneutics

The first hermeneutic level of a bibliographical research pertains to the scholarly effort as such. Our understanding of Mesopotamia is inescapably filtered through the lens, in fact the lenses, created by the scholars who have confronted the data over time,

The first hermeneutic goal of our historiography approach is to bear this out, and thus to make us aware of the lenses which filter, today, our vision of things Mesopotamian.

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The second hermeneutics

The second hermeneutics pertains to this very vision. Ultimately, it is a matter of experience. Knowing data for the sake of knowing data is valuable, but it does not nourish. Thus the second hermeneutics aims to go beyond the filter.

What is the inherent structure of the Mesopotamian world?

The filter, while remaining a filter, seeks to identify the reality of what is filtered. Different filters achieve different results on what is filtered. Depending on how fine the filter, we will gain different dimensions of what is filtered. The finer the filter, the more diversified the result. But the combination of all the filters yields the more comprehensive view of the filtered, and the more insightful the understanding of its reality.

Another metaphor is that of a lens. Different lenses give us different perceptual ranges of the observed, and it is their combination that allows us to define ever more precisely the reality of what we observe, the object of the observation.

The second hermeneutics works in a simar way. We gain an ever richer understanding of Mesopotamian culture, in its many facets, by identifying the filters and the lenses through which this culture has been observed. The coarser filters or lenses (as in the early periods of the discipline) often yield insights not only on the early observers (the first hermeneutics), but also on the “objective” reality of Mesopotamia (the second hermeneutic).

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The websites

In the websites of the 4 Banks cluster we aim to address both types of hermeneutics, in the following manner:

1. by studying the bibliographical entries in terms of the authors' points of view, which we seek to understand in the various levels of annotation (abstracts and reviews), and
2. by looking at specific phenomena relating to ancient Mesopotamia as they appear through the filter or the lens of these authors' views – this through the various components of the central argument. This bears on the larger issue of the scholarly tradition.