Colonialism divided the Middle East: spatially, via unnaturally straight borderlines, and also temporally. By separating the “ancient” from the “medieval” Islamicate Middle East, colonial powers justified the large-scale extraction of ancient cultural heritage into Western museums. “Eastern antiquity” was appropriated as laying the foundations for “Western civilization,” whereas the Islamicate Middle East was posited as the very antithesis of the West.

Our interdisciplinary project challenges the colonial division of the Middle Eastern past by investigating the rich and diverse literary production from ca. 2200 BCE–1500 CE. Rather than following the usual East-West trajectory of comparison and criticism, we seek to explore what insights can be achieved by reading previously isolated “ancient” and “medieval” Middle Eastern literatures side by side. Through this longue durée approach to nearly 4,000 years of Middle Eastern poetry and poetics, we not only aim to better appreciate regional (dis)continuities; we also move Middle Eastern literatures from the Western periphery to the center of critical inquiry. This can only be achieved through cross-disciplinary collaboration, as our corpora span millennia of literary production in a multitude of languages, ranging from ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, Hittite, and Egyptian to classical Arabic and Persian. Given the high level of linguistic expertise required for each discipline, novel approaches toward the reconstruction and conceptualization of the various poetic systems have often advanced along parallel lines, but never in dialogue. Our project hence seeks to provide a forum for interdisciplinary exchange, in which a diverse group of experts convene to learn from one another and jointly chart new avenues of research: What changes when we appreciate that Middle Eastern literati not only composed poetry but developed their own poetics, long ignored or disparaged by Western critics? What is gained by appreciating non-Western poems not as deviant and “Other,” but as poetic models in their own right? How does that redefine our understanding of literature at large?