On Wednesday,11 February 2015, Piotr Michalowski, George C. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Michigan, will give a lecture for the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies:

TRACES OF RACE: NOTIONS OF THE OTHER IN EARLY MESOPOTAMIAN THOUGHT

Many historians have elucidated various aspects of the history of modern Western racist attitudes and thought and some have even traced some of the strands of this horror as far back as Classical antiquity.
But we now have access to thousands of years of earlier written history from Western Asia and Egypt, compelling us to inquire whether it is possible to trace this kind of classificatory thinking further back in time. This lecture will present evidence from an early second millennium BCE heroic poem, written in the Sumerian language in the area that is now Iraq, that may shed some light on ancient Mesopotamian attitudes toward what we today label as race.

This free public lecture is at 8:00 pm in Earth Sciences Auditorium B142, 5 Bancroft Avenue, University of Toronto, St. George Campus

Further information may be obtained at: csms@chass.utoronto.ca