Canines from Inside and Outside the City: of Dogs, Foxes and Wolves in Conceptual Spaces in Sumero-Akkadian Texts
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2021
- handle: 10670/1.5b2gi4
- isbn: 978-1-913344-05-4
- hal: hal-03687107
- doi: 10.17863/CAM.76187
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info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.17863/CAM.76187
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Andréa Vilela, « Canines from Inside and Outside the City: of Dogs, Foxes and Wolves in Conceptual Spaces in Sumero-Akkadian Texts », HAL-SHS : histoire, ID : 10.17863/CAM.76187
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Humans have always had complex relationships with their environment and the situation in the Ancient Near East was no different. Though often using metaphors and symbolic images, Sumerian and Akkadian texts provide us with a unique insight on how urban populations from Mesopotamia perceived their own interactions with their environment. Those documents clearly distinguish the city, seen as the realm of men and domestic animals, and the steppe, land of wild animals and chaotic forces. While this dualistic vision suggests that faunal elements belong to either one or another of those two parallel worlds, a closer look on the sources reveals that the integration of animal species in those conceptual spaces is more complex than the simple dichotomy between domestic and wild animals. This work focuses on the representations of three canine species (dogs, foxes and wolves) and demonstrates how they integrate themselves in the mental division people from Mesopotamia had of their environment while at the same time insinuating the existence of a third conceptual space, a sort of in-between.