The first workshop of the DFG-Scientific Network “New Perspectives on Monsters, Hybrids, and In-Betweens in Ancient West Asia”, organized by Elisa Roßberger (FU Berlin) and Geraldina Rozzi (Universität Leipzig), will focus on emic and etic strategies of differentiating and sorting the large variety of creatures known from ancient West Asian textual and visual sources. It will provide insights into ongoing research activities, follow up on topics and debates initiated during a related workshop at the Deutscher Orientalistentag (DOT) in Erlangen in 2025, and help shape future research directions in this fundamental field of ancient Near Eastern studies. The work of the late Frans A. M. Wiggermann continues to inspire the network and its activities.

Parts of the workshop are public, others reserved for network members and invited speakers. If you are interested in joining the public parts, please register with H. Hamel (vorderasiatische-archaeologie@geschkult.fu-berlin.de).

Wednesday, 24 June 2026

13:30 Elisa Roßberger (Berlin) / Geraldina Rozzi (Leipzig): Welcome and introduction

14:00 Karen Sonik (Auburn): Monster culture in Mesopotamia. Practical taxonomization

14:30 Katharina Zartner (Tübingen): Breaking it down – How to make the unknown more tangible

15:00 Gebhard Selz (Wien): Hybrid beings. Their creation, categorisation, and function: the thunderbird and the dragon

16:00 Diana Stein (London): Defining the indefinable? Terminology and classification of hybrid figures

16:30 Nedal Haj Darwich (London): The lion-dragon motif in the glyptic of Late Bronze Age Syria and Upper Mesopotamia. Contexts, symbolism, and formal transformations

17:00 Christoph Uehlinger (Zürich): Classifying vs naming hybrids in glyptics from the Southern Levant

Thursday, 25 June 2026

09:30 Nils Heeßel (Marburg): The good, the bad and the ugly. Evaluating intermediate beings

10:00 Gina Konstantopoulos (Los Angeles): The root of all power. Naming demons and monsters in Mesopotamia

10:30 Geraldina Rozzi (Leipzig): Listing the monstrous. Classification and selection in Mesopotamian lexical lists and in literary texts

11:30 Benedetta Bellucci (Würzburg): Reflections on the single-and-multi-headed forms of composite creatures in Hittite art

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Thematic pitches with moderated discussion (for speakers only)

13:00 David Kertai (Leiden): The visualization of unknown Late Assyrian monsters

13:45 Dahlia Shehata (Würzburg): Anzu’s many faces. A case study on impact and interaction of narrative and visual media

15:00 Renate Marian van Dijk-Coombes (Stellenbosch): Mischwesen. Beings of variable and component parts … but what about gender?

15:45 Elisa Roßberger (Berlin): Visual forms of analogical thinking. Philippe Descola’s anthropology of figuration and ancient Mesopotamia

16:45 Johannes Bach (Dublin) / Jonathan Beltz (Copenhagen): An experimental proposal on charting composite beings

17:30 Anne-Caroline Rendu-Loisel (Strasbourg): Can demons feel and be felt? Polysensory experience and the categorisation of demonic beings

Friday, 26 June 2026 (for speakers only)

09:30 Focus Group A: Sensory phenomena  |  Focus Group B: Gestures and movement

11:15 Focus Group C: Cosmological spaces and spheres of action  |  Focus Group D: Interspecies relations, social networks and hierarchies among deities, monsters, and in-betweens

13:30 Synthesis and outlook

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