The History of Art and Architecture is a co-sponsor of this conference. View the event in Events@Brown for more information and to register.

This conference will bring together a diverse range of scholars interested in the reception, use, and misuse of the Ancient Near East in early modern art, literature, scholarship, and politics. The fourteen speakers will explore the ways that the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia were imagined and their history constructed by scholars, artists, and writers during the early modern period (ca. 1600–1800) – and the political and social uses that they were put to. The conference seeks to go beyond a purely Euro-centric study of reception to explore also local reception within the near east, and reception in the Americas.