Before archaeology

"This volume aims to explore some aspects of the multifaceted modalities with which classical and pre-modern Islamic thought (with two final glances at modern and contemporary times) has imagined and narrated the past, entering into a dialogical relation with its questioning nature, developing an intellectual and interpretative attitude to the past from different points of view - literary, historical, philological, political, religious, or at the level of collective imagination -, and articulating a complex discourse on antiquity, its memory and its persistence in the cultural and geographical spaces of the Muslim Near East. From different perspectives and with different approaches, the scholarly contributions here collected investigate how the pre-modern Muslim Near East imagined and gave meaning to a past which emerged in the form of traces (āthār - a word which appears, in the Islamic historiographical tradition, every time the description of the landscape meets the desire or the anxiety of interpreting it in a historical framework) before Western archaeology, since the late 18th century, established the epistemic framework of the scientific knowledge of the past... The essays collected in this volume investigate precisely the ways in which the historic culture of the pre-modern Arabic Islamic world constructed epistemic frameworks in order to understand and narrate the past, utilizing categories and methods (sometimes in conflict with each other) that sought to define the conditions of truth of the historic narrative and to control the conditions of the use of sources"--Introduction.