The question of taboo in Ancient Near East

Jean-Marie Durand is professor for Assyriology at the Collège de France. Michaël Guichard is director of studies at "l'Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes". Dr. theol. Thomas Römer is Professeur for Hebrew Bible at the Department of Theology and for Religious Studies at the University of Lausanne

This colloquium brought together biblical scholars, Assyriologists and scholars of Antiquity to discuss the question of taboo and its transgressions, from the perspective of their disciplines and through their particular corpus of texts: Bible, literary or archeological evidences from Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Mamelouk period. On the one side, the contributions highlight the absence of a term that would be the equivalent of the word "taboo", originally borrowed from the Polynesian languages by last century's anthropologists. It appears however that several characteristics connected to this concept are recurring in the societies under scrutiny. >