Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

History

First Advisor

Andrew Berns

Abstract

The concepts of primordial incomprehensibility, ordered creation, and the liminal chaos between them, form a foundational framework in Mesopotamian intellectual culture. The distinctive ways in which these concepts manifest in Sumero-Akkadian cultures suggest a systematic cosmological substructure — characterized by the paradoxical, cyclical, and co-creative relationships between forces such as Infinity and measure, generation and destruction, and definition and obscurity — that remains insufficiently examined in current scholarship. Drawing from diverse corpus of Mesopotamian creative works, Kabbalistic exegesis, and post-modern scholarship, this thesis seeks to elucidate the essential dynamics within that substructure. By proposing a semiotic hermeneutical strategy attuned to the hidden dimensions of these traditions, this study aims to inspire new avenues of inquiry, address longstanding gaps in Assyriological understanding, and expand the discourse on esotericism in ancient thought.

Rights

© 2025, Fiona Eirene Andrews

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