The paper explores the history of research dedicated to maps of Ancient Mesopotamia based primarily on publications of Western scholars of the 20th—21st centuries. The focus is given to studies that bear particular importance for the historiography and help to obtain an adequate understanding of the development of the field of topographic and cosmogonic maps discovered as a result of archaeological excavations at different times in the territory of Ancient Mesopotamia and dating back widely from the Sumerian and Old Akkadian periods (2340—2200 BC) to the Neo-Babylonian time (626—539 BC). This paper offers an analytical approach, which presupposes not so much a general description and presentation of the content of the works under consideration, but rather the identification of their relevance, novelty, and line of arguments. In addition to reconstructing the history of research of ancient Mesopotamian maps, the article pursues another important goal, namely, the characterization of historical cartography as a discipline, which emerged and acquired its own methodological framework only in the second half of the 20th century. Thus, the paper implements a rather complex multi-level approach, within which historical cartography is characterized on the basis of scientific publications which contributed to shaping its outlines, while these publications themselves are analyzed from the point of view of the theoretical principles and methodology of the scholarly approach they were meant to promote.
For citation: Lidov A.A. The History of Research of Ancient Mesopotamian’s Maps in the Western Scholarship of the 20th—21st centuries, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 4, pp. 90—97.