Biodiversità nel Vicino Oriente antico (BioANE). Per un approccio interdisciplinare all’interazione interspecifica

Concerned by the looming environmental and climate crisis, anxious about the state of the planet’s water resources, the extinction of plant and animal species, the quality of the atmosphere, the chemical pollution of the soil and the seas, almost all the world’s governments promise in their political agenda to try to remedy the environmental and climate damage caused by human beings, now considered as a geological force. Such issues may interest Ancient Near Eastern scholars, who, stimulated by the theoretical-methodological approaches of the so-called Environmental Humanities (EH), study the ways of the inter-specific collaboration not only between humans and the more studied non-human animals but also with plants and trees, which have not been the subject of such detailed studies. The aim of this short contribution is twofold: 1) to approach the study of the biodiversity of the ancient Near East and discuss how human communities have thought about their relationships with the environment they are part of, influencing it and being conditioned by it (connectivity ontology); 2) to encourage/stimulate the creation of a new research group overcoming the traditional dichotomy between the disciplines of “nature” and those of “culture”.