Chapter V turns to the image and discusses first former art historical approaches in ancient Near Eastern studies to the narrative in the image. It then introduces W. Mitchell’s notion of text-image dialectic and Schriftbildlichkeit (pictorial notation). It makes a case for a semiotic approach informed by Gottfried Boehm’s notion of the deixis of the image to justify a narrative reading of the image in the process of reception. This narrative reading is informed by the interpictoriality of the image which is anchored in a stream of tradition as well as its intermediality with mythic narratives and ritual performance.

John Locke’s influential account of personal identity emphasizes the importance of consciousness.  This had led many commentators to argue that Lockean selves just are consciousnesses.  Charles Taylor has mounted persuasive critiques of this “punctual” Lockean self; such a conception of the self is too thin and stands divorced from our values and moral agency.  This chapter shifts the focus from Locke’s views on personal identity to his views on personhood in an effort to show that Locke is sensitive to the kinds of worries raised by Taylor.  Lockean persons are more than consciousness.  In particular, the chapter focuses on Locke’s exploration and analysis of the complex faculty psychology undergirding consciousness and on the ways in which persons can be embodied.  This allows for a richer conception of the self.  It then argues that this richer conception better aligns with Locke’s own views about the value and importance of the self and with what he says regarding our moral agency and our duty of self-improvement.  Finally, the chapter shows that understanding Locke’s examination of human cognition as contributing to an analysis of the self allows us to resituate him with respect to some of his predecessors in seventeenth-century England.

This chapter traces notions of the self in the plays of early modern Spain. Drawing on a vast corpus of unpublished plays with the technique of “distant reading”, it examines the relation between self and free will in a period of increasing authoritarian control by both church and state. These plays demonstrate a deep preoccupation with maintaining a sense of personal freedom and choice despite the pressure of external constraints: Kallendorf proposes that the self is conceived as a “fortress” within which some sense of personal autonomy can be retained. This is very different from the more free-form relational concepts of the self that we have seen developed in the volume up to this point: the self remains grounded in the body and operative in society, but society places the body under heavy restraint.

Chapter VI provides case studies for the conceptual metaphor of conflict myth in the image reaching from the fourth in the first millennium BCE. Its approach is informed by Aby Warburg’s emphasis on gesture language and its history of reception as developed in his Mnemosyne Atlas and by Erwin Panofsky’s approach to iconology to develop the concept of interpictoriality as a network of pictorial references or Bildgedächtnis (collective pictorial memory).

What Alberto Manguel claims for Talmudic and Islamic book culture can be extended to the history of reception of storytelling through text and image in Mesopotamia. In this book, storytelling, in general, and mythmaking, in particular, have been categorized as essential cognitive and cultural strategies of world-making to make sense of experience, to explain social and cosmic order, and, consequently, to structure knowledge in order to respond to future challenges and expectations. Thus, cognition and cultural learning merge in the process by which the ancient scholars, whom I regard as the primary agents behind the creation of texts and images receive, reactualize, and rework former material. Due to their orientational and expository nature, storytelling and mythmaking can claim their rightful place as systems of knowledge besides other systems of knowledge, including divination, magic, Listenwissenschaft, et cetera and should be considered on a par with logical reasoning. In other words, in its endeavor to create meaning, mythmaking is an epistemic and world-making endeavor. The diachronic approach in this book made it obvious that, despite its localized expression, the creation of a cultural repertoire of text and image revolving around the ruler was shared by the elites throughout Mesopotamia and contributed to their cultural identity, self-understanding, and self-representation. This repertoire was informed by core metaphors and conveyed in all media including myth, image, architecture, and ritual, with each medium creating its own narrative framework. It has also shown that the transfer of knowledge over centuries and millennia was not transmitted in a linear manner, but rather that scholarly communities shared and retained collective knowledge over generations, choosing and reviving particular tropes in specific historical situations and contexts.

Chapter IV discusses various Sumerian and Akkadian stories as examples for myth as a fundamental instrument of thought and its explanatory, orientational, and worldmaking functions, as well as a reflection upon forms of political governance.

This chapter considers how self-harm, suicide, and views of the afterlife reveal the radical shift between Greco-Roman tradition and Christianity with regard to the self. Classical Greek language uses the same auto- compound words to indicate self-willed action, suicide and kin-murder. From Homer through to Roman ideals of masculinity, significant action is generally understood with regard to the possibility of lasting fame, not with regard to a punishment or reward in an afterlife. In contrast to this picture, Christianity insists that each action is evaluated after death and contributes either to punishment or reward in an afterlife: life is a preparation for the afterlife. In particular, and in contrast to the earlier tradition, suicide becomes now a morally reprehensible act. For the faithful, however, martyrs become a model of willing death, which must be kept separate from suicide in evaluation. Ascetics enact a bodily self-harm to perfect their own holiness: physical self-harm becomes a positive gesture of self-fulfilment, dependent on the promise of a life after death. The Western model of the self is deeply influenced by this Christian modelling – and yet neither self-harm nor death play any role in Charles Taylor’s discussions of the history of the self

This chapter introduces the reader to the understanding of the human person articulated by Gregory Palamas (1296–1357) during the late Byzantine Hesychast controversy. The notion of the self elaborated and defended by Palamas is notable for its stress not only on the practice of inner prayer and stillness (“hesychia”) as crucial for the true cultivation of the self, but likewise for its robust defence of the embodiment of the self. Before discussing Palamas’ approach in detail, some background on the question of the relationship of body and soul in Greek patristic thought is offered, with special reference to Maximus the Confessor. This sets the scene for Palamas’ argumentation regarding the body as constitutive of the self together with the soul. Several ways in which Palamas both adopts and challenges classical views of the human self are presented. For instance, while the human soul might be detachable from the body, the human self, or person, is not. In some sense, moreover, every activity of the human self can be understood as a “common activity” of soul and body. The interweaving of body and soul in Palamas’ thought ultimately challenges a straightforward hylomorphic conception of the human being, notwithstanding certain commonalities.