My grandmother always wanted to be an archaeologist. She grew up in a military family, moving from base to base, all the while delving into books that illuminated the ancient world. When I was young, she would find “fossils” in her backyard for us to examine, including a recently deceased mouse on one occasion.

My grandmother never got the chance to go to college, but she loved her six children and worked as a volunteer docent at the local museum in Kern County, California. I always appreciated her passion for history and archaeology, and even more that she wanted to share it with me. She could sit for hours explaining how people of the past worried about the same sorts of things we worry about now. Combined with a secret desire to be the real-life Indiana Jones, my grandmother is the reason I have decided to pursue academia.

At the University of Chicago Divinity School, I study Islam and pre-Islamic religions in a historical context. Studying religions historically can be a challenge to making them contemporarily relevant. We examine evidence so critically, sometimes it makes the actual religious significance feel irrelevant. The reason I love studying the Ancient Near East is because I find it overwhelmingly relevant to the study of contemporary religion, and moreover, our society today.

Before the birth of Islam and the revelations from God to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the Ancient Near East thrived with religions concerned with the very same things as Muhammad and his believers. Many of these concerns relate to us today as well.

Citizens of Ancient Mesopotamia prayed and performed rituals to a storm god who would bring rain for successful harvests. Today, though many of us may not worry about our food supply, our religious and faith traditions concern themselves with feeding those who are hungry. In Ancient Egypt, kings were believed to be mediators to the gods, perhaps even half-gods, receiving revelations that would allow them to help their kingdoms prosper, and more importantly, to be prepared to journey through the underworld after death to reach the afterlife.

At a site in southwestern Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, remains of a sacred place that predates Stonehenge by 6,000 years still stand for us to admire. The site is thought to be the world’s oldest temple, built by prehistoric peoples who predate metal tools and ceramic. Contemporary people travel the world in search of sacred places, sacrificing money and time, risking danger in some cases, to satisfy spiritual yearnings. The Hittites of ancient Anatolia wrote a comprehensive law code, enforced by their king, to maintain peace and civility in their society. Each of us today follows a moral code, many times influenced by our religion, faith, or philosophy.

In my scholarly and spiritual journey, I seek to find common concerns in the ancient world and our own, proving that the past really is relevant to the present. Though the Romans may have lived 2000 years ago without television or MacBooks, they, like us, enjoyed having a good time and believed in the power of humans working together for the greater good. Sharing our humanity in the modern world proves quite powerful- so what else might we learn by engaging with the ancients?

Photo by qmnonoic, via Flickr Creative Commons.