A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art, First Edition. Edited by Ann C. Gunter. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CHAPTER TWELVE Introduction: Religion and Ideology In the American academic landscape, where the discipline of archaeology is anchored in anthropology departments, studies of ideology in the ancient Near East—with some notable exceptions—have generally lacked a dialogue between the subdisciplines of material studies, art history, and philology. 1 Assyriological or philological investigations, typically at home in depart- ments of Near Eastern studies, have suffered from a similarly narrow approach. The topic of ideology, however, surely requires an interdiscipli- nary approach with “the full analytical arsenal available to us—art historical, archaeological, anthropological, and textual—and on its own terms” (Winter 1997: 359). Any artistic, textual, and ritual statement needs to be contextu- alized within the religious worldview of its time. Moreover, these various modes of expression, far from functioning as independent media, were inte- gral to understanding each other: all contributed alike to the creation of reality revolving around the king rather than independently representing reality (Bahrani 2003). The fields of Assyriology, Near Eastern art history, and archaeology have further been dominated by an understanding of religion as “one cultural system among others (politics, economy, literature, art, philosophy, fashion, etc.), all of which enjoy relative independence” (Lincoln 2008: 223), rather than recognizing religion as the metadiscourse that encompasses, orders, and permeates all others—ideology included. In frequently using the term ideology “as a substitute for ‘world view,’ ‘religion’ or ‘political doctrine’” Ideology Beate Pongratz‐Leisten