NEAA

The Uruk period (4th millennium BC) saw the emergence of the earliest known state societies, urbanism, kingship, writing, and colonial network extending from Mesopotamia across the Jazira and into neighboring resource zones in the Taurus and Zagros mountains. This seminar examines Uruk Mesopotamia and neighboring regions from several perspectives â€" an examination of key sites in Mesopotamia and contemporaneous local late chalcolithic polities in Syria, southeast Anatolia and Iran. The seminar also considers the main theoretical issues involved in understanding inter-regional interaction in the social, economic, and political organization of this period.

This course takes place outside of Chicago and can only be taken by arrangement with the instructor well in advance of the quarter in which it is offered.

This course is an in-depth survey of the various ceramic traditions that have characterized Anatolia from the invention of pottery in the Neolithic period to the Islamic period (time permitting). We will use collections in the Oriental Institute Museum to gain hands-on familiarity with these corpora, although the ceramic repertoire of Anatolia is so vast and diverse that the class will also involve lectures and student presentations on ceramics only available in scholarly literature. This class is structured less as a teacher-directed instructional, and more as a collaborative project in which we become masters of the Anatolian ceramic repertoire together.

This course takes place outside of Chicago and can only be taken by arrangement with the instructor well in advance of the quarter in which it is offered.

This course investigates public and private buildings in which ancient records have been found in situ, seeking to find correlations based on architecture, artifacts, and the contents of texts. Often, in the past, the findspots of texts have not been meticulously recorded, resulting in the loss of valuable information on the function of specific buildings or even rooms in buildings; the layout of a building can also give information that can add significantly to the interpretation of the texts.

In this course we will read widely in the archaeological, historical, and sociological literature pertaining to ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern households, kinship, and demography, with attention to methodological issues involved in interpreting relevant archaeological and textual evidence.

This course is an exploration of the continuities of Egyptian culture from the Ptolemaic period down to modern times, a span of over 2000 years.  The emphasis will be on the archaeology of Coptic and Islamic Egypt.  The focus will be on the role of medieval archaeology in amplifying the history of economic and social systems.  It is this connective quality of archaeology which contributes to an understanding of Pharaonic culture and fills the gap between ancient and modern Egypt.

This sequence does not meet the general education requirement in civilization studies. This sequence surveys the archaeology and art of the Near East from prehistoric times to the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Each course in the sequence focuses on a particular cultural region.

This is the general introduction to Egyptian Archaeology which is part of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East sequence.
This course will examine in detail the archaeology of ancient Egypt. The aim is to give a detailed overview of major sites and discoveries as well as including as much as possible material from recent excavations. Additionally, problems and priorities concerning fieldwork in Egypt will be discussed throughout this course.