NEHC

From the outside, Israeli society might seem homogeneous and cohesive, bound together by the outside challenges and threats that have defined its eight decades of existence. However, in a recent public speech, President Reuben Rivlin warned Israelis of the tribal schisms tearing contemporary Israeli society and defined a ‘new Israeli order’ splitting the state into 4 groups: Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, national religious Jews and secular Jews.

Using the president’s description of the “four tribes of Israel” as our framework, this course focuses on representations of the different groups in Israeli media and popular culture.
We will ask:
• What distinguishes each of these tribes?
• What is the narrative held by each tribe to describe itself and the 'other' tribes?
• How do the different tribes interact?
• Is modern Israel a successful immigration society or a failed experiment at creating a melting pot?

Using Israeli society as a case study, we will also consider prevailing ideas about mediation and reconciliation in fragmented societies.

If there is student interest, the course may include a section for advanced Hebrew learners.

What are the major developments in thinking and in literature in the Islamic world of the “middle periods” (c. 950-1800 C.E.). How did noteworthy Muslims at various points and places think through questions of life and death, man and God, faith and belief, the sacred and the profane, law and ethics, tradition vs. innovation, power and politics, class and gender, self and other? How did they wage war; make love; shape the built environment; eat and drink; tell stories; educate their youth; preserve the past; imagine the future; perform piety, devotion, and spirituality; construe the virtuous life and righteous community, etc.? How did these ideas change over time? What are some of the famous, funny, naughty, and nice books read in the pre-modern Muslim world? We will survey a broad geographic area stretching from Morocco and Iberia to the Maldives and India--even into the New World--through lectures, secondary readings, and discussion. We will engage with a variety of primary texts in English translation, as well as various visual, aural, and material artifacts.

This course gives an overview of the richness of Mesopotamian Literature (modern Iraq) written in the 3rd-1st millennium BC. We will read myths and epics written on clay tablets in the Sumerian and Akkadian language in English translation and discuss content and style, but also the religious, cultural and historic implications. Particular focus will be on the development of stories over time, the historical context of the literature and mythological figures. The texts treated cover not only the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, but also various legends of Sumerian and Akkadian kings, stories about Creation and World Order, and destruction. The topics covered range from the quest for immortality, epic heroes and monsters, sexuality and love.

The goal of this class is to get an overview of Hittite literature, as “defined” by the Hittites themselves, in the wider historical-cultural context of the Ancient Near East. Some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves in reading ancient texts are: why were they written down, why were they kept, for whom were they intended, and what do the answers to these questions (apart from the primary content of the texts themselves) tell us about — in our case — Hittite society?

The building of sculpted monuments and monumental architecture seems to be a universal human trait in all parts of the world, from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to the inuksuit cairns of the artic Inuit. What explains our urge to create monumental things? Why are monuments built, and how do we experience them? This course explores various answers to these questions through the disciplines that most frequently address monuments: archaeology, architecture, and art history. In the process, we will encounter a number of the major trends that have characterized the humanities and social sciences in the past century. This course examines humankind’s monumental record through a series of famous case studies from around the world to investigate the social significance of monuments in their original ancient or modern contexts. We will also determine whether lessons learned from th¬e past can be applied to the study of monuments today, and whether studying modern monuments – including those from our immediate surroundings in Chicago – can help us understand those of the past.

This course introduces students to the Hittite Empire of ancient Anatolia. In existence from roughly 1650-1200 BCE, and spanning across modern Turkey and beyond, the Hittite Empire is one of the oldest and largest kingdoms of the ancient world. We will be examining their history and their political and cultural accomplishments through analysis of their written records – composed in Hittite, the world’s first recorded Indo-European language – and their archaeological remains. In the process, we will also be examining the concept of “empire” itself: What is an empire, and how do anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians study this unique kind of political formation? This course therefore has two goals. First, students should emerge with a broad familiarity of the historical trajectory of the Hittite Empire and its neighbors from the beginning of written records to the empire’s post-collapse cultural regeneration in the early first millennium BCE. Second, students should acquire a sense of imperialism as a general phenomenon for analysis. No prior knowledge of Anatolian or Near Eastern history is required.

This course offers a critical introduction to the study of the relationship between human societies and their environment, with a specific focus on situations of rapid climatic change (RCC) in early historical periods. Students will be invited to reflect on discourses about climate and its influence on human societies from Herodotus to the IPCC; on notions such as environmental or social determinism, possibilism and reductionism, societal collapse and resilience; and on recent academic trends at the crossroads of Humanities, Social Sciences and Environmental Studies. Alternating lectures (Tu) and discussion sessions (Th), the first half of the quarter introduces the notion of “climate,” from its origins in Classical Greece to the present, and how this concept has been (and still is) used to define human groups and their history; it also offers an overview of the theories and methods that shape our current understanding of climate change and its effect on societies (past and present). The second half of the quarter is devoted to case studies, with a specific focus on the Ancient Near East (from prehistory to the first millennium BCE). Students will be asked to present the readings and participate in classroom discussions; write an article summary; and conduct a personal research (midterm annotated bibliography and research proposal; final essay) on a topic of their choice, which needs not be limited to the Ancient Near East.

This course offers a critical appraisal of the concepts of empire and imperialism in the historiography of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran to address political formations that developed (and vanished) during the first millennium BCE, with a focus on the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid empires. This seminar will explore the nature of power, control, and resource management in these early empires, and how they served as the blueprint for the later imperial formations of Classical and Late Antiquity. Students will address a substantial part of Mesopotamian and Iranian history and study in depth some key historiography issues for the history of Antiquity. Primary documents will be read in translation and the course has no ancient language requirements. However, some readings of secondary literature in common academic languages (especially French and German) are to be expected. Students will be asked to present the readings and participate in classroom discussions; write a book review; and conduct a personal research on a topic of their choice (midterm annotated bibliography and research proposal; final essay). This course fulfills the requirements of a survey course in Mesopotamian civilization as defined by the Ancient PhD programs in NELC and the MA program in the CMES.

Taking as its central theme the cultural situatedness of the earliest systems of mathematics and astronomy -- from their origins in ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq, c. 3400 BCE) until the Common Era (CE) -- this course explores topics in mathematical language and script, metrology, geometry and topology, music theory, definitions of time, models of stars and planets, medical astrology, and pan-astronomical hermeneutics in literature and an ancient board game. Pushing against boundaries separating the humanities and social and physical sciences, students discover how histories of science and mathematics could be decisively shaped not merely by sensory experience or axiomatic definition, but also by ideas and imagery derived from the cultures, societies, and aesthetics of their day.

The course will take its start from combing the “Histories” and “Politics” sections, and their commentaries, and listings of the recently published Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library of Sultan Bayezid II of 1502-1503 (Treasures of Knowledge:  An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502-1503/1503-1504), eds. G. Necipoglu, C. Kafadar, C.H. Fleischer, 2 vols., Brill 2019), to develop a map of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish historiographical and political theoretical terrain that formed the foundation of the early modern Islamic understanding of history as science, and its mobilization in the interest of reestablishment of universalist sovereignty in the sixteenth century and beyond.  It will then proceed to selected readings in original languages, selections to be determined by linguistic capacities and focus of participants.