NEHC

Humans across cultures have historically attached great religious, cultural, political, and social value to a variety of cultural artifacts and sites, usually with significant immediate and historical consequences. Political ideologies, such as colonialism and nationalism, wars, poverty, a thriving illicit antiquities market: all of these are entwined with the ways in which the knowledge about the past is manipulated, collected, interpreted, presented, preserved, and destroyed to create meaning in the present. This course explores this relationship between past cultural heritage and the present through a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary survey of the human obsession with the past. We will consider a variety of topics such as the history of archaeology, the antiquities trade, and disputes over cultural ownership, along with a discussion of the repatriation of artifacts and current controversies surrounding antiquities around the globe.

This course is designed to acquaint the student with the basic problems and concepts as well as the sources and methodology for the study of premodern Islamic history. Sources will be read in English translation and the tools acquired will be applied to specific research projects to be submitted as term papers.

This sequence explores the thought and literature of the Islamic world from the coming of Islam in the seventh century C.E. through the development and spread of its civilization in the medieval period and into the modern world. Including historical framework to establish chronology and geography, the course focuses on key aspects of Islamic intellectual history: scripture, law, theology, philosophy, literature, mysticism, political thought, historical writing, and archaeology. In addition to lectures and secondary background readings, students read and discuss samples of key primary texts, with a view to exploring Islamic civilization in the direct voices of the people who participated in creating it. All readings are in English translation. No prior background in the subject is required. This course sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.

This course will investigate the intellectual, political and socio-economic background of Europe’s discovery of Egypt within the framework of the Age of Enlightenment and the following transformative years of the birth of a new scientific discipline called Egyptology but also greatly influencing European archaeology. The aim for the students is to explore the reasoning, pre-conceptions and attitudes of the first explorers and scientists travelling to Egypt and the ensuing aftermath of ‘Egyptomania’ in Europe. The students will be introduced to the consequences of Napoleon’s campaign on European fashion, art and architecture and what inspired the ensuing cultural plunder to satisfy the growing European demand for things Egyptian. The course is structured around primary sources (in translation) but also secondary literature including theoretical works such as the influential monograph by Edward Said on Orientalism and its criticism.

This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This sequence introduces three great empires of the ancient world. Each course in the sequence focuses on one empire, with attention to the similarities and differences among the empires being considered. By exploring the rich legacy of documents and monuments that these empires produced, students are introduced to ways of understanding imperialism and its cultural and societal effects—both on the imperial elites and on those they conquered.

This course takes as its topic the literary tradition surrounding Gilgamesh, the legendary king of the Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk. The course will focus on the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and its Sumerian forerunners, and their cultural and historical contexts. We will also read a number of Sumerian and Akkadian compositions that are thematically related to the Gilgamesh tradition, including Atrahasis, the Sumerian Flood story, and the Epics of Enmerkar and Lugalbanda, also of first dynasty of Uruk.

This course surveys the political, social, and economic history of ancient Egypt from pre-dynastic times (ca. 3400 B.C.) until the advent of Islam in the seventh century of our era.