Graduate

Second quarter reading course of ME texts

This course and its sequel EGPT 10102 provide an introduction to the hieroglyphic writing system, vocabulary and grammar of Middle Egyptian, the 'classic' phase of the Egyptian language developed during the Middle Kingdom (circa 2025-1773 BCE) and used until the disappearance of hieroglyphs over two thousand years later.

This course surveys the archaeology and history of the Levant from the end of the Bronze Age around 1100 BCE to the Roman conquest of the region in 64-63 BCE.

This course provides an overview of the archaeology of Egypt, focusing on data from the Paleolithic Period to the Second Intermediate Period, around 1,600 BCE. It introduces fundamental methods and approaches to the archaeological record, surveying significant sites, objects, art, and architecture to understand various aspects of culture, society, and history. While Egypt is well-known for its pyramids, temples and tombs, we will not only examine such constructions, but also explore how material culture can offer us insights on such themes as power and inequality, human-environment relations, urbanism, identity, cross-cultural interactions, collapse, and transformation. We will also consider the origins and legacies of Egyptology while engaging with diverse perspectives on the past, and how Egypt’s rich cultural heritage continues to be valued, used, and contested.

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 – 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 introduces the background and development of the first urbanized civilizations in the Near East in the period from 9000 to 2200 BC. In the first half of this course, we examine the archaeological evidence for the first domestication of plants and animals and the earliest village communities in the "fertile crescent" (i.e., the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia). The second half of this course focuses on the economic and social transformations that took place during the development from simple, village-based communities to the emergence of the urbanized civilizations of the Sumerians and their neighbors in the fourth and third millennia BC.

This course will explore the longue durée development of Eastern Arabia from the beginning of the Holocene until about the 15th century CE. It will examine themes such as the nature of life and settlement in a semi- to hyper-arid environment, marginality, nomadic and sedentary lifestyles, irrigation methods, and maritime trade and globalisation. Loosely based around a chronological narrative, the course will be organised through a series of case studies (supported by general background lectures) that will cover topics such as, for example, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age (Magan, Dilmun, the 4.2ky event), Iron Age, the late pre-Islamic period, the early Islamic period, and the Hormuzi period. The course will also examine the area’s interaction with, amongst others, Mesopotamia, the Indus, Iran, the Graeco-Roman and Parthian worlds, and the Indian Ocean economy.

This course will examine aspects of the archaeology of Indian Ocean trade from the Late Antique to the 17th century, focussing on the Western Indian Ocean in particular. The lectures will set out the broad scheme of trade, economic development and merchant activity and then focus on a number of case studies looking at specific sites, regions, shipwrecks, commodities, theories and academic debates. By the end of the course students will have a broad outline of the history of Indian Ocean trade. They will understand the significance of Indian Ocean trade to the Late Antique, early medieval, medieval and post-medieval worlds. They will have a knowledge of some of the key academic debates related to Indian Ocean trade, such as, for example, historiographical issues, the role of early Islamic merchants, the ‘peddler trade’, and the question of an Indian Ocean identity. Students will debated issues in close relation to archaeological evidence and will have increased their understanding of how archaeological evidence can be used to develop an understanding of trade and commerce.

This course explores the archaeology of the states and empires of Mesopotamia during the early 2nd through mid-1st millennia BC. We begin with the Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian territorial states and end with the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian empire and the takeover of the Neo-Babylonian empire by the Persians in the mid 1st millennium BC, which marks the end of “Mesopotamian” culture. During these centuries, the region saw many political changes, developing from a network of expansive territorial states to massive hegemonic empires. But political developments also included retraction of states and two large-scale political collapses, in part driven by climate change. These millennia in Mesopotamia are also marked by internationalism in both archaeology and politics; trade, elite communication and conquest all affected the material culture of the sub-regions of the ancient Near East. Additional topics include the archaeological evidence (or lack of it) for ethnic groups known from textual sources, symbolism and hybridization in artworks, organic versus artificial settlements and landscapes, and the archaeological signatures of empire. The geographic focus encompasses northern and southern Mesopotamia (approximately the modern countries of Iraq and Syria); reference will also be made to southeast Anatolia (Türkiye) and the eastern Mediterranean.

This is a two-course sequence that introduces students to theory and method in landscape studies and the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to analyze archaeological, anthropological, historical, and environmental data. Course one covers the theoretical and methodological background necessary to understand spatial approaches to landscape and the fundamentals of using ESRI’s ArcGIS software, and further guides students in developing a research proposal. Course two covers more advanced GIS-based analysis (using vector, raster, and satellite remote sensing data) and guides students in carrying out their own spatial research project. In both courses, techniques are introduced through the discussion of case studies (focused on the archaeology of the Middle East) and through demonstration of software skills. During supervised laboratory times, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample archaeological data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.