Winter

This course covers the first section of Elementary Sumerian.

In consultation with a faculty research adviser and with consent of the Director of Undergraduate Studies, students devote the equivalent of a one-quarter course to the preparation of their Research Project. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. Please indicate that you wish to register for NEHC 29995 Section 01 with the Director of Undergraduate Studies. 

Second quarter of Classical High Intermediate Arabic

Colloquial Levantine Arabic is a proficiency-based course designed to develop the linguistic skills necessary for personal day-to-day life. The course focuses on spoken rather than Standard written Arabic, and will therefore target primarily the oral/aural skills. Through the knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic and the introduction of colloquial vocabulary, expressions, and grammar, the course will build the students’ competence in spoken Arabic. Students will also be introduced to the Levantine culture.

The second quarter of Intermediate Arabic

This sequence concentrates on the acquisition of speaking, reading, and aural skills in modern formal Arabic.

Course introduces students to the historical context and specific characteristics of the mass printed press (newspapers, cultural and political journals, etc.) in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th C. We will investigate issues such as content, censorship, production, readership and distribution through secondary reading and the examination of period publications.

This course introduces the students to the scholarship on and the original texts of Ottoman court records. Thousands of registers with millions of court cases covering the period from the sixteenth century to modern times have survived to date. These documents are celebrated by modern historians as exceptional snapshots into the daily lives of common people. Monday sessions are reserved for the discussion of secondary literature; we will read from the original court records on Fridays.

This course, a continuation of Islamicate Civilization I, surveys intellectual, cultural, religious and political developments in the Islamic world from Andalusia to the South Asian sub-continent during the periods from ca. 950 to 1750. We trace the arrival and incorporation of the Steppe Peoples (Turks and Mongols) into the central Islamic lands; the splintering of the Abbasid Caliphate and the impact on political theory; the flowering of literature of Arabic, Turkic and Persian expression; the evolution of religious and legal scholarship and devotional life; transformations in the intellectual and philosophical traditions; the emergence of Shi`i states (Buyids and Fatimids); the Crusades and Mongol conquests; the Mamluks and Timurids, and the "gunpowder empires" of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Moghuls; the dynamics of gender and class relations; etc. This class partially fulfills the requirement for MA students in CMES, as well as for NELC majors and PhD students.

NOTE TO UNDERGRADS: This course does not fulfill Civilization Studies requirements in the College.

Using the original tablets excavated by the Oriental Institute in Nippur, we will read different texts found in House F, an Old Babylonian School. The class will include introductions to typical genres like lexical texts, model contracts, and literary school texts.