Course Descriptions
©Kahn: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau
To enroll in an ISAW course, you must first obtain the permission of the instructor. You may then forward the permission email to isaw.academic.affairs@nyu.edu to get the registration access code. All classes will be held in the 2nd-floor Seminar Room at ISAW unless indicated otherwise.
Fall 2025: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World
The Materiality of Writing in the Ancient World
Lillian Tseng, Antonis Kotsonas, & Greg Woolf
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu; ak7509@nyu.edu; g.woolf@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar explores the physical and tangible aspects of writing in the ancient world. It examines how the medium, material, and technology used in the practice of writing affect the creation, interpretation, and preservation of written works. Thematically structured, the seminar encourages students to explore key concepts, ideas and theories that transcend specific periods and regions, while still engaging with a variety of cultures and contexts. Topics include the physicality of writing materials (e.g., clay, papyrus, parchment, bone, bamboo, silk, paper, bronze, stone, etc.) and how they influenced both the writing process and the readers' experience. The seminar also explores how durable materials contributed to the monumentality of writing and the shaping of public memory, the preservation, collection, curation, and circulation of written objects in archives and libraries, and the physical production, handling, and reverence of religious texts. The seminar group will be visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss the materiality of a range of inscribed objects.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Fall 2025: Research Seminars
How to Think Through Primary Evidence: A Research Seminar in Western Asian Studies
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
Over the past hundred years or so, Western Asian studies have developed into a host of specialized subfields which often challenged, if not prevented, communication among them. Often, this inability to communicate is tied to a lack of adequately contextualizing specific materials historically and/or within a conceptual approach. This seminar is about research strategies and weaving together primary sources through theory. It is intended to help students to develop an argument about the material they want to address in a paper, an article, a dissertation, or a book project and turn it into a relevant academic contribution. Beyond methodological strategies linked with specific kinds of primary sources, it seeks to train students in conceptual thinking that allows for communicating their research to a broader audience beyond the few initiates in the area of their research and reveal its relevance for further study. Identifying and developing adequate questions rather than ready answers is key to success in this regard and requires the combination of deep knowledge of the material, past research related to it, as well as theoretical approaches that might help think through the sources. However, as there exist a multitude of concepts and theories nowadays that have been developed over the past decades in cultural-historical studies, anthropology, archaeology, etc., the seminar also provides a platform to just explore a particular concept or theory that is of interest to a participant in the seminar linked with her or his primary material. The seminar is open to students of all levels in Western Asian Studies.
Requirements: 3 submissions of aspects or questions related to specific research material; active participation in the discussion based on required readings. Submissions prior to the first session are particularly welcome to help develop a program.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Cities and Hinterlands in Early China
Roderick Campbell and Chris Kim
rbc2@nyu.edu; chriskim@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Permission of the instructors is required.
Women's Health in the Ancient Mediterranean
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Women's health forms a significant subsection of the discourses of health in antiquity. This class will cover an array of primary sources and recent scholarship on the topic. We will read the gynecological texts of the Hippocratic Corpus (including discussion of their relationship to Egyptian gynecological material), the tenth book of Aristotle's History of Animals, the fragments of Herophilus' anatomical studies of the female form, Soranus' Gynecology, Pliny's insights into female practice, and relevant passages from Galen and other Roman medical authorities. In addition, we will look at votives related to fertility (both Greek and Italic), inscriptions recounting religious healing of women, epigraphic evidence for midwives and female doctors, legal texts addressing childbirth, and ritual practices surrounding menarche, marriage, and post-natal cleansing.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Gods are Not Just Out There: Conceptualizing the Divine from the Upper Paleolithic to the Rise of Monotheism in the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Gods are not just out there, they are the product of human metaconceptualization, which emerges with the evolution of the homo sapiens during the Upper Paleolithic. This course will explore religion as a social-historical phenomenon. Conceptualization of the world beyond is the expression of and modelled on lived social experience. It is anchored in the cultural notion of personhood which, in the ancient Near East, did not have the concept of individuality. Rather the person was conceived as an assemblage of parts which operated as the extension of the body. This understanding of the person had its impact on imagining divine agency, the sociomorphic conceptualization of the polytheistic pantheon, and the interaction with the divine which was based on knowledge rather than on faith and personal choice. The course will further investigate the scholarly concepts of animism and the way the ancients assigned divine status to nature, all kinds of objects as well as to the king and ancestors in certain contexts. We will look critically at the notion of anthropomorphism and how it is applied in modern scholarship. The disappearance of indigenous kingship with the collapse of the Neo-Babylonian empire, different forms of governance during the Persian and Hellenistic empires and increasing mobility and drastic deportations of huge numbers of people had a deep impact on how the individual related to the divine. Overlapping diasporas of Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, and Romans who brought their cults with them merged with local cults wherever they went which led to multiple translations of deities. Individuals started to make their own religious choices creating even their own cults and religions. Mystery Cults arose along the official state religion and numerous strands of Christianity and Judaism emerged leading to a huge diversity of religions, which ultimately resulted in an officially supported religious pluralism.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Fall 2025: Other Courses
Intro to Ancient Egyptian I
Marc J. LeBlanc
marc.leblanc@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1000-001
Fridays, 2:00-5:20pm
This course, the first in a two-semester sequence, will introduce students to the Middle Egyptian (Classical) dialect of the ancient Egyptian language. Students will become familiar with the hieroglyphic writing system, as well as key elements of the grammar and vocabulary of Middle Egyptian.
There are no formal prerequisites, but previous study of foreign languages and a strong general understanding of grammar are recommended.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Theory in Roman Archaeology
Greg Woolf
g.woolf@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-001
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
4 credits. This tutorial considers recent applications of a range of archaeological theory to material from the Roman world. We will meet most weeks in person at ISAW over Fall semester 2024, to read and discuss key recent publications. Among the approaches examined will be actor-network theory, assemblage theory, and the impact of globalization, post-colonial studies, and post-humanism on the field. Some of the publications deal with approaches to artefacts, and others with macro-scale analysis. Among the concepts we will discuss are objectscapes, new materialism and flat ontologies.
Assessment will be by a final piece of writing or critique in a form agreed with the instructor.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Arabic Legal Documents from Early Islamic Eurasia
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-002
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
4 credits. In this course we will read a number of Arabic legal documents from the early Islamic period (ca. 1-200 AH/622-815). They mostly originate in Egypt, Palestine, northwest Iran and Khurasan. They are of very different types, but in particular contracts (sale, loan, marriage, divorce, etc), rulings of governors and officials, debt arrangements, and so on. Two key and related objectives of the course will be to consider whether there is evidence of regional variation of legal norms and procedures across the Islamic Empire and whether there is any indication of a pre-Islamic legal subtext to these documents.
Permission of the instructor and competence in advanced classical Arabic are required.
Spring 2026: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World
Christianity from the Middle East to China in the First Millennium CE
Sören Stark, Robert Hoyland, & Rong Huang
ss5951@nyu.edu, rgh2@nyu.edu, rh4210@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructors is required.
Spring 2026: Research Seminars
Lived Religion between Polytheism and Monotheism
Beate Pongratz-Leisten & Greg Woolf
bpl2@nyu.edu; g.woolf@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Rather than looking at the religious systems of polytheism and monotheism from a theological point of view, this seminar approaches religion in terms of community, practice, institution, and theological discourse. The historical-geographical focus will be on the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East in order to trace the social-political conditions of the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman empires that promoted an increasing mobility and migrations which lead to profound changes in how the individual related to the divine. Religion in local and/or regional terms mediated through traditions, customs, institutions and social players moved from the context of the city-state towards religion as choice of different groups offering a diversity of religious doctrines and stories. Diasporic communities emerged as new additional social players undermining the traditional distinction between local and translocal cults. A focus on discrete social worlds or fields rather than thinking merely in ethnic or political-historical terms will allow for evaluating the agency of scribal/scholarly/monastic centers, the role of their networks, as well as the materiality of religion and craftmanship in defining the transition from knowledge-oriented religion to faith and belief dominating the interaction with the divine. Neither Judaism nor Christianity can be seen in isolation from the wider cultural and historical-political context from which they emerged nor does their diversity in practices allow for a monolithic view or single master-narrative.
Students may like to look in advance at: Albrecht et al. "Religion in the Making: The Lived Ancient Religion Approach." Religion 48, no. 4 (2018/10/02 2018): 568-93.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Scientific Methods in Archaeology
Federico Carò
Federico.Caro@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm
This course explores the application of scientific methodologies to the investigation of archaeological objects and works of art, with a specific focus on inorganic materials. This introductory course aims at providing the students with the appropriate knowledge and tools to understand advantages and limitations of traditional and cutting-edge analytical techniques commonly available to archaeologists, and to implement them into successful interdisciplinary archaeological research. Students will be introduced to the science of most common archaeological materials and will examine how scientific analysis can help characterizing them, disclosing manufacturing processes and techniques, and reconstructing raw material procurement and trade.
The goal of this course is to give each student the knowledge necessary to understand, for each technique, its primary area of application, its strengths and weaknesses, and finally, how to couple complementary scientific techniques to tackle specific archaeological problems.
Upon completion of the course, students will have gained a basic knowledge of the techniques presented and will be able to discuss and design an analytical protocol around an archaeological question of their choice. Students will be involved in lectures, classroom discussions, hands-on exercises and analytical projects that will take advantage of the equipment and materials in the department of Scientific Research of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while certain portable analytical instruments will be made available at ISAW.
Permission of the instructor is required.
The Phoenicians and the Mediterranean
Antonis Kotsonas
ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Wednesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
This seminar will address questions of Phoenician archaeology, history and historiography, and it will explore the identity and culture of these people by investigating a wide range of textual and material evidence from the homeland of the Phoenicians and the areas of their overseas activities around the Mediterranean. The scholarship to be covered encompasses theoretical approaches to Phoenician identity, society and economy; models of interaction of these people with others in the Near East and the Mediterranean; art-historical accounts of Phoenician craftsmanship; and reports of archaeological fieldwork and important discoveries in the Levant, Cyprus, the Aegean, north Africa, the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia, and Iberia. Also, we will investigate the ways in which the history and archaeology of the Phoenicians has been communicated to the wider public through museum exhibitions, and we will reflect on the relevance of ancient Phoenician history and heritage to present-day communities.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Empire and Frontiers: Art and Archaeology in Han China
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Mondays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructor is required.
Early Chinese Time: Calendars and Hemerology in the Warring States, Qin, and Han Periods
Ethan Harkness
harkness@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-003
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Permission of the instructor is required.
Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, & Patrick Burns
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu; tom.elliott@nyu.edu; pjb311@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3024-001
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructor is required.
Spring 2026: Other Courses
Intro to Ancient Egyptian II
ISAW-GA 1001-001
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
Fridays, 9am-12pm
This course, the second in a two-semester sequence, will introduce students to the Middle Egyptian (Classical) dialect of the ancient Egyptian language. Students will become familiar with the hieroglyphic writing system, as well as key elements of the grammar and vocabulary of Middle Egyptian.
Prerequisite: ISAW-GA 1000-001, “Intro to Ancient Egyptian I” (or equivalent coursework).
Permission of the instructor is required.