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This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. In stratified and hierarchical societies, ancient and modern, accessibility to those in power – divine and human – was always a topic of explicit articulation, regulation, negotiation, and performance. The interaction with the human ruler in the palace, was each highly regulated: it was bound to a particular space and time, and it was an exclusive privilege to attend it. The right to access, as well as the possibility for personal interaction that issues forth from it, constitute an essential component in the visual and cultural representation of sacred and political power.

This lecture is given in collaboration with NYU Alumni Association and will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. This lecture explores the highlands and lowlands of the west and southwestern Iran, where the transitional nature of the land created a dynamic ecosystem and variability in resources created both risks and opportunities in land-use and production.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Humans first sailed regularly upon the Indian Ocean roughly 5,000 years ago. They continued to brave the waves over millennia through coastal skips and open sailing with the monsoon winds. By the early centuries of the Common Era, the ocean supported a host of human activity, including individuals from the eastern Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula, and Indian subcontinent. Despite its perils, maritime travel proved faster and more cost-effective than equivalent overland routes. This lecture dives into the waterways of the western Indian Ocean (e.g., the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Arabian Sea). We will follow not only the tracks of mariners braving the waves, but also the numerous items of Indian Ocean trade—spices, gems, coins, textiles—that whetted the demand of consumers well beyond their shores.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Global approaches have made less headway among ancient historians than among historians of more recent periods. I suggest that this is because ancient historians working in Asia, Europe, and Europe's former colonies continue to focus chiefly on understanding the beginnings of one particular regional culture, generally finding them in the first millennium BCE. This makes it very difficult to see a global picture. Only when we widen our chronological as well as our geographical perspectives, in fact, do patterns at the global level become clear. I close by looking at the intellectual possibilities that this bigger vision of ancient history offers.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. This lecture sets up the basic framework for the series, and its broad line of argument. Most of the existing historiography tends to assume that the bigger the gap between written norms and legal practice, the more irrelevant the norms must have been. Such gaps, however, could be productive in their own right. Once law is understood as a starting-point for the construction of scenarios, rather than dictating outcomes, one can start to see why the most useful laws might not necessarily always have been the ones that came closest to the practical solutions eventually reached.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. One of the areas on which surviving legal evidence provides some of the most contradictory views is the legal and administrative framework itself. I will take the written word and feuding as examples. Surviving texts can give very different impressions of the importance of written documents, and it is possible to read early medieval evidence either to support a literate, almost bureaucratic vision of legal rights, or to view literate forms as a distorting sideshow. I suggest this shows that the importance of the written word depended not on stable assumptions about the value of writing, but instead on a collective agreement about how important it was going to be in any particular case.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. The legal framework for slavery was long thought by historians to have been carried over from the ancient world long after it had ceased to hold any relevance to the ways early medieval power and dependence (in their own ways brutal, but different) were exercised or experienced. This is a key example of a field in which legal representations remained effective precisely because they allowed – indeed, demanded, in order to be discussed in legal terms at all – a radical reinterpretation of reality, in which lords of tenants might take on the roles of masters of slaves along Roman lines.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. This lecture looks at early medieval families, and the types of misconstruing involved in constituting them and their members as legal concepts. This, like the example of slavery, will lead us to reconsider the issue of gaps in normative legal material, and the possible reasons for density of regulation. Which human relationships were most and least densely legally defined and rule-bound seems to have had very little to do with which relationships were most open to becoming fraught or conflict-ridden, or with the levels of coercion required to keep them going.