https://isaw.nyu.edu https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/overseas-trade-and-its-impact This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. China’s Song dynasty (960–1279) began as a military government ruling a population devastated by decades of civil war following one of the most tumultuous periods of Chinese history. Yet, the Song dynasty was merely only the latest in a series of short-lived dynasties that attempted to rule China. Its leaders understood that their predecessors failed because they succumbed to the instability of military rule, and thus a balance was sought in which a greatly expanded civil bureaucracy could offset the monopoly of power held by military men. 2026-10-19T18:54:28Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/open-house-2026 ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students 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 event will include an opportunity to meet the ISAW faculty; an information session about our academic program; a Q&A session with current students; and sessions on archaeology, digital humanities, exhibitions, and the library at ISAW. 2026-09-10T20:14:04Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/culture-of-magic This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. For the ancient Egyptians, magic was not an illicit alternative to religion or a mysterious violation of the natural world. Heka—the force usually translated as “magic”—was woven into creation itself and provided gods and humans with the causative power to make things happen. Drawing on texts and objects featured in the ISAW exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World, this lecture explores how Egyptians used spoken spells, written words, images, amulets, ritual actions, and sacred substances to heal the sick, protect children, defeat enemies, communicate with the dead, and transform their spirits. Seen from an Egyptian perspective, cursing, curing, and creating were not separate domains but different expressions of a world in which magic was an expected part of everyday life. 2026-09-03T21:22:34Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/halloween-amulet-making This workshop will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Protect yourself with the eye of Horus or scare off all evil with the fierce face of the demon Pazuzu! At times calling on spooky spirits, at times relying on benevolent magical symbols, amulets were part of the lives of people across the ancient Mediterranean. 2026-08-27T00:08:41Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/isawlib-card-paranormal Professor Jeb Card, known for his book Spooky Archaeology, will present a primer for understanding the use and abuse of archaeology and mythology of Ancient Southwest Asia in current and popular paranormal and conspiracy myth-making, including the inspirations and appropriations of Near East scholarship for more recent ideas, such as secret missions to seize a Babylonian stargate, intelligent plasma jinn, Ubaid reptilians, Denisovan Gobekli Tepe, star-sent Anunnaki, and more. 2026-09-21T14:28:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/20th-annual-leon-levy-lecture This lecture will take place in person at ISAW (15 East 84th Street). Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture examines how recent archaeological research has transformed the understanding of precolonial state formations in Eastern and Southern Africa. Drawing on excavations and analyses conducted over the past two decades at sites such as Kilwa Kisiwani, Songo Mnara, Mtwapa, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, and Mapungubwe, this study contends that a fundamental reconceptualization of African political complexity is underway. 2026-09-08T19:53:31Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-pratcial-magic This workshop will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. This online workshop delves into how ancient people harnessed the power of the supernatural – from invoking demons to appealing to ancestral spirits. Through a series of object-based learning activities, we will explore spells, charms, and rituals that were used by magicians and witches to navigate the often-dangerous forces and entities that occupied the material and immaterial worlds. 2026-09-14T19:28:02Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/isaw-lecture-talk-burial-betrayal This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The ancient Roman cemetery is often framed as the domain of the “well deserving,” as funerary monuments frequently formulaically assert. These dead were deserving of proper burial, of commemoration, and of the ongoing provision of offerings and other cult activities that both integrated them into the community of the dead and maintained their relationships with the living. But what might happen to the “badly deserving?” By examining select case studies of social betrayal documented in Roman cemeteries from the first three centuries CE, this talk will explore efforts at enforcing postmortem punishments against those perceived to have violated Roman social norms. It will argue that these stories of betrayal, while unique in their specifics, together illuminate the ways in which private individuals could seek to impose a form of afterlife exile upon those they deemed guilty of social transgressions. 2026-09-10T19:35:26Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-slavery-in-the-roman-world This workshop will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. The workshop invites teachers to further incorporate Roman slavery into ancient history curricula. From transactional papyri, to clever slaves on stage, to the tombstone of a child miner, we will examine slavery both as a ubiquitous legal phenomenon and as a varied spectrum of experience across the Roman world. 2026-09-10T16:39:39Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/gods-of-the-night This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The ancient Mesopotamian world was populated with a wide range of demonic and monstrous creatures, all of which intersected with daily life in a variety of mostly-malignant ways. Most often, demons, or the chaotic figure of the witch, could cause serious harm, being associated with disease and illness, or even death, particularly in infants and young children. 2026-08-26T21:47:35Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/window-into-the-ptolemaic-mind This lecture is part of the ISAW Library events series and will take place in person at ISAW (15 East 84th Street). Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture explores a new source of evidence for the status and conceptualization of women in Ptolemaic Egypt through a pilot study of classifiers in the hieroglyphic system. From the Old Kingdom onwards, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing employed a highly organized system of category markers—classifiers or determinatives. These “mute” hieroglyphs, typically placed at the end of words, provide a unique window onto the emic organization of knowledge and the categories through which the ancient Egyptians conceptualized their world. 2026-09-02T16:07:36Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-primer-on-the-roman-army This workshop will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. This workshop explores the organization, equipment, and social life of the Roman army. Everyone knows the Roman army was a powerful military force, but did you know it did much more than fight wars? 2026-09-10T17:36:17Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/poetry-of-ancient-magic-workshop This workshop will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Rediscover your inner sense of magic in this hands-on workshop at the Galleries at ISAW! Guided by ISAW PhD candidate Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli, participants will learn how people in the past channeled their hopes and fears, loves and rivalries, and more by writing spells on amulets and talismans. 2026-08-26T20:46:28Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/karjoo-ravary-arab-cosmography This talk introduces how the Arabic and Islamic manuscript tradition inherited and adapted images of the late antique cosmos, focusing on a series of cosmographical maps from the 12th century Andalusian Sufi thinker, Ibn al-ʾArabi (d. 1240) and considering the reception of these images in the visual history of the Islamic world. 2026-09-02T16:08:55Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/acts-of-remembering This lecture will take place in person at ISAW (15 East 84th Street). Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace was the home of a famous mystery cult of the ancient Greek world, and of the famous Victory statue. Even at its height (3rd-2nd centuries BCE), the cult referenced Archaic and Classical period (7th-5th century BCE) origins in ways both visible and invisible. This talk reconsiders the archaeological evidence of the central valley of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods of Samothrace. 2026-08-20T16:56:36Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/cursed-gallery-talk-with-jeffrey-spier This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Join curator Jeffrey Spier for an in-gallery exploration of the exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. Dr. Spier will discuss the exhibition’s key themes and engage participants in close-looking at a selection of exhibition highlights. 2026-09-16T20:57:03Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/museum-mile-festival-2026 On Tuesday, June 9, 2026 between 6 and 9 pm, join ISAW and our neighbors for the 48th annual Museum Mile Festival! 2026-05-21T16:50:03Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/etaw-early-belief-systems This workshop is being organized by the OER Project and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. It will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Early belief systems weren’t just priests, temples, and lists of gods to memorize. Religion was embedded in every aspect of people's lives—at home, in the marketplace—and it informed everyday decisions. 2026-03-26T13:19:55Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/rostovtzeff-lecture4-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture series will consider current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-02-19T17:27:57Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/etaw-digital-approaches-to-global-art-history This workshop will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. This workshop uses the prompt of a newly started digital project to consider how large scale narratives and individual objects can be integrated into curriculums and into classroom experiences. The project is Global Approaches to Early Representations of the Human Figure, currently browseable at https://gaerhf.org 2026-09-03T15:26:19Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/rostovtzeff-lecture3-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture series will consider current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-02-19T17:27:28Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/rostovtzeff-lecture2-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture series considers current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-02-19T17:27:14Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/rostovtzeff-lecture1-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture begins with considering current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-09-14T21:28:01Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/the-example-of-the-human-figure-heath NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this lecture has been canceled. We hope to reschedule the lecture for a later date and will post more information here when we're able to. 2026-03-23T13:15:03Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/etaw-power-of-monsters PLEASE NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this workshop has been postponed. The new date is March 17th, 2027, at 5:30pm (Eastern Time). We apologize for any inconvenience. The workshop will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Sphinxes, lions, griffins, winged demons, angels, chimeras of all sorts are some of the most captivating and enduring images of Mediterranean antiquity. Monsters are found across in objects of all sizes, from tiny scarab amulets to monumental statues, across the region. They were part of the visual imaginary of people in antiquity, cutting across regions, periods, social classes, and communities. 2026-03-11T13:40:58Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/the-sensorial-audience-rodin-egypt This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The body was a hugely popular subject of representation in ancient Egypt. But this talk will look at the bodies in Egyptian art that we now don’t see–those of the ancient Egyptian audience. 2026-02-05T00:35:32Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/archaeology-history-of-lyktos This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Celebrated by Homer, considered as the birthplace of god Zeus by Hesiod, and identified as the cradle of the Spartan constitution by Aristotle, Lyktos boasts an unusually rich literary and epigraphic record. The lecture offers an integrated analysis of this record and the wide-ranging archaeological discoveries made by ISAW/NYU’s team to shed light on Lyktos for roughly a millennium, i.e. from its probable foundation ca. 1000 BCE, to the monumentalization of part of its acropolis ca. 100 CE. Emphasis is placed on the rich finds from settlement and burial areas of the 7th to 5th centuries BCE, which generate exceptional insights into the archaeology and history of a Greek community of the period, and raise important methodological issues over the archaeological visibility of an alleged Dark Age. 2026-01-06T21:18:24Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/the-egyptian-body This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This talk will explore how and why that was so, offering several hypotheses for why Egyptian figural art became central to the imagining of this complex psychological concept. The talk––paying special attention to Rodin’s self-described “Egyptian colossus,” his 1898 monument to Honoré de Balzac––will also probe Rodin’s highly distinctive approach to this widespread association between Egyptian art and the formal expression of the human potential for unconscious thought. 2026-02-22T21:19:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/Lived_Religion_Polytheism_Monotheism_Ancient_Near_East NOTE: The time and format for this lecture have been updated as a result of blizzard conditions in New York. This lecture will take place at 1pm (Eastern Time) on Zoom. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. In my talk I am going to argue that the rise of so-called monotheistic religions begins nearly five hundred years before the Common Era and that individual identity and self-definition in relation to the social community – human and divine – was primarily a process of experience and lived practice in particular social political, economic, and religious settings. It is the collapse of these settings that paved the way for the emergence of new forms of religiosity. 2026-02-23T17:41:47Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2025/beyond-midas-phyrgia This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This presentation reviews the archaeological evidence for these two strongly divergent viewpoints, considering the scholarly traditions in which they are embedded and, importantly, what is at stake in each. Since the time of the Greek philosophers, Anatolia has served as the setting for metaphorical discourses on power, authority, legitimacy, and even human nature: how have these debates influenced archaeological interpretation? 2025-12-19T15:54:00Z Event