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Due to unforeseen circumstances, this workshop has been canceled. We plan to reschedule for a later date, probably in late spring or fall 2025.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. For many, the history of Christianity in China begins with the Jesuit missions of the 16th and 17th centuries. However, nearly a millennium earlier, during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), East Syriac Christians had already made their way to China through the ancient Silk Road trade routes spanning Eurasia.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Since 2021, a team from ISAW/NYU has been involved in archaeological fieldwork at the Greek and Roman city Lyktos in central Crete, Greece. 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.

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. Before the Classical period, where Athens and Sparta dominate as central figures in Ancient Greek history, two earlier civilizations have sparked significant debate regarding their identity and acknowledgment. The first is the Minoan civilization, based on Crete and named by Sir Arthur Evans after the mythical King Minos. The second is the Mycenaean civilization, identified as the first recognized Greek civilization.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The ubiquity of the image on ancient Near Eastern artefacts and its function as a medium for visualizing knowledge has not been a primary concern in ancient Near Eastern studies.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture begins with considering the role that luxury material played in creating politically useful subjectivities in the Achaemenid Persian Empire before turning to the formation of a new, competing traditions of luxury under the empire’s rivals and successors.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture focuses on the role of luxury objects and spectacles as deployed by the Seleucids in their conflicts the Antigonids, Ptolemids, Greco-Bactrians, Arsacids and later the Romans.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture will focus on the development of an Arsacid tradition of precious metal and ivory vessels and a new Iranian court culture that participated in both the Hellenistic and Iranian ecumenes.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture examines Arsacid luxury material beyond Iran both as object and idea. As under the Achaemenids before and Sasanians after, these charismatic objects potentially entangled or “assembled” aspects of identities of those outside the empire at a range of societal levels, including those who had dealings with the empire and those who encountered them even in negative and in reaction.

Maria Doerfler (Yale University; ISAW Visiting Research Scholar 2014-15) returns to ISAW to discuss wealth and dealt in late antique Syria, part of her forthcoming monograph from the Cambridge University Press, Death and Afterlife in Syriac Christianity: Social Identity and Emotional Communities.

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. Writing is such an integral part of our everyday lives that it is difficult to imagine how we could live without it. But just like so many of the other technologies that have become essential to us, writing had to be invented. Scholars studying the ancient past have discovered that writing was invented independently in four different places: in Mesopotamia (in modern-day Iraq) around 3300-3200 BCE; in ancient Egypt around 3200 BCE; in ancient China around 1200 BCE; and in ancient Mesoamerica (in modern-day Mexico) around 1000 BCE. In this workshop, we will focus on the invention of writing in Mesopotamia.