Past Seminars

Spring 2024: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World

Interconnectivity in the Ancient World: Issues, Topics, Approaches
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Daniel Potts
bpl2@nyu.edu; dtp2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:20pm

In the ancient world, the interconnectivity of polities or states occurred on many planes and in a variety of social fields: trade, extraction of resources, diplomatic engagement, military encounters, vassaldom, exchange of gifts, as well as the transfer of knowledge and expertise in many domains of cultural production. Very often, the royal courts can be seen as the motor behind these various kinds of cultural encounters. As the intensity of cultural contact and the social fields in which these encounters occurred always differed, it would be wrong to extrapolate from one type of cultural interaction to the others. Ancient studies abound in attempts to categorize intercultural contact, as we can see in approaches including network theory and world system theory, as well as in recent work on globalization, the notion of entanglement and histoire croisée, cultural transfer and transmission, and translation studies. Not all of these theories are suited to address adequately these varieties of cultural interaction mentioned above, and many have focused primarily on economic rather than cultural interconnectivity. In combining textual and archaeological evidence, this course will investigate a number of case studies to probe the adequacy of modern approaches while aiming at defining in more nuanced ways the historical context and agency relevant to particular cultural encounters.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2024: Research Seminars

Observation and Experiment in Ancient Physical Science
Alexander Jones
aj60@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001
Mondays, 2:00-5:20pm 

This seminar explores the empirical elements in ancient scientific traditions that aimed at systematic description, explanation, or prediction of physical phenomena. Scientific practices of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world will figure prominently, but those of other civilizations may be investigated according to the interests and competences of participants. The evidence is largely textual; knowledge of at least one ancient language in which relevant scientific texts exist is required. Participants will choose topics, select study materials, and guide discussion for at least one session.

An initial selection of topics will include the following: the rise of systematic observation of spontaneously occurring phenomena in the context of interpretation of the phenomena as ominous signs; practices of recording and transmitting observations of astral, meteorological, and mundane events; precision, accuracy, and instruments of measurement, especially in astronomical observation records; experiment and experimental apparatus in Greek harmonic theory; empirical claims within deductive scientific texts, e.g. in optics, mechanics, and astronomy; empirical argument in Ptolemy's Optics; adjustment and fabrication of reported observations and measurements.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Writing History … Experimentally
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Fridays, 2:00-5:20pm

Historians, anthropologists and archaeologists all communicate through writing. We re-construct, imagine, present, narrate, tell stories, but seldom do we reflect seriously on this process. Even less do we actively play in the creative field that is manifestly the ground of all writing, historical or otherwise. Nor is taking writing seriously (or joyously!) merely about the aesthetics of good form or the craft of persuasive rhetoric but rather the very structuring, embodying, even worlding of thought. What then might history, anthropology or archaeology look like if we reconfigured the parameters of its constitution? This seminar will explore the craft of historical writing including its experimental borders with multi-scalar narratives, counter-factuals, fictioning, narration/anti-narration and even speculative fiction.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Scientific Methods in Archaeology
Federico Carò
Federico.Caro@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Thursdays, 2:00-5:20pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

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.

Early Greek Medicine
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Thursdays, 2:00-5:20pm

This course will investigate Greek medicine of the 5th and early 4th centuries BCE. The majority of the evidence for medical thought in this period stems from the Hippocratic Corpus, which comprises medical texts from a collection of authors with diverse viewpoints. Generally considered, both in antiquity and by modern scholars, to be the heart of Greek academic medicine, the corpus has exerted an enormous influence on the development of western medical thought (and beyond). Scholarship is also increasingly attuned to connections between these texts and contemporary literature and philosophy. We will consider every text traditionally considered to be part of the corpus (reading most in their entirety) and trace the themes and differences to be found among them. Although these texts dominate the historical record, they are not a complete picture of Greek medicine in this period. Accordingly, we will also consider other voices that can be recovered, including through the Anonymous London Papyrus and the fragments of Diocles. Further, these textual sources, whether eventually codified into the Hippocratic Corpus or not, were operating in the context of an explosion of interest in religious healing. We will therefore round out the class with a consideration of the Cult of Asclepius, including the robust corpus of inscriptions celebrating miracle cures.

Permission of the instructor is required; ability to read Ancient Greek is recommended.

Agriculture in the Ancient Near East: From the Neolithic to the 'Islamic Green Revolution'
Lorenzo Castellano
lc2995@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:20pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

The history of agriculture is a history of persistence and innovation. Structural aspects of agropastoral economies are often embedded at the very core of the longue durée. Nevertheless, farming systems are also prone to changes and transformations, either resulting from long-term gradual trends or abrupt ‘revolutions’.

This seminar-based course introduces to the history of agriculture in the Ancient Near East, understood in its historical and environmental complexity, across both space and time. The course is diachronically organized around a series of topical questions, chronologically extending from the Neolithic to the Islamic period. Among other topics, we will discuss the onset of the first agricultural communities in western Asia, the role of agricultural production in the emergence of early complex societies, the impact of climatic and environment change on farming systems, and the broader changes in the agricultural landscape throughout the Iron Age, Roman, and Late Antique periods.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Early Chinese Excavated Manuscripts in Context
Ethan Harkness
harkness@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-003
Mondays, 8:40am-12:00pm 

This seminar will explore important discoveries of early Chinese manuscripts dating from the late Warring States period (475-221 BCE) to the early Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 CE). Philological analysis based on close readings of select texts will be complemented, insofar as possible, by consideration of historical and archaeological context to uncover nuance within and connections between the texts. In practice, we will examine the nature of “tomb libraries,” relations between manuscripts and the other material objects found in tombs, connections between separate assemblages of excavated manuscripts, connections between excavated and transmitted texts, and problems with manuscripts of non-standard or unknown provenance. Every effort will be made to present the initial meetings of this course in a way that is accessible to students with an interest in early manuscripts but little or no background in Chinese studies, and auditors are welcome to attend those sessions. Classical Chinese reading skills are a prerequisite for formal enrollment.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The History and Archeology of Chinese Divination
Zhao Lu
lz69@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-004
Wednesdays, 8:40am-12:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

This course explores the archeological findings and history of divination in China from the 4th century BCE to 10th century CE. We will examine the subject matter from three perspectives: the material culture of the divination manuals, the technological details and traditions behind them, and the socio-intellectual context of the time. We will ask questions like: What led people to seek out divination? How did divination work and what technology went into it? What made a satisfactory answer? The class will move chronologically so that we have a clear understanding of the development of divination. Further, in-class discussions will also incorporate relevant discourse in the study of material culture, religious studies, science and technology studies, and studies of divination outside China. Although case studies in this course are mainly focused on China, we will also have in-depth discussions on divination in a trans-regional context. Students are encouraged to write the final research paper from a trans-regional or comparative perspective.

Reading Classical Chinese is recommended but not required.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Generating Antiquity: Artificial Intelligence for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath and Patrick Burns
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu; patrick.j.burns@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:20pm

This course will be an open-ended exploration of the impact of recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (gAI) and their implications for research and teaching focussed on the Ancient World. That gAI tools can respond to prompts has proven to be a compelling form of human-computer interaction. The course pushes further, beginning with an introduction to how the underlying technologies of chatbots and image generation tools work and accordingly positioning students to be both critical and realistic about what these tools can do. All students will have the opportunity to engage with Large Language Models (LLMs) and Image Generation tools from a programmatic perspective using the Python programming language. We will also make use of NYU's infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC). There are no technical prerequisites for the course beyond a willingness to try the approaches introduced in class. We also welcome students with technical expertise who want to apply that to the Ancient World. Throughout the semester, students will be exposed to particular use-cases for gAI as well as to critical readings. The goal is not to promote gAI but rather to think about it: there are actual downsides and barriers - including cost, perpetuation of bias, threats to intellectual property, and environmental impact - and we will consider those alongside any potential benefits. Towards the end of the course students will undertake their own final project that should incorporate both hands-on work as well as informed critical discussion. We are open to projects that are predominantly written papers and to projects that are predominantly in the form of applied work, though again, all projects should exhibit an element of both. Creativity will be encouraged as a path to exploring to what extent the development of gAI tools might lead to fundamental change in scholarly practice. In addition to the final project, students will be expected to respond to the weekly readings and to complete smaller assignments - including coding assignments - throughout the term that allow them to build their familiarity and skills with gAI tools.

Students are expected to bring their own notebook computers to class.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2024: Other Courses

Intro Ancient Egyptian II
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 1001-001
Fridays, 9:00am-12:20pm

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.

Advanced Akkadian: Oracles and Literary Prophecies
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Thursdays, 10:00am-1:20pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

Permission of the instructor is required.

A Brief Introduction to Urartian Language
Annarita Bonfanti
ab11866@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-002
Fridays, 10:00am-12:30pm
Small Conference Room, 6th Floor

3 credits. This course will introduce the students to the study of Urartian language. The course will provide essential notions of Urartian grammar, followed by a discussion on specific topics associated with the Urartian state (art and iconography, religion and cult, architecture, conception of royalty), and related readings in Urartian language, when possible, directly from cuneiform. During the whole duration of the course, we will also focus on the problems related to the understanding of Urartian vocabulary and on the challenges faced by the scholars when translating the epigraphs.

Knowledge of cuneiform and permission of the instructor are required.

Fall 2023: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Death in the Ancient World (Mediterranean to China)
Daniel Potts and Antonis Kotsonas
dtp2@nyu.edu; ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:20pm

The burial of the deceased by the living is virtually universal amongst Anatomically Modern Humans. Nevertheless, as archaeologists are acutely aware, the forms that burials take vary widely across space and time, as do the actions and responses of the living who assume the responsibility of interring the corpse of a dead relative, friend or enemy. As such, the study of death and burial is an ideal topic for a cross-cultural investigation of a very basic feature of human behavior. In this seminar we will be engaging with a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the recovery, sampling, and interpretation of human burials and the ethical issues which relate to design and practice of working with human remains. We will examine a culturally broad sample of case studies, taking account of both archaeological evidence and literary/epigraphic sources that display ancient attitudes towards the deceased.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Fall 2023: Research Seminars

The Archaeology of Ancient China – Technologies of Transformation
Roderick Campbell and Dongming Wu
rbc2@nyu.edu; dw1798@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Thursdays, 8:40am-12:00pm

The archaeology of Holocene China is normally narrated as a developmental sequence progressing from the advent of agriculture to the rise of states marked by chronological divisions based on tool technologies. Though it could be argued that terms like “state”, “agriculture”, “Neolithic” and “Bronze Age” are merely useful heuristics, they also explicitly or implicitly entail problematic grand narratives. Tool age divisions are supposed to demarcate technological watersheds of wide impact, while agriculture and state formation are often seen as revolutions radically changing the shape of society, economy and politics. At the same time, it has been obvious for decades that plant and animal domestication was no revolution, nor was the development of food production systems uniform or spontaneous, but a complex, ongoing process spanning millennia. The same issues can be raised for “the state” – re-envisioned as socio-political complexity – rather than a single revolutionary moment there were instead numerous peaks and valleys, watersheds and transitions. Gordon V. Childe once hypothesized that bronze marked a radical transformation of technology, long-distance trade, and the organization of labor, paving the way for the rise of urbanism and states, but comparative archaeology has long demonstrated that urbanism and expansive, complex polities can exist without metal. If the concepts that anchor the narrative structures of ancient China can all be shown to be either problematic in themselves or not straightforwardly marking chronological divisions, perhaps it is time for a new approach? If food production, social complexity and craft production are all better thought of as processes than events, and all can, in an expansive sense be considered technologies, then a new approach might look for the historical peaks and valleys of a variety of key technologies, exploring their entanglements as well as their unique trajectories. Where were the moments of emergent technological disruption? What were their knock-on effects and unintended consequences? This seminar will explore the stories of three broad and three narrow technological streams in ancient China: polity form, economic organization, agricultural regimes, as well as ceramics, metallurgy and textiles.

Prerequisites: Background in Chinese archaeology and an ability to read Chinese ideal but not essential – more important are a sense of curiosity and a willingness to work

Permission of the instructors is required.

Advanced Study in Early Medieval Chinese Art and Archaeology
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:20pm

This course is intended to provide intensive analyses of primary sources and related scholarship in early medieval Chinese art & archaeology for graduate students who have sufficient knowledge of the field.

Ability to read Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor are required.

Archaeologies of Landscape and Territoriality in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Mediterranean
Lorenzo d'Alfonso and Dominic Pollard
lda5@nyu.edu; dp3704@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Wednesdays, 8:40am-12:00pm

One important contribution of the ‘Mediterraneanizing’ archaeological approaches of the last two decades has been to re-assert the importance of the relationships between human communities and the landscapes they inhabit. There is a particular emphasis on the impact and visibility of different identities within the same community and the definition of alternative forms of political interaction with space and landscape. Temporality and critical events add further elements of dynamism to a fine understanding of human – landscape interactions.

This seminar will critically examine a range of these relationships in the context of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in the Mediterranean region. The class will begin by introducing the physical and ecological setting of the Mediterranean Basin, and the kinds of physical landscapes – mountains, plains, coasts, rivers and seas – that characterise it, and which have formed important foci of human activity in antiquity. We will then examine historical developments in the archaeological study of ancient landscapes, and discuss different theoretical approaches to conceptualizing and analyzing human-landscape relationships in the past. This will lead to a consideration of the kinds of landscapes – physical, economic, political, and ritual – that intersect in the emergence of concepts of territoriality between and within groups. These ideas will be contextualised through case studies drawn from across the Mediterranean region, spanning the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, during which time landscapes of human settlement, mobility, interaction, and scale of complexity underwent significant changes in many regions. Working over multiple scales, this seminar will tackle the concepts of landscape and territoriality from the level of individual communities, up to the cities, states, and empires which existed during this dynamic period of Mediterranean history.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Between Bronze and Iron Age: The ‘Sine Sepulcro’ Cultural Complex in Southern Central Asia (2nd half of the 2nd mill. BCE)
Sören Stark
ss5951@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-004
Mondays, 2:00-5:20pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

The Final Bronze/Early Iron transition in southern Central Asia represents a protracted period of major cultural changes. Аt the end of the 3rd mill. BCE, southern Central Asia was home to the mature Oxus Civilization, with its major proto-urban centers and related towns and villages engaged in extensive prestige-oriented exchange networks with partners in Mesopotamia, southern Iran, and the Indus Valley. During the early 2nd mill. BCE this exchange system slowly dissolved, and the Oxus Civilization entered its final phase, with many of its proto-urban centers abandoned in favor of smaller sites, no new constructions of monumental buildings, and a sharp reduction in the number of symbolic items in stone and metal that required skilled craftsmanship. Yet, while the underlying production technologies and organization seem to have changed in the late Oxus period, there are typological and aesthetic continuities in certain ceramic, metal and stone artifacts that indicate a reorientation, rather than a full-scale collapse of the prevailing economic system. A major new role was played by partnerships for sourcing copper-tin ores within the realm of ‘Andronovo’ or ‘steppe’ pastoralist communities to the north of the late Oxus Civilization.

This trajectory of cultural change accelerated in the middle and late 2nd mill. BCE with the formation of a series of new cultures which stand at the beginning of a number of socio-political, ethnic, and religious processes and traditions that came to shape southern Central Asia for the next two millennia at least. Subsumed under the term “Painted Ware Cultures” or “Sine-Sepulcro Cultural Complex,” these regional cultures have usually been perceived through their differences from the previous Oxus-Andronovo cultural system and have been attributed to modest, ‘egalitarian,’ and inward-looking communities of agro-pastoralists based on self-sustaining local economies with few long-distance exchanges. Yet, many of these assumptions are based on a limited data set, as the archaeological exploration of Final Bronze / Early Iron Age settlements has often been hampered by substantial superimposing later deposits as well as the near complete absence of graves and grave goods, giving this this particular period the air of a “dark age.” All the more important are recent investigations (with the participation of an ISAW team) at the newly discovered site of Kimirekkum-1 in the southwestern Kyzylkum desert, which seem to indicate not only the large-scale production of metal and semi-precious stone objects but also the continuation of specialized long-distance exchanges together with notions of prestige and status long after the end of the Oxus Civilization, calling into question our current perception of “Bronze Age collapse” in proto-historic Central Asia as a wholesale end of ‘international’ trade and elite-centered governance arrangements.

Hence, fundamental questions remain as to what precipitated the slow disappearance of the Oxus Civilization and the subsequent formation of fundamentally new cultural complexes: Who laid the foundation for these new cultural developments? Were internal social dynamics the root cause, or did incursions by outsiders (“nomads”) destabilize traditional socio-political regimes? How does broad regional similarity in ceramics fit alongside strong archaeological evidence for local cultural variations? How should we understand the appearance of new religious and funerary traditions? What impact did changes in regional climate have on local ecologies and resource networks? In our seminar we will address these and other questions by systematically revisiting older archaeological data as well as new approaches and data.

Requirements: Reading knowledge of Russian and French; permission of the instructor.

The Legal Agency of Divinity in the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Daniel Fleming
bpl2@nyu.edu; daniel.fleming@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 8:40am-12:00pm

In the ancient Near East, the divine and human intersect in ways that can be interpreted as legal, that is, they uphold social and by extension cosmic order. The legal agency of the divine reflects this connection, as divine agency can be found in various text genres, ranging from ritual texts, prayers, and literature to the actual performance of law, as found in treaties, law codes, court procedures, and legal documents. Legal agency of the divine can also be observed in material evidence, as seals and sealings belonging to deities have been found. The presence of the divine in such evidence invokes divine authority and illuminates how the ancients perceived of their connection to the divine and vice versa. This course will investigate the various ways in which the divine engage with the “human” legal sphere through various ancient Near Eastern texts, including Hammurabi’s Code and Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty. We will also analyze legal metaphors, such as the “divine courtroom” in prayer, ritual, and court procedures and will probe the ways in which deities act as participating parties through material and textual evidence relating to the performance of law. The course will also consider the narrativization of legal metaphors in literature from the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The aim of this course is to examine how legal agency of divinity reflects ancient West Asian worldviews concerning the divine-human relationship and cosmic order.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Text Analysis for Historical Language Research
Patrick Burns
patrick.j.burns@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Mondays, 2:00-5:20pm

This course introduces students to computational research methods helpful for producing data-driven scholarship involving large collections of historical-language text. Drawing on relevant topics in exploratory data science, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing, the course provides a forum for students to develop hands-on skills in computer programming (using Python), focused primarily on managing textual data, string manipulation, text mining and analysis, language modeling, and data visualization. Special attention will be given to the use of word embeddings and transformer models and their applicability to historical-language text collections. Demonstrations throughout the course will draw primarily on English-language examples, but because of the philological range and diversity at ISAW, students are encouraged to work with digitized text collections in the languages most relevant to their research. There are no prerequisites, though students are expected to be open to reading, writing, and editing computer programs; students are required to bring notebook computers to class. Note that historical-language text for the purpose of this course covers texts or collections of texts written before the Early Modern period.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, and David Ratzan
sh1933@nyu.edu; tom.elliott@nyu.edu; david.ratzan@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3024-001
Thursdays, 2:00-5:20pm

This course will introduce students to the use of digital tools and computational methods in the study of the ancient world. There are no technical prerequisites and the course will be of particular interest to early-stage graduate students who want a broad introduction that involves hands-on work. The course will progress through topics and methods such as applying structure to text via XML-based markup languages, introduction to the programmatic manipulation of textual data, and how scholarly resources are shared on the public internet and edited in collaborative environments. There will also be a focus on structured datasets. Students will gain practical experience in acquiring, creating, querying, and displaying spatial data, digital images, and 3D models. The course also addresses the growing role of so-called "generative AI" and related tools. There will be frequent introductions to existing digitally-informed work in disciplines that are part of the study of the ancient world, such as textual studies, history, and archaeology, as well as more specific fields such as epigraphy, papyrology, and numismatics for which exemplary digital projects exist. Readings will introduce students to current trends, theories, and ethics in Digital Humanities and will encourage discussion of the impact that digital methods and open-licensed content are having on research, teaching, and public engagement with scholarly practice. Over the course of the semester students will design and then implement a final project that can overlap with their existing research interests. It is a requirement that students bring their own notebook computers to class.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Fall 2023: Other Courses

Intro to Ancient Egyptian I
Marc J. LeBlanc
marc.leblanc@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1000-001 (cross-listed as FINH-GA 2520-002)
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 prerequisites, but previous study of foreign languages and a strong general understanding of grammar are recommended.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Akkadian: Ritual Texts
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 10:00am-1:20pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2023: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World

The Later First Millennium BCE
Alexander Jones and Claire Bubb
aj60@nyu.edu; cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm

The period from the mid-fourth century to the end of the first millennium BCE saw enormous political change, both east and west. Power fluctuated among smaller states and empires across the Eurasian continent, ultimately to be largely subsumed by the two massive empires of the dawn of the Common Era, the Roman and the Han. Against this tumultuous backdrop, the period saw significant cultural and intellectual innovation in many different fields. This course will offer a broad picture of the changes that unfolded during this eventful timeframe across Eurasia, paying particular attention to the themes of cultural transmission and cultural identity and hybridity.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2023: Research Seminars

The Sciences of the Stars in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Civilizations
Alexander Jones
aj60@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001
Mondays, 9:30am-12:30pm

In this course, we will explore the main lines of development and transmission of the astral sciences (astronomy and astrology) in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Greco-Roman world, loosely from 7th century BCE Nineveh (Assyrian scholars observing and interpreting celestial omens) to 2nd century Alexandria (the works of Claudius Ptolemy). Knowledge of one or more of the relevant languages (Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, Latin) will be an asset though not a prerequisite.

Permission of the instructor is required.

'Hellenistic' and 'post-Hellenistic' Central Asia beyond 'Hellenism'
Sören Stark
soeren.stark@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

Alexander the Great's conquest (and Seleucus' I re-conquest) of the northeastern satrapies of the Achaemenid Empire is commonly understood as an important historical caesura, that led to the formation of 'Hellenistic' Central Asia by bringing Macedonian and Greek forms of governance, religion, and lifestyle to faraway Bactria, Sogdiana, and Margiana – mainly as a result of Macedonian and Greek rule over these regions in conjunction with the presence of military and civilian colonists from the 'west.' As a consequence, historical and archaeological research on 'Hellenistic' Central Asia has been decidedly focused on the Greek/Macedonian settler society and their urban environment in southwestern Central Asia.

In our class we will take a broader chronological and cultural perspective: We will inquire into how this part of Central Asia looked during the preceding Achaemenid period as well as after the end of Macedonian/Greek rule. Also, we will move the focus from Greek/Macedonian colonies to the rural countryside, which is almost exclusively known to us only from archaeological data. This will, hopefully, lead us to a more complete and more balanced picture of this important period in the history of southwestern Central Asia.

Requirements: Reading knowledge of German required; French and Russian are recommended, but not required.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Domination, Subordination, and Identity in the Ancient World
Roderick Campbell & Lorenzo d'Alfonso
rbc2@nyu.edu; lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Fridays, 2-5pm

This seminar explores the topic of domination and subordination and their constitutions of identity in the ancient world. If the convict, the slave and the human sacrifice stand at one end of the spectrum of personhood, the conditions for their social death are to be found in the social, political and economic matrixes of particular societies. The structure of authority, the bonds of kinship, economic roles and relations all play a role in shaping the topography of domination and subordination. Moral economies of permissible and impermissible violence interact with hierarchies of worth and care to create the possibility of non-persons but also structure the distribution of status and obligation more broadly. In this seminar we will explore theories of power and subjectivity, personhood and violence as well as analyze historical and archaeological cases, surveying sources and methodologies.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Advanced Study in Early Chinese Art
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Thursdays, 2-5pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

This course is intended to provide intensive analyses of primary sources
and related scholarship in early Chinese art & archaeology for graduate
students who have sufficient knowledge of the field.

Ability to read Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor required.

The Formation of Cultural Memory: Ancient Near Eastern Libraries, Archives, and Schools
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm

Ancient disputation and dialogue literature as well as other texts reveal that there was a tradition of competition between ancient centers of learning in Mesopotamia. Knowledge of important Babylonian cultural centers can still be detected in the writings of Strabo. So far, scholarship has occupied itself primarily with publishing the contents of libraries, and often – due to the quantity of texts and particular research questions – such effort has focused on particular genres rather than on entire collections. Much effort has gone into the reconstruction of school curricula. Less attention has been paid to the actual owners of the libraries and their professions, what particular texts or genres were collected and for what potential purposes in one particular place. The workshop intends to approach Mesopotamian libraries holistically, by taking a closer look at their content, situating them in their sociopolitical context, and exploring who owned them. This approach will probe the possibility that Mesopotamian libraries can be defined as much as places for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge as for its construction and production. Further, the workshop will attempt to map a geography of knowledge and to test whether we can identify traditional centers of knowledge as well as staging posts in the flow of knowledge.

Permission of the instructor is required. Akkadian is required for those who attend the reading sessions. Evaluation Criteria:  preparation for the reading sessions (35%); active participation in the discussion sessions on the basis of short written summary statements of the required readings (35%); final paper 30%.

Death and Burial in the Ancient Near East
Daniel Potts
dtp2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Wednesdays, 2-5pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

Permission of the instructor is required.

Graph Databases and Network Analysis
Sebastian Heath
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Mondays, 2-5pm

This course will explore the relationship between two overlapping approaches to working with data: Graph Databases and Network Analysis. Students will learn to apply these approaches to their own work within the broad scope of the Ancient World. A "Graph Database" is a collection of heterogeneous entities and the relationships between them. The software tools that allow querying of these collections start from the perspective of the individual entities and allow these entities to be selected, grouped, and counted. For the purposes of this course, a "Network" is a collection of nodes and the edges that connect them to other nodes in the same set. A focus of the tools for working with networks is the whole collection. Which nodes are highly connected? What is the nature of the paths that exist between all the nodes? What subgroups exist within a network and which nodes mediate between those subgroups? It is the case that 'nodes' are analogous to 'entities' and that 'edges' are analogous to 'relationships'. Starting with working examples, the course will explore these similarities as students learn how to implement these concepts within the context of their own work. How do these generic terms, methods, and questions relate to the past phenomena we study? Existing resources, including the Wikidata graph database and the networks that can be derived from it, will introduce students to specific tools such as the SPARQL query language and the Python programming-language libraries for working with networks. Visualization of results will be one focus of our work. While there is no prior technical expertise required, an openness and commitment to learning digital methods is essential. As the course progresses, students will increasingly work with their own data and this will lead to the development and implementation of a final project that uses the methods we learn in class. Weekly readings will explore working examples of both technologies and explore the impact they are having on scholarship and research in the Ancient World. The course may be particularly useful to archaeologists, historians, art historians, and philologists who want to explore how Graph Databases and Network Analysis can contribute to their own research.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2023: Other Courses

Advanced Akkadian: International Relations during the Second Millennium BCE
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-003
Thursdays, 11am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

While generally the Amarna Age has become synonymous with international relations in the ancient Near East, evidence for diplomacy goes far back to 24th century kingdom of Ebla in Northern Syria, and its relations with Mari and other kingdoms. During the Old Babylonian period we see Mari using the full range of diplomatic strategies including dynastic marriages, gift-giving, treaties and oaths and their accompanying rituals, the use of etiquette and protocols, and kinship terminology in the letters and treaties. With the Late Bronze Age we then enter the period of the balance of power between various political formations of region extent including Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria, and Babylonia with the metaphor of 'brotherhood' expressing the political alliances between peers and evoking the notion of the royal houses belonging to an "extended family of international setting" (Liverani, Prestige and Interest). In this seminar we will read letters and treaties from the Early Bronze Age to the Late Bronze Age to familiarize ourselves with the diplomatic strategies developed during these periods.

Requirements: Knowledge of Akkadian. Participation in class 50%; Final 50%.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Ancient Egyptian II
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 1003-001
Fridays, 9am-12pm

This course will focus on reading Middle Egyptian texts in a variety of genres. Special consideration will be given to the grammar of the texts, as well as the materiality and historical, cultural, and archaeological context.

Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I"; ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II"; and ISAW-GA 1002, "Advanced Ancient Egyptian I" (or equivalent coursework).

Permission of the instructor is required.

Tracing the Biographies of Ancient Objects
John Hopkins
jnh1@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-001
Mondays, 3:00-5:45pm
Silver Center for Arts and Science, Room 302

4 credits. Ancient objects have long lives. They were crafted millennia ago and were often used for decades or centuries before being buried in the ground. After a long slumber, millions of objects have reemerged as people have searched for the past or accidentally stumbled upon it. In their modern and contemporary years these objects have experienced often-tumultuous life-moments and circumstances. In this seminar, you will learn to trace and uncover these biographies, looking through their chains of custody (their provenance) to find their locations of use and deposition (provenience). Each week we will explore different philosophies and techniques (conservation practices, close looking, provenance research, and more) and study how and why scholars have been so concerned with recovering and re-centering the often-fragmented stories. As your semester-long project, each of you will select an ancient object in the collection of NYU, housed in the Conservation Center at the IFA. You will study this object all semester, looking for the holes in its biography and applying the techniques you've learned in hopes of filling out its past.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2022: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World

Theory and Approaches to the Study of the Ancient World
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm

The goal of this seminar is to conduct a multi- and transdisciplinary excavation of influential social theory relevant to the major disciplines of the humanities (and social sciences to a lesser degree). While the proximate goal of the seminar is neither to decolonize theory nor provide particular histories of disciplinary engagements, by attempting to uncover the buried structures of, and connections between, major social theoretical projects of the 20th century and some of their 21st century developments, students will be provided with the tools for their critique, deconstruction and repurposing. This seminar is also an ISAW interconnected seminar and as such is constructed an engagement between institute faculty and students. Thus, many sessions will feature faculty guests who will recommend readings and present case studies in, or engagements with, their disciplines or research. This seminar will also be a dialogic conversation between the instructor and students, and students are encouraged to recommend alternative readings or even sections.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2022: Research Seminars

Arabic Historical Writing in its Formative Period
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Thursdays, 9am-12pm

Permission of the instructor is required

Food and Diet in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Thursdays, 2-5pm

This seminar will consider food and diet in Greco-Roman antiquity through three different lenses: science, practice, and culture. Beginning with an overview of theories of nutrition and digestion, we will discuss medical advice on diet, which had an outsized role in both preventative and therapeutic medicine. Next, we will move to the practicalities of diet, considering both textual and archaeological sources; topics will include agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting (both natural and staged), the role of sacrifice, and the role of the state (military diet, grain doles, etc.). Finally, we will turn to the culture surrounding food, including philosophical attitudes, the ethnography of diet, cookbooks, and satire.

Permission of the instructor required.

Transcultural Art History
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Mondays, 2-5pm

This seminar explores ways in which cultural boundaries in art history can be reconsidered. It focuses on the most recent art historical publications that investigate art in the in-between zones. Through critical analysis of what is at the cutting edge of the discipline, students will learn skills essential to articulate transcultural complexity in art, such as asking bold questions, developing alternative perspectives, identifying little-known but crucial objects, retrieving long forgotten yet meaningful contexts, etc. The ultimate goal is to encourage students to move beyond the dichotomy between Eurocentric and multicultural approaches, and to take an active role in shaping the academic world after the so-called global turn. The seminar benefits from Professor Tseng's recent service as the Coeditor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin.

Permission of the instructor is required.

An Ecological Approach to the Ancient World: Topics, Methods, and Debates in Environmental Archaeology
Lorenzo Castellano
lc2995@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-004
Fridays, 2-5pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

This seminar introduces the field of Environmental Archaeology – i.e., the interdisciplinary study of past human interaction with the natural world.

We will address this subject through a threefold approach: (i) we will conduct a survey of the main methodologies employed in environmental archaeological research – including palaeoclimatology, geomorphology, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology; (ii) we will critically engage with central topics and debates in the field through an analysis of selected case studies drawn from current research across Eurasia; (iii) we will discuss the main theoretical approaches framing human-environment relationship – from environmental determinism to historical and political ecology.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Religious Institutions and Sacred Space in Syria and Anatolia (2nd-1st Millennium BCE)
Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm

After its demise during the end of the past century, the archaeology of the cult has reacquired momentum in the study of the human past. New technologies and new theoretical approaches allow us to concentrate on the cultic use of space and the reconstruction of rituals through new venues that will be discussed in the first classes of the seminar. They will be then applied to the case study of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Anatolia and Syria. The LBA-IA transition in southwest Asia was felt nowhere as politically disruptive as in the core of the Hittite empire. After considering the discussion on the "Hittite collapse", the course will try to trace the different local political trajectories developing during the Early and the Middle Iron Age in the former territories of the empire, with a particular attention to material remains and figurative art. While exploring the micro-regional, specific developments of the single post-Hittite polities, questions of economic strategies, strategies of political legitimation, (re)definition of cultic institutions, of social stratification, of long and short distance contacts, the impact and modalities of movements of peoples, of technological innovations and of the specific intercultural contacts with the east (Assyria), the west (Mediterranean), and the south (southern Levant, Biblical world) and the models used to represent them in modern scholarship will be discussed with the participants.

Note: the first meeting of this course will take place on September 14th.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The Phoenicians and the Mediterranean
Antonis Kotsonas
ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Fridays, 9am-12pm

The Phoenicians are central to current approaches to the history and archaeology of the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium BCE. However, the historiography of these people has been volatile. This seminar will address questions of Phoenician history and historiography, and will explore the identity and culture of these people by investigating a wide range of textual, material and other evidence from the homeland of the Phoenicians and the areas of their overseas activities around the Mediterranean. We will engage with a diverse body of scholarship, which ranges from theoretical approaches to Phoenician society and economy and models of interaction of these people with others in the Near East and the Mediterranean, to critical readings of textual traditions, to art-historical accounts of Phoenician craftsmanship, to 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.

Early Rome and Italy: Materials, Practices, and People in Motion
John Hopkins
jnh1@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-003 (cross-listed as FINH-GA 3024-001)
Mondays, 3-5pm
Institute of Fine Arts (1 East 78th Street), Rm. 119, Seminar Room

Over the past 20 years, the study of early Rome and Italy has usurped scholarship on the Republic and Empire, to become perhaps the most vital area of Roman studies and Ancient Mediterranean Art History. This Seminar will examine the latest scholarship on the makings of a Roman Community amidst major shifts in Italic and Mediterranean Culture from ca. 800-250 BCE. Spanning periods that saw the formations of urban landscapes, multiple architectural and artistic traditions, governmental bodies and the tumultuous upheaval of Mediterranean power norms through the aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquest and the onset of the First Punic War, we will read the latest scholarship and engage in the field-altering debates that have hit the discipline over the past 20 years. Topics will include the built environment as socially generative space, materials and making practices as constitutive of sociocultural traditions, religious practice, elite networks, governmental organization, military engagement and the relevance of scholarly conceptual shifts, including the material turn, the turn to indigenous and race-studies, queer and feminist readings of evidence, the ontological turn and more. In pairs and trios, students will focus each week on a single book in order to gain a sense of the construction of dissertation-length arguments. Writing will be an essential component as well. This course will be object and built-environment focused but will speak as well to historical questions essential to Roman Studies, broadly.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The History of Assyria in Ancient and Modern Historiography
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm

This seminar is not geared towards an event-oriented history of Assyria. It is also not concerned with the social science oriented history including quantitative sociological and economic history modeled after the natural sciences and its claim for objective truth. Rather than a history from below, the emphasis is on the study of the textual production as it related to or occurred at the Assyrian courts throughout their history and on how ancient historiography proceeded from facts or empirical events to create a coherent story about the deeds of the king that met the expectations linked with the office of rulership, which were informed by a longstanding tradition and the world view of the time. We will educate ourselves as to how to interpret the various text genres that Assyriologists have classified as chronicles and annals by critically re-evaluating our modern taxonomy applied to the ancient texts and explore how these 'genres' interface with what we tend to subsume under fiction and literature. In addition to such critical attitude toward the text, informed by postmodern literary theory and linguistics, linguistic features of the ancient texts and the shape of the tablet as well as the context of the text will illuminate our interpretation of the ancients' intentionality. We will explore to what degree the writings were indeed concerned with the past, what the inserting of 'historical factual data' was aiming at and further critically evaluate the assumption that history needs always to be written in a narrative.

The goal of the seminar is threefold: 1) to familiarize ourselves with the various text categories, 2) to acquire knowledge in the various dialects of the Assyrian language as well as in the 'hymnic epical dialect' by reading primary sources related to the general discussion and 3) to acquire an insight into the cultural and intellectual setting in which historiography was written by the ancient scholars for the political elites.

Requirements: Knowledge of Akkadian.

Evaluation Criteria: - Preparation for the reading sessions (35%); - active participation in the discussion sessions on the basis of short written summary statements of the required readings (35%); - final paper 30%.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Seals and Sealing Practices in the Ancient Near East
Daniel Potts
dtp2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Wednesdays, 2-5pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2022: Other Courses

Advanced Akkadian: The Civil War between Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-003
Thursday, 11am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

In this class we will read the sources pertaining to the historical event of the civil war between the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal and his brother Shamash-shum-ukin, viceroy of Babylonia including annals, the oath of allegiance of the queen mother Zakutu on behalf of Ashurbanipal, queries to the sun god, letters, and Assur's response to Ashurbanipal regarding his campaign against Babylon, a so-called Letter of the God.

Requirements: Knowledge of Akkadian; reading and analysis of the primary sources (50%), Final (50%).

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Ancient Egyptian I
Marc LeBlanc
ml4878@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1002-001 (cross-listed as FINH-GA 2520-002)
Fridays, 2-5pm

This course will focus on reading Middle Egyptian texts in a variety of genres. Special consideration will be given to the grammar of the texts, as well as the materiality and historical, cultural, and archaeological context.

Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I," and ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II" (or equivalent coursework).

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2022: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World

The Early First Millennium CE
Sebastian Heath & Lillian Tseng
sh1933@nyu.edu; lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm

Drawing on the expertise of various ISAW faculty members and invited guests, this seminar will examine the period c. 1-500 CE across Eurasia and Africa. Special attention will be paid to how ancient empires facilitated cultural interactions within or beyond their borders and how overland and maritime trading networks connected various places and political entities between the Roman Empire in the west and the Han and its successive dynasties of China in the east. Readings will be drawn from multiple disciplines that range from literature, history, archaeology to art history. Based on all the contextual and thematic studies, students will formulate and present their own large-scale narratives of the interconnected world.

Permission of the instructors is required

Spring 2022: Research Seminars

Ancient Near Eastern and Early Greek Epic: World-Making and Myth-Making
Beate Pongratz-Leisten & Antonis Kotsonas
bpl2@nyu.edu; ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm

Stories revolving around heroic figures have a long history in the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East reaching back to the end of the third millennium, when the first evidence of episodes of the Gilgamesh Epic emerged in Southern Mesopotamia. Tales woven out of the military deeds of the historical kings of Akkade quickly developed into a cultural repertoire for modeling the idea of kingship. And by the first half of the second millennium the literary corpus celebrating the figure of the heroic king encompassed royal praise songs, epics, and mythic narratives that were performed at court, were part of the school curriculum and the cultural repertoire kept in temple and palatial libraries as well as in libraries of ancient scholars. The spread of cuneiform writing and its curriculum throughout the entire ancient Near East and into the Levant and Anatolia, and the development of large territorial polities into empires, created a variety of venues that fostered cultural exchange and the transfer of ideas and knowledge, and more particularly of cultic and literary practices. It in these palatial, cultic, and other venues that we have to imagine the spread of literary themes that informed the emergence of the Iliad and Odyssey. This emergence has come to occupy the nexus of complex discourses (better known as the Homeric Question) concerning by whom, when and why a range of oral stories, which circulated in different parts of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean in the second and early first millennium, were woven together to formulate the two monumental works of early Greek poetry which have had a profound impact on the Classical to modern world.

This seminar will engage with these issues by problematizing the notion of epic poetry, and by exploring possible venues of poetic and other exchange and histories of reception of heroic stories, including questions of oral and written transmission and the canonization of text. We will further consider the agents of transmission (wandering poets and scholars, mercenaries) and the actual routes (via the sea, or overland, through Phrygia) and contexts involved. Further topics of inquiry are the common themes in Greek and Mesopotamian epic literature, and the impact of regional traditions on textual composition. We will also be addressing questions surrounding the historicity of the epics, which has been pervasive in both ancient Near Eastern and Classical studies, and we will re-evaluate the historicizing element in literature, with emphasis on the traditions for the cities of Aratta and Troy. The world-making potential and power of epic and myth and their intermediality with material expressions of culture and ritual will also form part of our investigation. Last but not least, we will be exploring the appropriation of the Gilgamesh Epic and the Iliad and Odyssey for political, economic, and cultural purposes, and we will be reflecting on the ways in which these epics and their material correlates have been communicated to the wider public through museum exhibitions. 

Permission of the instructors is required.

Art, Representation and Ontology in Early China
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Fridays, 2-5pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

The rapid pace of archaeological work in the People’s Republic of China has produced a bonanza of new materials some of which are re-writing the art history of Early China. From the stone carvings at Shimao to the jades of Liangzhu scholars have rushed to link Neolithic representational traditions to those of the better-known Shang across gulfs of centuries and across hundreds of kilometers, largely on the unspoken assumption that they are all, somehow, Chinese. Shang art in turn, mired in decades of debates over its (non) representational nature is scarcely better understood beyond its putative ritual context. But what is ritual? According to some scholars, ritual underlies all early Chinese art until the end of first millennium BCE, but ritual lives a dual life in Early China - as a poorly examined anthropological category and as a translation for the often anachronistically projected Confucian notion of li. Combine this issue with the fact that the vast majority of the corpus of things that makes up Early Chinese art history comes from tombs and Early Chinese “art” becomes unintelligible without an understanding of its larger mortuary context. Among all these issues of context and meaning we will raise a further and more fundamental one – what are the ontologies of representation present in the Early China corpus and how (rather than what) do they mean?

This course will range from the Neolithic to the first empires and from the Mongolian steppe to the semi-tropical south. The course will be both a survey of representational forms in Early China and an extended exploration of what representation (or better, mediation) might be and how it might be studied.

Ability to read Chinese and Japanese secondary sources is desirable, classical Chinese is also a plus, but curiosity and an open mind is even better. The course is open to those with any of the above characteristics.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Aramaean Kingdoms and Aramaic Texts in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East (ca. 300 BC- 300 CE)
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm 

In the aftermath of the fall of the Achaemenid Empire a number of small kingdoms and principalities emerged that used Aramaic as their official language. Most famous are those based at Petra (Nabataeans), Palmyra, Hatra, Charax Spasinu (Characene), Hazza (Adiabene) and Edessa (Osroene). They seemed to flourish as a result of the decentralized nature of Seleucid and Parthian rule and came to an end due to the increasing encroachment and centralization of, first, the Roman Empire, and, later, the Sasanian Persian Empire. This course will explore their interaction with the empires of their day and the basis of their economies (usually perceived as mercantile, some of them famously characterized by Rostovtzeff as ‘Caravan Cities) and investigate the nature of their identities and the relationship between Aramaic and local languages. A major source for our knowledge of these polities is the Aramaic inscriptions that all of them produced, often in large numbers. These help us to understand the character of these statelets and we will look at some of them, principally in translation, but also in the original (for which I will provide some basic instruction in Aramaic).

Prerequisites: none, but some exposure to a Semitic language will be helpful.

Permission of the instructor is required.

After the Empire: Post-Hittite Polities of Anatolia, Syria and the North-eastern Mediterranean
Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-004
Mondays, 9am-12pm

In western Asia the LBA-IA transition was felt nowhere as politically disruptive as in the core of the Hittite empire. After considering the discussion on a 'Hittite collapse? The course will try to trace the different local political trajectories developing during the Early and the Middle Iron Age in the former territories of the empire, with a particular attention to material remains and figurative art. While exploring the micro-regional, specific developments of the single post-Hittite polities, questions of economic strategies, strategies of political legitimation, (re)definition of cultic institutions, of social stratification, of long and short distance contacts, the impact and modalities of movements of peoples, of technological innovations and of the specific intercultural contacts with the east (Assyria), the west (Mediterranean), and the south (southern Levant, Biblical world) and the models used to represent them in modern scholarship will be widely discussed.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Greco-Roman Zoology
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

This seminar will explore Greco-Roman intellectual engagement with animals. The core texts under study will be Aristotle’s Parts of Animals and History of Animals, which are foundational to the development of zoology as a distinct field of inquiry. We will read and analyze both texts in their entirety. Beyond these central texts, any ancillary topics that the course covers will depend in large part on the interests of the participants and may include one or more of the following topics: the reception of the texts, encompassing Aristophanes of Byzantium’s epitome of the History of Animals and Galen’s handling of the material—including an evaluation of James Lennox’s claim that Aristotle’s zoological program essentially disappeared in antiquity until being revived in the twelfth century; the alternative zoological programs present in Roman texts like Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and Aelian’s Nature of Animals; other Aristotelian texts relevant to his zoological program, for example Motion of Animals, Progression of Animals, or Generation of Animals; the geographical range of animals covered in Aristotle’s text and their original cultural contexts and accessibility to Greco-Roman thinkers.

Reading knowledge of ancient Greek strongly recommended.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Social Contexts of Ancient Sciences
Claire Bubb & Alexander Jones
cc148@nyu.edu; aj60@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Thursdays, 2-5pm 

This seminar will situate the ancient sciences in their broader social contexts. While the scientific thinkers of antiquity are most typically studied as important figures in the course of the history of science, they also influenced and were influenced by their historical and cultural surroundings. We will explore such questions as: the audience and register of various scientific texts, the degree of lay interest and proficiency in different scientific traditions (medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, biology), the influence of scientific knowledge on contemporary literature and culture (and vice versa), and the popularity of para-scientific texts and studies (physiognomy, miscellany, scientific texts by non-experts, etc.). The primary focus of the course will be on the Mediterranean Hellenistic and Roman periods; however, we may broaden temporally and/or geographically in some areas as the interests of participants dictate.

Reading knowledge of at least one relevant ancient language is recommended.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Scientific Methods in Archaeology
Federico Carò
Federico.Caro@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 3013-003
Wednesdays, 2-5pm 

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 should have accomplished 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 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.

Archives and Ancient History
Rhyne King
rk4266@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-004
Mondays, 2-5pm 

How can scholars use ancient archival evidence to write social, cultural, and economic history?  Although archival studies are among the main research tools for historians of the modern world, ancient historians study archival evidence far less frequently.  Nevertheless, numerous archives survive from across ancient Eurasia, and these corpora offer insight into aspects of the ancient world often invisible in other types of primary sources.  In this course, we will discuss methodology for approaching archival evidence, and we will examine how scholars write history using archival evidence across numerous case studies.  The case studies will include material from Sumer, New Kingdom Egypt, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire, Hellenistic Egypt, Roman Britain, Roman Egypt, late antique Central Asia, and Chinese Inner Asia.  The seminar will culminate in a research paper which students will write in an area of their specialty using primary source languages of their choice.

Prerequisite: Reading knowledge of at least one ancient language

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2022: Other Courses

Intro to Ancient Egyptian II
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 1001-001
Fridays, 2-5pm 

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.

QGIS for Archaeologists and Historians
Sebastian Heath
sh1933@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-001
Wednesdays, 5:15-6:45pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

This two-credit course will provide an opportunity for students to gain skills working with spatial data though the mechanism of close engagement with the capabilities of the open-source (therefore freely available) Geographic Information System (GIS) software QGIS. This application implements all the common tasks and many of the more advanced methods that are expected of modern software for geographic analysis. Loading vector, raster, and geospatial point-cloud data; map composition and the display of descriptive data; and spatial analysis can all be done within a single environment. Over the course of the semester, students will learn these techniques, complete weekly assignments, and then, during the last weeks, apply what they have learned to their own research projects. Weekly assigned readings will provide case studies illustrating how the methods that QGIS implements have been applied in the pursuit of varied research agendas. Readings will also offer constructive critiques of "GIS" as an approach. The audience is any student or scholar interested in a practice-oriented introduction to the role of spatial approaches in their own work. The course may be particularly useful to students turning their attention to their anticipated dissertation work. There are no prerequisites.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Hittite
Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-002
Thursdays, 2-4pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

The goal of this two-credit course is to achieve a sufficient control of Hittite cuneiform, and a view over the different text genres attested in the Hittite archives, with their specific lexikon and structure. For each class, students will be asked to transcribe and translate ca 20 ll. from cuneiform text belonging to a given genre, and to discuss with the instructor secondary literature on the said genre.

A previous course of introduction to the Hittite language and script is required to take the class.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Ancient Egyptian Textual Objects in New York Collections
Yekaterina Barbash
Yekaterina.Barbash@brooklynmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 3003-003
Fridays, 10am-12pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

Three credits.

Note: the course will include visits to the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I"; ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II"; ISAW-GA 1002, "Advanced Ancient Egyptian I"; ISAW-GA 1003, "Advanced Ancient Egyptian II" (or equivalent coursework).

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Akkadian: Mythic and Epic Texts
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Thursdays, 11am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2021: Research Seminars

Ancient Astrological Texts, Theories, and Methods
Alexander Jones
aj60@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001
Fridays, 9am-12pm

This course will center on reading and analysis of handbooks of astrology in the Greco-Roman tradition, with emphasis on the concepts and doctrines, their applications in astrological practice, and the transmissions and vicissitudes of the texts. Knowledge of ancient Greek required.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Classical Arabic Texts and their Context
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm

This course is aimed at students with a grounding in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) who wish to deepen their knowledge of Classical Arabic (CA) and to acquire familiarity with the range and breadth of CA texts. This is not primarily a language course, though there will be discussion of the ways in which CA differs from MSA and also from spoken forms of Arabic. The principal aim is to explore the variety of CA texts and to investigate the contexts that generated them and the audiences that consumed them. 

Prerequisite: competence in Modern Standard Arabic.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Cultural Interactions in Eurasian Art & Archaeology
Sören Stark & Lillian Tseng
ss5951@nyu.edu; lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Wednesdays, 2-5pm

Cross-cultural inquiries over the Eurasian continent are still, to a considerable degree, hampered both by the fragmenting character of traditional academic divisions (such as Near Eastern, Central Asian, East Asian, South Asian studies) and considerable language barriers. Whereas the current academic divisions encourage the in-depth investigation of issues derived from the ‘core areas’, it does not facilitate the cross-border inquiry that addresses the interconnectedness between assumed ‘core areas’.

This seminar is intended to bridge academic gaps by exploring the wealth of cultural interactions between Central Asia and East Asia, with diverse topics such as elite representation, frontier societies, diaspora communities, urbanism, commercial networks, and religious plurality/competition. We will tackle these topics by focusing on a series of representative cases of archaeological sites or material assemblages dating between the 5th/4th century BCE and the 9th century CE, which either have come to light only relatively recently, or received a fundamental reassessment in current research.

Reading knowledge of Chinese and Russian is recommended, but alternative English readings are available if necessary.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Curating Ancient Art
Niv Allon & Clare Fitzgerald
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org; cpf213@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Mondays, 9am-12pm

This course explores major issues in the curation of ancient art through study of past and present modes of collecting and display in museums. Central topics will include acquisition and cultural property, development of exhibition narratives, approaches and challenges surrounding questions of race and identity in exhibitions, use of design and technology in contemporary modes of display, as well as audience development and engagement. Through these inquiries we will ask how we might bring visitors into meaningful conversations with the ancient world.

Permission of the instructors is required.

The Sumerian Problem
Daniel Potts
dtp2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

This seminar will examine the controversy surrounding the identity of the Sumerians, the first literate occupants of southern Mesopotamia. This will commence with the 'rediscovery' of the Sumerians at Lagash in the 1880s, and move on to the battles over their ethno-linguistic affinity in the early 20th century. Topics to be considered include the question of their geographical origin; whether or not they represent the 'aboriginal' population of lower Mesopotamia; the archaeological evidence of continuity and discontinuity in material culture during and after the first appearance of evidence deemed 'Sumerian;' and how race and ethnicity have been treated in early Mesopotamian studies.

Prerequisites: reading knowledge of French and German.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The End of the World in Context: Perspectives on Societal Collapse in the Ancient World
Sarah Adcock
sarah.adcock@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Mondays, 2-5pm 

The past five years have seen a surging interest in the study of societal collapse in the ancient world (e.g., Faulseit 2017; Harper 2017; Weiss 2017; Vogelaar, Hale, and Peat 2018; Middleton 2020). This growing scholarly engagement coincides with contemporary preoccupations with geopolitical uncertainty, climate crisis, mass extinction, and global disease. In this seminar we will work to situate the study of societal collapse in the past within its broader context, both within the academy and beyond. Over the course of the semester, we will examine how the study of societal collapse is approached by a range of disciplines: history, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, political economy, and environmental studies. We will seek to understand what collapse is, who or what is affected by it, and why. At the same time, we will consider how definitions of societal collapse have changed over the past several decades in concert with shifting explanatory frameworks in archaeology and ancient studies, which are, in turn, often inflected by contemporary concerns. We will explore the usefulness of collapse as analytic as well as potential alternatives. Theoretical material will be anchored by case studies spanning time and space. These will be rooted in the ancient world but will branch out to include contemporary examples, as well as the post-apocalypse. We will also touch on topics of contemporary interest, including environmental change, modern ruins, the Anthropocene, and depictions of collapse in popular culture.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Emar under Hittite Dominion
Beate Pongratz-Leisten & Daniel Fleming
bpl2@nyu.edu; daniel.fleming@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm

Much information about the ancient political landscape comes to us through the written or built products of the great centers of power. Across time and place, however, we often get a view of power from below, and such perspectives are as important for understanding political systems as the efforts of the centers. For the late second millennium BCE, one such opportunity is offered by the finds from Emar, which through the 13th century stood at the southeast frontier of the great Anatolian kingdom of Hatti. Situated at the major roads connecting Mesopotamia with the North as well as the Mediterranean in the West, Emar has been an important hub since the third millennium BCE, which explains the Hittite interest in this region. The cuneiform texts from Emar display the variety of practice and messiness of application for authority in a small Syrian city securely attached to a larger kingdom. Hittite involvement in Emar affairs appears to have been mostly indirect, carried out through the regional capital at Carchemish, with ebb and flow of contact that remain to trace and understand. The rich and diversified cuneiform material from Emar including  administrative records, legal documents, letters, public rituals, divinatory texts, cultic and literary texts allows to examine the many dimensions of its cultural, civic, and political life in a regional context and to build a more adequate conception of how great power intersects with local life and custom in a particular setting.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, & David Ratzan
sh1933@nyu.edu; tom.elliott@nyu.edu; david.ratzan@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3024-001
Thursdays, 2-5pm 

This course will introduce students to the use of digital tools and computational methods in the study of the Ancient World. There are no technical prerequisites and the course will be of particular interest to early-stage graduate students who want a broad introduction that involves hands-on work. The course will progress through topics and methods such as applying structure to text via XML-based markup languages, introduction to the programmatic manipulation of textual data, and how scholarly resources are shared on the public internet and edited in collaborative environments, including content management systems. There will also be a focus on structured datasets stored in relational databases. Students will gain practical experience in acquiring, creating, querying, and displaying spatial data. The integration of visual media such as digital images and 3D models will be explored. There will also be frequent introductions to existing digitally-informed work in disciplines that are part of the study of the ancient world, such as textual studies, history, and archaeology, as well as more specific fields such as papyrology and numismatics for which exemplary digital projects exist. Readings will introduce students to current trends in Digital Humanities and will encourage discussion of the impact that digital methods and open-licensed content is having on research, teaching, and public engagement with scholarly practice. Over the course of the semester students will design and then implement a final project that can overlap with their existing research interests. It is a requirement that students bring their own notebook computers to class.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Fall 2021: Other Courses

Intro to Ancient Egyptian I
Marc J. LeBlanc
marc.leblanc@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1000-001 (cross-listed as FINH-GA 2520-002)
Fridays, 2-5pm

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 prerequisites, but previous study of foreign languages and a strong general understanding of grammar are recommended.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Akkadian: Incantations and Prayers
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 11am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2021: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Themes

Historiography of the Ancient World
Roderick Campbell & Robert Hoyland
rbc2@nyu.edu; rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Historiography is fundamental to what we do as historians, art historians, or archaeologists. Broadly, and interdisciplinarily, understood, it references the method and theory of the study of the past. This seminar will investigate both modern approaches to the study of antiquity as well as the historiographies of ancient writers. We will also call upon diverse faculty both in ISAW and outside it, who work on the ancient world, to discuss historiographical debates in their field and to present their own methodology for engaging with the past. This will help students to appreciate the degree to which historiographical strategies vary according to region, culture and period, reflecting the different ways in which academic fields have developed (e.g. Egyptology versus Sinology), and according to the different materials available for study (literary, documentary, epigraphic, archaeological, etc). 

Assessment: Oral presentation: 25%; contribution to class discussion: 25%; Final paper: 50%

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2021: Research Seminars

Remembering and Forgetting: Theory and Applications of Memory Studies
Odette Boivin
odette.boivin@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-005
Mondays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Human experience is largely shaped by the past, individual and collective, including what we remember of it and how we remember it. Memory Studies have developed rapidly in the past few decades, penetrating several academic disciplines, including Sociology, Anthropology, History, and various areas of Cultural Studies. Remembering and forgetting takes many shapes and guises: as historians—in a broad sense—we find aspects of memory hiding behind any instance of continuity or innovation, archaizing features, memorialization, intentional destruction or damnatio memoriae that we encounter in our sources.

This seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore theories of Memory Studies and case studies from the Ancient World. We will first review foundational and more recent scholarship in Memory Studies by reading and discussing works by scholars in various fields of research. Topics covered include: individual memory, generational memory, collective/cultural Memory, memory and history, memory and historiography, lieux de mémoire, commemoration/memorialization/instrumentalization of the past, memory and identity, remembering and forgetting, memory and religion, concepts of time.

In the second half of the semester, the emphasis will be on case studies based on textual and archaeological sources from various ancient cultures.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Galen: The "Canonical" Works
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-006
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

This seminar will provide an intensive study of the medical oeuvre of Galen of Pergamon. The vast corpus of this second century physician allows an unparalleled window into medicine in Greco-Roman antiquity. Due to Galen’s antiquarian interests and his prominent place in imperial Rome, his writings offer particularly valuable insights not just into medicine as it was practiced in the first two centuries CE, but also into both the socio-intellectual culture of the Roman empire and the now largely lost worlds of Hellenistic medicine and philosophy. In reaction to the size of the corpus, late antique teachers of medicine soon found it desirable to create a navigable selection of core works for students to read. We will follow this Alexandrian canon of the so-called “Sixteen Books,” some of which are among his most famous, others of which have received limited attention from modern scholarship. We will begin the course by reading the relevant sections of Hunain ibn Ishaq’s Risala, which describes the late antique curriculum, and Galen’s On my Own Books and On the Order of my Own Books, which offer his own views on how to conceive of his output. We will then proceed through the following works: On the Sects for Beginners, The Art of Medicine, On the Pulse, Method of Healing to Glaucon, the minor anatomical works, On Temperaments, On the Natural Faculties, On the Elements according to Hippocrates, the books of causes/differentiae, On the Affected Parts, the collected books on the pulse, On Critical Days, On the Differences of Fevers, On Crises, and the latter half of On the Method of Healing. Students will come out of the class with a comprehensive understanding of Galenic medicine, as well as a solid familiarity with the themes of ancient medicine writ large. Because of the large scope of the reading list, the readings will be assigned in English translation and there is therefore no language requirement; however, students with Greek will be asked to read some key passages of each week’s reading in the original.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Curatorial Studies: How to Curate Cross-Cultural Thematic Exhibitions
Hsueh-man Shen & Clare Fitzgerald
hms10@nyu.edu; cpf213@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-007 (cross-listed as FINH-GA 3041-001) 
Thursdays, 12:30-2:30pm
Mode of Instruction: In Person
Location: Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78th Street, Lecture Hall

This seminar, co-taught by Professors Hsueh-man Shen (IFA) and Clare Fitzgerald (ISAW), aims to provide students with an overview of curatorial practices and challenges observed in museum settings. Special attention is paid to cross-cultural thematic exhibitions. After initial lectures from both professors and after considering a few case studies drawn from their own curatorial experiences, enrolled students will work in groups to develop ideas, strategies, narratives, and plans for exhibitions (virtual) on topics of their choice.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Archaeologies of the Athenian Acropolis: Myth, Cult, Monuments, and
Reception
Joan Connelly
jbc1@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-008 (cross-listed as FINH-GA 3023-001) 
Tuesday, 10:30am-12:30pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

This course investigates the archaeologies of the Athenian Acropolis through its transformations from early settlement, to Mycenaean citadel, to sacred precinct of Athena, to Late Antique town with Parthenon as Church of the Virgin Mary, to administrative center of Latin Duchy of Athens with Parthenon as the Cathedral Notre Dame D'Athènes, to Ottoman garrison with Parthenon as mosque and Erechtheion as Governor's harem, to world famous ruin, to archaeological site, to iconic epicenter Western Art and Culture.

We will examine the geology, landscape, archaeoastronomy, topography, and topology of the Athenian Acropolis with an eye toward understanding the interrelation of landscape, myth, cult, and ritual. Topics include: the architectural phases of the Acropolis buildings and monuments, their programs of sculptural decoration, their relationships to one another, the foundation myths that lie behind their meanings, and the cult rituals celebrated within the sacred precinct. Issues of reception, projection, and appropriation will be examined as will the history of the conservation and reconstruction of Acropolis buildings. Longstanding efforts to secure the reunification of the Parthenon sculptures will be reviewed within the broader context of global cultural heritage law and the opening of the New Acropolis Museum.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Writing History – Experimentally
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-005
Fridays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Historians, anthropologists and archaeologists all communicate through writing. We re-construct, imagine, present, narrate, tell stories, but seldom do we reflect seriously on this process. Even less do we actively play in the creative field that is manifestly the ground of all writing, historical or otherwise. Nor is taking writing seriously (or joyously!) merely about the aesthetics of good form or the craft of persuasive rhetoric but rather the very structuring, embodying, even worlding of thought. What then might history, anthropology or archaeology look like if we reconfigured the parameters of its constitution? This seminar will explore the craft of historical writing including its experimental borders with counter-factuals, fictioning, narration/anti-narration, weird realism, and even speculative fiction.

In addition to weekly readings, students will have weekly short writing assignments ranging from response papers to creative writing. There will be a final, creative writing, paper.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Eastern Aspects of Maritime Trade in the Era of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
Daniel Potts
daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-006
Thursdays, 2:45-5:45pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

This seminar will examine selected problems arising from the maritime trade, principally during the 1st century AD, that linked the Indian sub-continent with Babylonia, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian peninsula. The products traded and their sources, the ports, imports and exports, and interactions between Arabians, Greeks, Mesopotamians, Palmyrenes and others will all be examined. Archaeological evidence from newer investigations in the UAE, Oman and Bahrain will be investigated as well.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fifth Century Central Eurasia and the Formation of a 'Eurasian Late Antiquity'
Sören Stark
ss5951@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-007
Thursdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

The fifth century CE saw a remarkable revival of cultural connectivity across large parts of Eastern and Central Eurasia with a series of new political actors, new religious and cultural dynamics, and new economic networks. The Tuoba Xianbei/Northern Wei Dynasty unified northern China and forcefully restarted diplomatic exchanges with the various 'Western Regions.' On the Korean peninsula we observe the appearance of a spectacular ensemble of monumental elite tombs associated with the elites of the state of Silla. In the Mongolian steppes – for the first time since more than 300 years – a new imperial power emerged in the form of the Rouran/Avar Qaghanate, while Buddhist monastic communities started to blossom in oases like Kucha in the Tarim basin. Further west, Sogdiana transformed by way of an internal urban and rural colonization into one of Eurasia's economic and cultural powerhouses, while Bactria/Tokharistan became the center of Hephthalite rule over the wider region. At the same time, south of the Hindukush, Gandhara saw a late blossoming of its Buddhist communities.

In many ways, the fifth century represents the end of the formative stage of a 'Eurasian Late Antiquity' – itself an era of far-reaching cultural contact that "witnessed the emergence of a new world order with cultural, religious, and political systems markedly different from the so-called Classical Antiquity of the Roman, Chinese, and Iranian worlds that preceded them" (Di Cosmo/Maas 2018, 1).

In our seminar we will focus on the role of Central Eurasia in the formation of this 'Eurasian Late Antiquity.' We will inquire into underlying new economic, cultural, and political/diplomatic networks – how they emerged during a time of rapid social change during the preceding 'dark age' after the end of the Han in East and the Kushan in Central and South Asia, and how they culminated during the heyday of intercontinental exchanges from the second half of the sixth century CE onwards.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Phrygia Between the East and the West
Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-005
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

At the dawn of historiography in the Greco-Roman world, between the sixth and the mid fifth century Phrygia represented the most ancient great power known of Anatolia. For some sources, Phrygia represented the earliest past of Anatolia, a civilization existing form the origins of time. From a west Asian perspective, by the 8th century, under the name of Muški, the Phrygian kingdom represented the easternmost political power that the Mesopotamian world had become aware of during the early 1st millennium. The monograph of AS.M. Wittke of 2004, Phrygier und Mušker, ideally offers a synthesis on the archaeological and textual sources for the reconstruction of this kingdom embodying a borderland between two worlds.

With the new chronology of the Destruction Level of Gordion, the new set of 14C dates for the Early Iron Age occupation at the site, new interpretations of ancient sources and new written sources recently uncovered in central Anatolia, our understanding of the process of formation of the Phrygian kingdom, its early history and its integration within Aegean, north-western and central Anatolia is radically changing. A renewed evaluation is required also by the apogee of the Phrygian kingdom. New hypotheses on dating and modalities of spread of the alphabetic writings has also produced a significant change in the evaluation of the standing of Phrygian as a writing system and a language. The same holds true for dating and meaning of several Phrygian landscape monuments. Moreover, the growing consciousness of the importance but also the differences between the 10th-9th century early political stage and the powerful kingdom of Gordias and Midas, are stimulus for the new evaluation. The question of a later 7th-early 6th century spread of Phrygians and/or Phrygian culture towards the east, and the meaning of the sites of Bağazköy Büyükkale and Karkenes in this new context, completes the set of new evidence.  All these elements encourage a revision on the understanding of the reception and significance of Phrygia and its culture in the Greco-Roman world and in other regions of western Asia.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Ancient Near Eastern Literature: Topics, Issues, Approaches
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-006
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

In the last decades the category of ‘literature’ in the Ancient Near East has come repeatedly under scrutiny. It included among other topics fierce discussions about how to define the literary corpus, orality and aurality, the notion of genre, the validity of historical references in literary works and the fluid boundaries between ‘literature’ and ‘historiography,’ where to locate literary production - school, temple, or palace, and how far the production process determined functional and pragmatic aspects of literary works. 

To isolate literature from its historical context as l’art pour l’art aesthetics favoring formalistic features over pragmatic and historical concerns certainly does not do justice to ancient literary works. While formalistic features such as the use of literary dialects might operate as a way of categorization, recently, due to the nature of the texts, narratology as well as fictionality have been considered equally important. Literature rather should be defined as a particular medium alongside other media as part of the social and cultural discourse. Moreover, what makes an oeuvre historically significant, is not necessarily established by the qualities of the work or by the author but by its history of reception and its intertextuality and intermediality. The seminar investigates what constituted literary works, how literary works became part of the stream of tradition, were affected by and affected historical conditions, and entered intertextual and intermedial relations.

Permission of the instructor is required. Knowledge of Akkadian is required. The research seminar is open to graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty. Students are required to do read primary texts in Akkadian and to do short response papers to the readings as well a presentation in combination with a written final paper.

3D Modelling and Related Technologies
Sebastian Heath
sh1933@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Wednesdays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Virtual representations of the ancient world are becoming increasingly important to both research and teaching as the ability to acquire, create, work with, and share these digital resources becomes less expensive and more widely available. Accordingly, this course will combine hands-on experience with creating and using 3D representations of ancient material culture, including objects and architectural spaces, with a review of current practices being employed by museums, archaeologists, and other practitioners. In all aspects of the course, the emphasis is on using these highly visual technologies to tell stories and to communicate and illustrate a wide range of recoverable aspects of ancient societies. Students will use such tools as the introductory 3D modeling software SketchUp, the more capable open-source 3D-suite Blender, game editing software, and tools for making 3D models from photographs. We will explore the acquisition, editing, creation and sharing of richly-textured 3D models of real objects as well as create and explore immersive virtual environments. A focus will be using affordable hardware for creating virtual reality experiences. Readings will include reports of ongoing work as well as discussions of why "3D" is important and how it is being used in teaching and in the field. Students will often be using their own computers and should be willing to apply themselves energetically to learning the digital skills the class introduces.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2021: Other Courses

Archaic and Classical Greece: Historical and Archaeological Problems
Antonis Kotsonas
ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-010
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

In this tutorial we will explore a range of fundamental issues in the study of Archaic and Classical Greece (ca. 750-300 BCE). The focus will be on the ways in which material culture, and literary and epigraphic evidence shed light on important problems of socio-political and economic history, and on major developments in different parts of the Greek world. Note: this tutorial is worth four credits.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Akkadian: Neo-Babylonian Royal Inscriptions and Religious Texts
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-007
Thursdays, 11am-1pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

In addition to consolidating the knowledge of Akkadian grammar the Advanced Reading of Akkadian Class is designed to introduce into various dialects of Akkadian from a diversity of regions and periods and to familiarize the student with a diversity of paleographies as well as text categories. In particular cases it will include the reading from photos of the originals to provide practice for reading originals of tablet collections in museums.

This class is dedicated to the Neo-Babylonian dialect, grammar and paleography, which will be studied in royal inscriptions of Nabupolassar, Nebuchadnezzar II, and Nabonidus, the Nabupolassar Epic and the Verse Account.

Grading: Reading of the texts (75%); Final (25%)

Requirements: At least one year of Akkadian

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Ancient Egyptian II
Yekaterina Barbash
Yekaterina.Barbash@brooklynmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 1003-001
Fridays, 10am-1pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

This course will focus on reading Middle Egyptian texts in a variety of genres. Special consideration will be given to the grammar, as well as the materiality and historical, cultural, and archaeological context, of the texts. 

Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I"; ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II"; and ISAW-GA 1002, "Advanced Ancient Egyptian I" (or equivalent coursework).

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2020: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Periods

Ancient Eurasia in the Mid-1st Millennium BCE
Antonis Kotsonas & Daniel Potts
ak7509@nyu.edu; daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Drawing on the expertise of various ISAW faculty members, this seminar will examine the period c. 800-330 BCE (which some call the Axial Age) across Eurasia, with case studies looking at cultural developments in the Mediterranean, Western Asia, Central Asia and China. Without presuming to cover every cultural expression across this vast area, the seminars will look particularly at Archaic and Classical Greece, the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Elamite states, Western Zhou and the Springs and Autumn period. Equal emphasis will be given to historical and archaeological data.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Fall 2020: Research Seminars

The Sciences of the Stars in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Civilizations
Alexander Jones
aj60@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001
Fridays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: In Person

In this course, we will explore the main lines of development and transmission of the astral sciences (astronomy and astrology) in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Greco-Roman world, loosely from 7th century BCE Nineveh (Assyrian scholars observing and interpreting celestial omens) to 2nd century Alexandria (the works of Claudius Ptolemy). Knowledge of one or more of the relevant languages (Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, Latin) will be an asset though not a prerequisite.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Textual & Material Approaches to the Roman Body
Claire Bubb & Sebastian Heath
cc148@nyu.edu; sh1933@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Blended

The core intent of this seminar is to use the concept of "the body" as a lens by which to examine Roman material and written culture. Roman society controlled bodies, created artistic depictions of bodies, and tried to understand the inner workings of bodies and cure them of disease. Roman individuals took care of their own bodies, dressed themselves, and cared about their hairstyles. Bodies were put on violent display in amphitheaters and elsewhere, either because of voluntary service as a gladiator or in the service of exemplary violence and criminal justice. Bodies were auctioned as part of the institution of slavery and paraded in triumphs as proofs of Rome's imperial power. Human bodies were also directly used as power in industrial processes. The gendered body was an object of some rhetorical anxiety in some Roman circles, while others were more tolerant of depictions of human sexuality, which is fundamentally a bodily behavior. Over the course of the semester, these and other approaches will be brought together in an effort to understand the many ways in which the body can be considered a central aspect of Roman experience. Readings will range across the subdisciplines of Roman studies and also incorporate theoretical and practical approaches from other domains. Consideration of primary sources in translation and close looking at Roman Art will play a role. Students will be expected to define their own area of research within the broad scope of this course and to produce a final paper that overlaps with its themes as those develop during the semester.

The course will primarily take place online, but will include monthly in-person class sessions. Three of these sessions will take place at ISAW. If possible, there will also be an in-person museum visit. A detailed schedule will be communicated to students in advance. Note: all in-person sessions can also be attended remotely.

Permission of the instructors is required. Familiarity with Latin and/or Greek will be put to good use, but is not a prerequisite.

Economic Archaeology
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Fridays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

The study of ancient economies has been an important topic in archaeology since at least V. Gordon Childe. But what is an economy and how does one study it archaeologically? Is it the system by which scarce resources are allocated, or is it the total production, circulation and transformation of social energy? Scholars have long debated whether economies are embedded in social matrices and cultural context or operate on principles independent of time and place. Archaeology has seen all of the both approaches and many things in-between while attempting to interpret the material cultural correlates of past practices. This seminar will be a survey of archaeological approaches to economy beginning with substantivist/formalist debates before proceeding with anthropological archaeology’s long, Marxian, interest in political economy. This will then frame an exploration of the large literature on production, before moving on to the less developed topic of the archaeology of exchange. General attempts to model economic or political economic systems based on archaeological data will be reviewed before switching to formalist approaches adapted from more recent economic theorists such as North and Picketty. Finally we will end with a discussion of relatively recent substantivist themes, such as the archaeology of value, and theorists such as Graeber and Bourdieu.

Students will take turns presenting on the readings and write a final paper.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Current Debates in the Art History & Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean
Hallie Franks
hmf2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Mondays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Rather than working around a theme or set of sources, this course aims to delineate some of the major current debates around and approaches to the study of ancient material culture in the Mediterranean. What kinds of questions are presently being asked of monuments and visual sources, both those recently discovered and long known? What theoretical approaches are being newly brought to bear on this material, and to what ends? What, in other words, are the kinds of issues that concern ancient art historians and archaeologists today, and how are they moving the study of ancient art in new directions? In looking to these questions, we will also look back and forward, situating recent studies in relationship to the scholarly history on which they depend.

Discussion topics may involve the use of new technologies, the construction of ancient “social imaginaries”, historiographical treatments of race, ethnicity, and gender, and environmental change. That said, topics for many of our classes will be determined on students’ fields, interests, and on research exercises. In addition to exposing students to a variety of approaches to ancient material culture, the hope is that this class will help each student to form a picture of their field as a whole and to practice positioning their research—present or future—in relationship to contemporary scholarship.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Palace to Polis: The Aegean ca. 1400-600 BCE
Antonis Kotsonas
ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Thursdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

The seminar engages a range of important discourses on political, social and economic history and material culture in the Aegean from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Early Iron Age (14th to 7th centuries BCE). In adopting this chronological scope, the seminar brings together two key periods of Aegean archaeology which are typically treated separately. We will be comparing and contrasting the textual and material culture of the palace-centered polities of the Late Bronze Age with the culture of the communities of the Early Iron Age, many of which became Archaic Greek poleis. Inspired by discussions over continuity and change, and over internal development and external influence, we will examine: socio-political complexity, including its collapse and re-emergence; economy and trade; migration, colonization and relations with the Eastern and the Central Mediterranean; religion and cult practice; death, burial and the role of the past; script, literacy and the Homeric epic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the meaning of temporal and spatial variation in material culture and patterns of deposition, which is important for the seminar’s major aim of enriching and deconstructing the linear narrative embedded in the traditional concept of “Palace to Polis." 

Permission of the instructor is required.

Ancient Oceanic History
Jeremy Simmons
jas2392@columbia.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-003
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Despite the fact that water covers around 70% of the Earth’s surface, most writers of ancient history have had their eyes fixed on terra firma. However, over the past five decades, there has been increasing interest in exploring large bodies of water as active participants in the development of premodern human activity. Works by scholars like Braudel, Horden and Purcell, Manning, and Beaujard have greatly expanded our knowledge of interconnectivity in antiquity through maritime networks among other complex socio-economic structures. 

This seminar will investigate three bodies of water for the study of the wider Afro-Eurasian world in antiquity (together with their associated waterways): the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic. We will first interrogate the state of the current scholarly debate on these waterways, including those that focus on antiquity and longue durée treatments. We will then investigate several thematic issues arising from the study of “oceanic history”—from ancient conceptions of these waterways, to the practical tactics used by ancient mariners to navigate them, to their vital role in the burgeoning field of ancient climatology. Particular emphasis will be placed not only on formulating new lines of inquiry specific to the ancient world, but also being able to put such research into fruitful dialogue with evidence and arguments for later periods of human engagement on the open sea (e.g., the medieval and early modern periods).

Course rubric: class participation 25%; oral presentation 25%; final paper 50%

Permission of the instructor is required. Knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin is preferred, but not necessary for this course.

Hittite Civilization: History, Archaeology, Language
Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Wednesdays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

The Hittite empire had a profound impact on the history of Pre-classical Western Asia. After a period defined by the presence of local principalities, and a formative phase in the 17th century, a complex political machine developed in Central Anatolia. The creation of a system of infrastructure for water management and preservation of agricultural products allowed this polity to overcome for the first time the regional challenges resulting from the climate and landscape. They are produced together with other public facilities such as temples and fortifications and it is possible to trace a coherent political conception inspiring these major constructions as well as much of the artistic and textual production of this polity. This infrastructure is part of a comprehensive approach to complex social life, whose effects became concretely observable in the so-called Early Empire. In this period, for example, normative texts were produced, some defining the administrative function of the capital and peripheral districts, some –what we call rituals and feasts-, defining the cultic activity between the core to the periphery, and the syncretic pantheon. The tension between the “possible empire” emerging from these texts and the local developments produced by various actors can be understood through the lens of the historical context in which the empire operated for almost 500 years. The course aims at providing participants with basic information and up-to-date research question on the Hittites. Each class will be divided into two parts: one touching different themes of the history and archaeology of the Hittites; the other providing an introduction into the Hittite language and script.

Permission of the instructor is required. Reading proficiency in one of the following foreign languages is required: French, Italian or German

Dynamics of Human-Environment Interactions across Ancient Near Eastern Landscapes
Mitra Panahipour
mitra.panahipour@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 2-5pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

Understanding the dynamic nature of human-environment interactions has been one of the primary goals of archaeological studies in recent decades. In this seminar, we explore the intertwined relations between the natural environment and social processes in the formation and transformation of past landscapes. We will investigate diverse environmental as well as microenvironmental zones, including alluvial, desert, highland, frontier, and transitional regions, and will further discuss the significance and longer-term views on development, adaptation, sustainability, productivity, and collapse in ancient societies.

With an interdisciplinary approach and through hands-on training, students will learn Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and satellite-based remote sensing techniques. They will also gain familiarity with geospatial analyses in the documentation, visualization, and interpretation of landscapes. While learning these techniques, students will review the theoretical concepts in anthropological and landscape archaeology. We will conclude the course by discussing how enhanced tools are addressing some of the enduring questions about past economic, social and political systems and how these methods, along with theoretical underpinnings, will create new research avenues and shape the future of this field. 

This course combines lectures, in-class exercise and lab activities, as well as discussion of weekly readings.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2020: Other Courses

Advanced Ancient Egyptian I
Marc J. LeBlanc
marc.leblanc@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1002-001
Fridays, 10am-1pm
Mode of Instruction: Online

This course will focus on reading Middle Egyptian texts in a variety of genres. Special consideration will be given to the grammar, as well as the materiality and historical, cultural, and archaeological context, of the texts.

Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I," and ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II" (or equivalent coursework).

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2020: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Periods

Ancient Eurasia at the End of the 2nd Millennium BCE
Lorenzo d'Alfonso & Roderick Campbell
lda5@nyu.edu; rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm

The end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean is essential to the study of Antiquity since it provided, together with the biblical narrative, the main impulse to archaeology from the 19th century onward. Today we know that its most representative case, the Graeco-Roman epics of the war and fall of Troy is only one of a rich number of major Bronze age centers of the eastern Mediterranean experiencing a dramatic process of change from a rich, interconnected palace-based political system controlled by a club of big powers, to novel forms of knowledge and aggregation. Though this stage has been labeled a Dark Age because of the scanty textual evidence, archaeological work of the last decade has rapidly changed the situation.

Between the late 13th and the 11th c. BCE Western Asia experienced two parallel historical developments. The fall of the palace systems produced a phase of new local experimentations in Greece, Anatolia, Syria and the Levant. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, by converse, the kingdoms of Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt survived the political turmoil, though both were marked with significantly reduced territorial control and by the development of an even stronger sense of political identity and tradition.

At the opposite side of the continent, in East Asia, the Great Settlement Shang was founded at Anyang in the reign of Wu-ding in the 13th century BCE, becoming the largest center in East Asia (and perhaps the world) by the time of its conquest in the 11th century BCE. The Great Settlement was both the culmination of millennia of social political development and at the same time the site of a suite of novel sovereign technologies – writing, the horse and chariot, monumental royal tombs and mass human sacrifice. Under pressure from the north and west, the Shang polity shrank and was finally conquered by a confederacy of Western groups led by the Zhou who then spread their conquests across north China, replacing the Shang hegemony. Despite the collapse of kingdoms, the movement of people, novel developments and the integration of disparate regions, the narrative of Early China has always been told as a story of the cyclic rise and fall of dynasties – chapters in the history of the world's longest continuous civilization.

For both areas movements of peoples have clearly played a crucial role, and in both cases the impact of populations moving from the steppes in Central Asia are relevant. Central Asia itself had at his time by its own extraordinary developments which we mainly connect with horse breading, chariot riding elites and their sedentary production sites changing into the advent a new phase characterized by the iron metallurgy, and horse-riding nomads.

Global climate change occurred at the turn of the 13th century BCE, and the different historical outcomes are there to show how microclimatic features, as well as the social process of perception and response generate multiple, often opposing results both in adjoining regions and in far away regions.

The course aims at introducing participants to the different realizations of processes and transformations of complex societies across the Asiatic continent. Through the discussion of the main interpretative works, and the focus on paradigmatic and at the same time unique case studies, it will explore the different dynamics and the different questions asked by historians and archaeologists often directly linked with the set of primary sources typical of each area.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2020: Research Seminars

The Greek Sciences of Optics and Harmonics
Alexander Jones
Aj60@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001
Mondays, 2-5pm

Optics and Harmonics developed as partly mathematical, partly physical approaches to understanding aspects of visual and auditory perception. In this course we will focus on a few landmark texts, including the Optics and Sectio Canonis in the Euclidean corpus, Aristoxenus, and Ptolemy's Harmonics and Optics, bringing them into relation with philosophical treatments of sense theory and epistemology, and highlighting their diverse approaches to mathematical and empirical demonstration and modelling.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The Economic Policy of the Roman Empire
Gilles Bransbourg
gb1077@nyu.edu; gbransbourg@numismatics.org
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm

According to a widely shared view, Rome’s imperial authorities were essentially reactive, minting coins and raising taxes mainly in order to pay the army and fund urban elites' lavish lifestyle, with no concern or even awareness of what the concept of economic policy might be. More generally, pre-Adam Smith societies are often deemed to be hopelessly devoid of economic rationality. This seminar will for the most part work around quite a different narrative, as articulated economic thinking predates economics as a recognized scientific field. The Roman state, far from simply adjusting its policy to short-term events and risks, conceptualized its existential challenges and developed a set of pragmatic policies that aimed at ensuring its long-term sustainability as a hegemonic political entity. With a quantitative focus, we will aim at a global and dynamic narrative of the economic policies that managed to successfully bring the city-state of Rome to imperial status in the 2nd century BCE and then supported its further expansion, prosperity and survival until the Empire’s 7th century CE partial disintegration. We will cover the topic’s most major aspects, dealing with the set of legal, monetary, fiscal, political, military, and logistical policies implemented during the Roman imperial era.

Our focus will include - without being exhaustive - the implementation, expansion and management of Roman and provincial monetary and taxation systems, the question of the annona (feeding Rome and the army), the relationships with local authorities (the Empire as a federation of cities and ethnies), the relationships between the nascent imperial bureaucracy and private actors (eg mining, land management, road transport and shipping). We will take into account the geographic and chronologic diversity of the various solutions that were implemented: eg, the successive manners by which taxation was levied - unequal treaties and military plundering at first, then through private intermediaries and local elites, and finally through an Empire-dependent bureaucratic aristocracy.

Coin and ceramic finds will be used as a support when needed, the American Numismatic Society resources playing a critical role.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Scientific Methods in Archaeology
Federico Carò
Federico.Caro@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Mondays, 9am-12pm 

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 should have accomplished 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 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 Mediterranean and the Near East (ca. 1200-500 BCE)
Antonis Kotsonas & Lorenzo d’Alfonso
ak7509@nyu.edu; lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Thursdays, 9am-12pm

The collapse of the palatial centers in the Eastern Mediterranean ca. 1200 BCE was the catalyst for major socio-economic developments which gradually integrated the Mediterranean and brought extensive parts of this region in close contact with the Near East, especially from the turn of the 1st millennium BCE onward. This seminar explores the development of these phenomena over several centuries, until the major confrontations of ca. 500 BCE, which created previously unattested notions of polarity between east and west which inform cultural and political history to the present day.

The structure of the seminar will revolve around key concepts and themes, including migration and colonization, resilience and revolution, Orientalism, Orientalizing, and Orientalization. Moreover, we will also explore regionally-based case-studies from different areas of the Mediterranean to appreciate the engagement of different communities and social groups with imports and imitations, the role of foreign styles in the formation and the negotiation of social identities, and the appropriation of local styles and symbols of power by newcomers. Emphasis will be given to the range of modes of contact and cultural and economic exchange, and the agency of different populations and social groups: from rulers and warlords, to seafaring coastal populations, to indigenous communities extending from the Levant to Iberia. To this end, we will be examining a notable range of textual evidence (both literary and epigraphic) and different forms of material culture (luxury objects to bulk commodities) from historical, archaeological and art-historical perspectives. The seminar will also involve recurring visits to the Metropolitan Museum and engagement with relevant finds from a wide range of regions and cultures in the Mediterranean and the Near East.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Gender in the Ancient World
Daniela Wolin
daniela.wolin@yale.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Thursdays, 2-5pm 

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the gendered past by drawing on an array of evidence, such as ancient texts, artistic representations, archaeological remains, and osteological analyses. In order to understand the current state of research on gender, we will first review the impact of feminism on scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, focusing specifically on fields related to antiquity. We will also disentangle the concepts of sex and gender and explore how research on non-binary expressions of gender in past societies have been approached.

This foundation will allow us to delve into various themes in the ancient world that scholars have questioned, deconstructed, and/or reimagined through gender theory, including: masculinity, power, and authority; violence and warfare; division of labor; and sexuality and the body. By investigating a range of contexts within these themes – spanning the ancient New and Old Worlds – we will be able to make larger, cross-cultural comparisons about gender-related issues.

Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to 1) critically question approaches to and assumptions about gender in their regions of study, 2) engage with and integrate social theories on gender into their research, and 3) explore how the longue durée perspective and access to diverse case studies can allow scholars of the ancient world to contribute to contemporary dialogues on gender.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Reading of Akkadian: Myths in Mesopotamia
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Wednesdays, 11am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

In addition to consolidating the knowledge of Akkadian grammar the Advanced Reading of Akkadian Class is designed to introduce into the Standard Babylonian language typical of literary texts.

In this class we will read a selection of excerpts from Babylonian Myths including Atrahasis, the Gilgamesh Epic, the Anzu Myth and the Creation Epic Enuma Elish. We will analyze and compare former existing translations and establish our own understanding of the texts.

Requirements: At least one year of Akkadian

Grading: Reading of the texts (50%); Final (50%)

Permission of the instructor is required.

Creation, Iconoclasm, & Abduction of the Image: The Pictorial & Textual Discourse
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 11am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

In the ancient Near East divinities are not fixed entities, rather their personality is subject to change according to historical and cultural-specific contexts. As epithets, paraphernalia, emblematic animals, symbols, etc. may to some degree fluctuate between members of the pantheon, what are for us, as modern interpreters the possibilities to recognize a particular divinity? How do functions and competences defined in the textual sources relate to the pictorial representation?  Divine agency operates along a spectrum of divine presence which, according to context, might change with regard to the media – statue, symbol, astral body, emblematic animal, etc., while within the particular media itself one might observe some adherence to a traditional repertoire. Combinations of various iconographic elements drawn from different divinities and accumulated onto one can convey syncretism. With regard to the theological profile of a divinity as expressed in image and text context is important. In other words, cultic texts should be related to the cultic image, historical texts to historical reliefs and seals, etc. Texts such as hymns, in particular, may convey a very complex image of a specific divinity that in its various details of appearance and agency cannot be matched by the pictorial representation. What then are the cultural choices of reduction? How do the mental image or visual epiphany of a divinity and the actual statue relate to each other? How do image and text relate to each other in these various cultic, juridical, historical contexts and how are themes such as the creation, destruction, and abduction of the image negotiated in the media of text and image? 

Requirements: The research seminar is open to graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty. Any primary sources will be provided with translations, knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian will be advantageous though. Students are required to do short response papers to the readings and a presentation in combination with a written final paper.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Data Modelling and Querying
Sebastian Heath
sh1933@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Wednesdays, 2-5pm 

This course will survey approaches to creating and querying Ancient World datasets. The semester will begin with relational models that rely on columns and rows queried with SQL. Students will learn how to create databases using this approach and also how to share results on the public internet. We will next look at graph databases that define connections between entities. Our particular focus will be RDF-based triplestores that are accessed with the SPARQL query language. With these fundamental approaches in hand, students will work on topics such as spatial querying and mapping, data visualization, network analysis, and integrating structured data and textual corpora. Practical work will include acquiring, manipulating, and querying existing datasets found on the public internet. We will explore the set of best practices known variously as “Linked Open Data” and the “Semantic Web.” Efficient representation and querying of hierarchical typologies will also be a focus. Students will have ample time to develop their own digital resources as a final project, and this course is likely to be useful to students who have defined a research topic that that they believe can be improved by better use of well-structured digital resources. There are no prerequisites, but also no “holding back” in the expectation that students work to become confident users of the digital tools and methods we explore. It is a requirement that students bring their own notebook computers to class.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2020: 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.

Fall 2019: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Themes

Myth in the Ancient World
Beate Pongratz-Leisten & Roderick Campbell
bpl2@nyu.edu; rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm 

What is myth? Since the 19th century it has been defined in opposition to science or to history – a primitive, false mode of thought. Post-secular theory has, however, noted that the death of the sacred has been greatly exaggerated, and mythopoesis has never stopped. If an archaeology of contemporary thought shows that science did not free us from deep narrative, or the necessity of structuring our beliefs about and practices in the world, then we must confront the fact that humans have always ordered and organized experience in narrative form (among others). If myth is broadly understood as deep, meaningful story then we might ask what specific myths tell us about particular societies, how they relate to other genres of story, history, or more, broadly, representation. Do different societies construct myths in the same way? Do myths reveal fragments of (past?) worldview or do they mean in a different way than other forms of narrative?

Rather than considering ancient myth as an archaic state of the mind, this course approaches myth as one pragmatic analytical category beside others, which operates as a metaphor to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Ancient mythography, on the one hand, organizes and systematizes the divine world in terms of genealogy, hierarchy, and functions and roles of divinity.  On the other hand, as conceptual metaphor, myth through projecting the social human world onto an otherworldly level, provides explanatory models and orienting patterns of behavior for the human world. The seminar pursues several trajectories: one is to familiarize ourselves with important former approaches to myth. The other is to understand the difference between myth as conceptual metaphor that can inform the various media of text, ritual, and art, and myth as a particular narrative that found its form in a text. A third step will be to study how questions of central human concern found their way into mythography, that is questions of origin and creation, the origin of humankind, the experience of death and the quest for immortality, the aetiological and analogical functions of myth in ritual, the relationship between myth and ritual. We will compare material from the ancient Near East, the Classical World, and ancient China.

Requirements: The texts will be provided in translation. Students of the respective fields, however, are required to reengage with the primary sources when necessary for the discussion.

Students are required to do short response papers to the readings and a presentation in combination with a written final paper.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Fall 2019: Research Seminars

Advanced Study in Early Medieval Chinese Art & Archaeology
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001
Mondays, 1-4pm 

This course is intended to provide intensive analyses of primary sources and related scholarship in early medieval Chinese art & archaeology for graduate students who have sufficient knowledge of the field.

Ability to read Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor required.

From Greek to Arabic: Science and Scholarship across Culture & Time
Claire Bubb & Robert Hoyland
cc148@nyu.edu; rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Thursdays, 9am-12pm 

In the course of the eighth-tenth centuries AD thousands of texts were translated from foreign tongues (especially Greek and Persian) into Arabic. So extensive was this activity that modern Western scholars have labelled it a movement, “the translation movement”. The epithet is well deserved in that the activity was not sporadic or haphazard, but to a substantial degree thorough and systematic.  Thus almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek works that were available throughout the Byzantine empire and the Middle East were translated into Arabic. One of the key factors driving this movement were the demands for applied and theoretical scientific knowledge made by those engaged in running the vast Muslim empire, now stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan.  Most prominent were the illustrious subjects of philosophy and medicine, but also many texts were translated in the fields of engineering, agriculture, veterinary science, chemistry, astronomy, geometry, administrative studies, and so on – all essential aids to the smooth workings of an empire. Perhaps just as important, at least in the eyes of the Muslim rulers who patronized this activity, was the desire to emulate and outdo the Persian Emperors whom they had replaced, basing themselves in Baghdad, only a stone’s throw away from the old Persian imperial capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon.

One of the aims of this course will be to look at the debates about the nature of the “Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement” that have arisen in the twenty years since Dimitri Gutas published his influential Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (Routledge, 1998). A huge amount of very impressive scholarly effort has gone into further reconstruction work and there have been some notable advances in this arena.  The topic of transmission is more contested.  It used to consist just of good-natured reflections on the degree to which other cultures besides the Graeco-Roman world played a part (especially Persian and Indian) and the importance of Syriac as an intermediary language.  However, of late the discussions have become more heated.  At the heart of it is the “what-have-the-Arabs-ever-done-for-us” question. A liberal Islam-sensitive agenda has promoted the message that the West owes its knowledge of the classics, and hence its great leap forward in the Renaissance, to the Arabs. Although this sentiment contains a lot of truth (bar the use of the term “Arab”, which obscures the contribution of many people of very different ethnic and religious backgrounds), there have been reactions to it.  Sylvain Gougenheim, in his Aristote au Mont Saint Michel (Seuil, 2008), argues that knowledge of the classics did not die in “dark-age” Europe and there were characters like the twelfth-century Jacques de Venise who translated the classics directly from Greek into Latin, not via Arabic.  Jack Tannous (The Making of the Medieval Middle East, Princeton 2018) has emphasized, rightly, that Syriac Christianity had already absorbed classical learning before Islam and continued it and tutored their new rulers in it after the Arab conquests.  Beckwith in an interesting and pugnacious book (Warriors of the Cloisters, Princeton 2012) alleges that Central Asian Buddhist viharas were the inspiration for Middle Eastern madrasas and European universities and that both regions were indebted to Central Asia for the scientific method (including the crucial recursive style of argument).  Besides this, debates tend to focus on the more technical questions of who did what how, where and why (What was the role of the Abbasid caliphs in the translation movement? Why did no translation seem to take place under the Umayyads? Where did the manuscripts come from? What were the methods of translators? Was the “House of Wisdom” in Baghdad an institute for facilitating translation or just a library? How important were Greek texts for the rise of Islamic theology? Etc.).

We will approach the subject of this course in two principal ways. First, we will look at some key Greek texts, consider them on their own terms and in their own context before then considering their Arabic translation, how it was received, what purpose it served in this new culture, and so on. Second, we will discuss in depth certain topics that help to understand the nature of the originating/target civilization (Greco-Roman/Islamic) and the mechanics of the translation (socio-cultural background of the translators and commissioners, methods of translation, motives for translation etc).

Pre-requisites: Familiarity with Greek or Arabic will be helpful, but is not required

Assessment: a final paper based on research into one of the topics covered in this course

Permission of the instructors is required.

Anthropologies of Representation: Semiosis & Ontology
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Fridays, 2-5pm 

Representation, broadly conceived, is key to the mediation of human sensory experience and perception. It is, in other words, a fundamental aspect of human being in the world. This course will pursue this broad sense of representation through the strands of phenomenology, semiotics, and ontology that comprise contemporary approaches to things, materiality, relationality and being. While the material turn has attempted to put things back into the social and discursive even as ontological approaches have worked to destabilize Modern Western assumptions concerning their nature, semiotics has begun to make a return. Despite the sense that semiotics belongs to outmoded textual approaches to social theory, the fact remains that neither actor-networks nor relational ontologies exist in an unmediated reality beyond human semiosis. What might, for instance, an image be if objects are destabilized into networks and being is relational? What of icon, symbol or pattern when both mind and nature are mutually constituted through representations mediating reality? This course will tackle the issues surrounding putting semiotics back into things.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Curating Ancient Art
Niv Allon & Clare Fitzgerald
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org; cpf213@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Mondays, 9am-12pm

This course explores major issues in the curation of ancient art through study of past and present modes of collecting and display in museums. Topics will include acquisition and cultural property, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary narratives, the incorporation of new technologies and other modes of display, as well as audience development and engagement. Through these inquiries we will ask how we might bring visitors into meaningful conversation with the ancient world.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Buddhism in Central Asia
Sören Stark & Annette Juliano
ss5951@nyu.edu; alj328@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Thursdays, 2-5pm

Buddhism was the first proselytizing world religion to spread over large parts of the Ancient world, finding its way into countries and cultures very different from its area of origin. Central Asia played a major and multifaceted role in this process.

This class will focus on Western Central and its role in the dissemination and subsequent development of Buddhist communities, doctrines, and iconographies. We will systematically discuss the archaeological evidence – from the Hindukush regions of Kabulistan, Bamiyan, and Gandhara, over Bactria/Tokharistan, and Khorasan, up to the Chu and Talas area north of the Tianshan. This will enable us to approach questions about trade and patronage networks as important conduits for the original spread of Buddhism outside of India, the most important visual and non-visual media involved, and the artistic dialogue between Buddhist and non-Buddhist iconographies in Western Central Asia. Finally, we will look into the legacy of Buddhism after the coming of Islam to many regions of this vast area.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Advanced Reading of Akkadian: The Interface between Historical & Religious Texts
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Thursdays, 11am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

In addition to consolidating the knowledge of Akkadian grammar the Advanced Reading of Akkadian Class is designed to introduce into the Neo-Assyrian and Standard Babylonian grammar.

In this Akkadian Reading Seminar we will trace the textualization of two historical episodes in various text genres: the first one is King Esarhaddon’s ascension to the throne attested in the genres of the Assyrian oracles as well as his so-called Apology, which forms an extensive introduction to his prism inscription Nineveh A. The historical inscription will be contrasted with the textualization of the episode in the oracles spoken primarily by the goddess Ishtar including some other divinities. The second episode is the war between the two brothers Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria and his brother Shamash-sum-ukin, governor of Babylon, which is attested in the genres of royal inscription, letters, and the letter of the god Assur addressed to Ashurbanipal.

Requirements: At least one year of Akkadian

Grading: Reading of the texts (50%); Final (50%)

Permission of the instructor is required.

Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, & David Ratzan
sh1933@nyu.edu; tom.elliott@nyu.edu; david.ratzan@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3024-001
Wednesdays, 2-5pm 

This course will introduce students to the use of digital tools and computational methods in the study of the Ancient World. There are no technical prerequisites and the course will be of particular interest to early-stage graduate students who want a broad introduction that involves hands-on work. The course will progress through areas such as applying structure to text via XML-based markup languages, introduction to the programmatic manipulation of textual data, and how scholarly resources are shared on the public internet and edited in collaborative environments, including content management systems and GitHub. There will also be a focus on structured datasets stored in relational databases. Students will gain practical experience in acquiring, creating, querying, and displaying spatial data. The integration of visual media such as digital images and 3D models will be explored. There will also be frequent introductions to existing work in disciplines that are part of the study of the ancient world, including papyrology, numismatics, textual studies, history, and archaeology. Readings will introduce students to current trends in Digital Humanities and will encourage discussion of the impact digital methods and open-licensed content are having on research, teaching, and public engagement with scholarly practice. Over the course of the semester students will design and then implement a final project that can overlap with their existing research interests. Students are required to bring their own notebook computers to class. It is a requirement that students bring their own notebook computers to class.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Fall 2019: Other Courses

Intro to Ancient Egyptian I
ISAW-GA 1000-001
Marc J. LeBlanc
marc.leblanc@nyu.edu
Fridays, 10am-1pm

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.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2019: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Themes

Water Management in the Ancient World
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Daniel Potts, Sören Stark, & Stephanie Rost
daniel.potts@nyu.edu, soeren.stark@nyu.edu, sr4832@nyu.edu
Tuesdays, 2-5pm

Ancient water management, in particular irrigation, has featured prominently in theories on the evolution of socio-political complexity. As many early civilizations, in particular of the Old World, have developed in large river valleys, scholars have assumed a causal relationship between the organization of irrigation and the formation of early states. The underlying assumption was, and at times still is, that the management of water for irrigation and other purposes requires centralized control, which had set early farming communities in arid zones on a similar evolutionary trajectory. Many of the earlier theories, in particular Karl Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis of “Oriental Despotism” have been refuted based on archaeological and ethnographic evidence; however, the role of water management in early state formation is still a topic of considerable scholarly interest.

This class will cover three major themes related to water control and ancient societies: a) the theoretical debate on water management and state formation, b) the variety of water works in the ancient world, and c) alternate explanations of the role of water management in the development and functioning of ancient states. Theme a) will review the most influential essays that shaped the scholarly debate on water management’s impact on ancient societies. The body of literature will include, both, archaeological as well as ethnographic case studies. Ethnographic cases studies are particular relevant as they provide detailed insights into the social organization of water management to help formulate more effective research designs for a more nuanced understanding of ancient water management. b) The case studies discussed in this class will be chosen to reflect the great variety of water control in different parts of the world and environmental contexts. The discussion of these different case studies will focus on the interplay of the physical agency of water control structures and the social agency of managing them for specific purposes. This “global” overview will also include a review of the methodological approaches to the study of ancient water management. Armed with that knowledge the last theme c) of the class will evaluate the most recent theoretical approaches to the function of irritation in early state formation. 

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2019: Research Seminars

Art & Archaeology in Tang Chang'an
ISAW-GA 3010-001
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
Fridays, 2-5pm

This seminar examines diverse visual and material cultures in Chang'an, the capital of the Tang Empire and one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the medieval world. We will study both transmitted and excavated objects, with special attention to their urban, historical and archaeological contexts. We will explore a variety of mediums, such as architecture, sculpture, pictorial art, ceramics and silverware.

Permission of the instructor is required. Ability to read modern Chinese is required. Knowledge of Japanese and Classical Chinese is preferable.

The Hippocratic Corpus
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
Mondays, 9am-12pm

The Hippocratic Corpus comprises medical texts from diverse Greek authors, mostly dated to the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Generally considered, both in antiquity and by modern scholars, to be the heart of rational Greek medicine, the corpus has exerted an enormous influence on the development of western medical thought (and beyond). Scholarship is also increasingly attuned to connections between these texts and contemporary literature and philosophy. In this seminar, we will read through the entire corpus. In addition to our main focus on the content of the texts, we will also consider contemporary context and influences, with occasional reference to secondary literature as desirable.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Networks & Network Theory in Ancient History & Archaeology: Theory & Application
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Roderick Campbell & Sebastian Heath
rbc2@nyu.edu, sebastian.heath@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 2-5pm

From formal graphing to actor network theory and from social networks to society as networks, networks are ubiquitous in academic discourse from the humanities to the natural sciences. The very popularity of networks creates both opportunities and confusion. On the one hand, there are a myriad of approaches that use the word network, from social theory to computer applications, each with its own potential uses, and, on the other, it is not always clear what sort of network one is referring to when one speaks of network theory. Some theoretical approaches, like actor network theory and Michael Mann’s social power use networks as metaphorical constructs rather than employing formal graphing techniques, but it is not clear that these disparate approaches cannot be reconciled.

In half of this co-taught course Professors Roderick Campbell and Sebastian Heath will explore network theories and their applications across a range of disciplines of potential relevance to ancient history and archaeology. The other half of the seminar will be spent learning to use and apply software to various network theory applications. While there are no pre-requisites in terms of specific digital skills, we do ask students to be comfortable using their own computers during class and to be willing to learn new digital methods.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Wine Production and Wine Drinking in the Ancient World: From Domestication to the Symposium
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
Wednesdays, 2-5pm

Among the agricultural products, wine occupies from its very origin a special role in ancient societies. This role originates in the uncommon conditions needed for the cultivation of grapevine, as well as in the toxic properties, both essential for determining its high value. The seminar aims at introducing the participants to the basic botanic and agricultural notions behind wine production, as well as to means and proxies for its study in antiquity. From there the course will move to explore the origin, the techniques of cultivation, storage and production of wine, but above all its use and significance in the different historical contexts of ancient western Asia and the Mediterranean until the definition of the institution of the symposium, in ancient Greece.

Permission of the instructor is required. 

Current Debates in Ancient Art History & Archaeology
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Hallie Franks
hmf2@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 9am-12pm 

Rather than working around a theme or set of sources, this course aims to delineate some of the major current debates around and approaches to the study of ancient material culture. What kinds of questions are presently being asked of monuments and visual sources, both those recently discovered and long known? What theoretical approaches are being newly brought to bear on this material, and to what ends? What, in other words, are the kinds of issues that concern ancient art historians and archaeologists today, and how are they moving the study of ancient art in new directions? In looking to these questions, we will also look back and forward, situating recent studies in relationship to the scholarly history on which they depend.

Discussion topics may involve the use of new technologies, the construction of ancient “social imaginaries”, historiographical treatments of race, ethnicity, and gender, and environmental change. That said, topics for many of our classes will be determined on students’ fields, interests, and on research exercises. In addition to exposing students to a variety of approaches to ancient material culture, the hope is that this class will help each student to form a picture of their field as a whole and to position their research—present or future—in relationship to contemporary scholarship.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Greek and Mediterranean Ceramics: Material Culture and Historical Interpretation
Antonis Kotsonas
ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-003
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm

Pottery is the commonest class of finds in the archaeological record for much of the history of the Mediterranean, and forms the backbone of a range of approaches to the ancient world. This seminar will provide an interpretative survey of Mediterranean ceramics focused on the ways in which this body of material is – and can be – used to address wide-ranging research questions on ancient history. Emphasis will be placed on Greek ceramics of the 1^stmillennium BCE because of their iconic status in western art history and in world museums, and of the extensive attention they have attracted in the scholarship. However, we will also engage with research on pottery from other regions and chronological periods.

Students will develop an understanding of diverse methods of ceramic analysis and their significance for historical interpretation, and they will engage with historical or art-historical discourses which focus on ceramics but are central to the study of the ancient Mediterranean. The range of issues to be explored includes: potters, painters, and workshops; the circulation of ceramics and its relevance to the study of human mobility, trade and the ancient economy; ceramic style, identity and commensality; data collection strategies and analytical techniques; ceramic chronology and classification and the ways in which they inform historical chronology and interpretation; iconographic and iconological approaches to vase-painting and their significance for the study of ancient visual culture; the reception of Greek and Mediterranean ceramics and its impact on collection strategies and museum displays in the modern world.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Landscapes, Monumentality, Ritual, and the Interface between Anatolia, Assyria and the Northern Levant during the First Millennium BCE, Part II
Beate Pongratz-Leisten & David Kertai
bpl2@nyu.edu; dkertai@yahoo.com
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesday, 9am-12pm

 This course continues the exploration of the fall seminar on Landscapes, Urban Design, and Monumentality, this time, with a focus on three major themes: the perception and conceptualization of nature, the sacralizing of space and demarcation of controlled territory by means of architecture and ritual, and the palace as “Gesamtkunstkunstwerk.” We will explore the conceptualization of nature in art, and its recreation in the royal gardens; the significance of place in the collective imagination and social memory as represented by landscape feature including rock carvings, sacred springs and open-air monuments. We will further pursue the question of the inclusion of landscape features in the Hurrian and Hittite Treaties as well as in the Neo-Assyrian Ritual. Water played an immensely important role in the subsistence of the ancient cities and translated into the marking of significant parts of waterworks by means of rock reliefs. How do we have to understand such monuments? Were they places of constant ritual concern or just markings of human intervention into the landscape? How did ritual and sacred architecture define the cultic topography of the state rituals, and how did this cultic topography reflect and delineate the territory of the empire? The last part will be dedicated to the Assyrian palace as Gesamtkunstwerk. The palace can be considered the physical manifestation of royal ideology and extension of royal agency. The content of the building inscriptions emphasizing the use of lavish construction materials assembled for the palace, the scale, the shape, the decorative schemes, and building techniques demonstrate that these do not serve disinterested aesthetics. Rather, these texts buzz with the key words that reflect the impressive appearance and luminosity of the building eliciting admiration and a sense of wonder in the beholder. Textual and archaeological sources will serve to reconstruct the materiality of the palace as Gesamtkunstwerk.

Permission of the instructor is required

Spring 2019: Other Courses

Advanced Ancient Egyptian II
ISAW-GA 1003-001
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm
Small Conference Room, 6th Floor

Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I," ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II," and ISAW-GA 1002, "Advanced Ancient Egyptian I" (or equivalent coursework).

Permission of the instructor is required.

A Retroactive Manifesto for Mesopotamian Architecture
David Kertai
dkertai@yahoo.com
ISAW-GA 3014-001
Tuesdays, 2-4pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

It is exactly 30 years since Rem Koolhaas published his Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In this book, Koolhaas reconstructs the implicit manifesto behind the architectural experiments resulting in the birth of the modern metropolis. The book deals with a dilemma that is familiar to archaeologist: how to reconstruct architectural concepts and ideas when its creators did not make them explicit?

The common approach would be to scavenge ancient sources and make comparisons with buildings that are as similar in time, function, and place as possible. The result has not been very satisfactory and has mostly led to tracing of similarities in floorplans and finding the origin of architectural elements such as columns. Such analyses are a poor substitute for the lack of architectural treaties or for the general absence of contemporary sources such as stories set in the palace, diaries etc.

This course is an experiment in creating a different type of architectural history. We will use modern architectural theories as a framework to look anew at Mesopotamian architecture. This course is about asking different questions and finding new topics to explore. Students will become familiar with Mesopotamian architecture as well as with different architectural theories. Each class is centered on a topic such as the similitude between cities and buildings, the constitutive role of ornament, the tectonics of mud etc. Relevant theoretical texts will be discussed and contextualized. Each class will explore its topic through a case study on a specific Mesopotamian building.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2018: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Periods

The Later First Millennium BCE
Alexander Jones and Claire Bubb
aj60@nyu.edu; cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2-5pm

The period from the mid 4th century to the end of the 1st millennium BCE saw enormous political change, both east and west. Power fluctuated among smaller states and empires across the Eurasian continent, ultimately to be largely subsumed by the two massive empires of the dawn of the Common Era, the Roman and the Han. To the west, the naval powerhouse of Carthage struggled against the rapidly expanding Roman Republic, while the aftermath of the campaigns of Alexander the Great left the Kingdoms of the Diadochi to navigate a newly broadened Hellenistic World, stretching all the way to the edge of the Mauryan empire in modern India. To the east, the gradual decentralization of power in the Zhou dynasty led to the contentious Warring States period, leading eventually to the unification of China under the Qin and later the Han dynasty. Against this tumultuous backdrop, the period saw significant cultural and intellectual innovation in many different fields. This course will offer a broad picture of the changes that unfolded during this enormously eventful timeframe, attempting to draw out lines of continuity and contact across space and time.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Fall 2018: Research Seminars

Advanced Study in Chinese Art and Archaeology
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001
Wednesdays, 2-5pm

This course is intended to provide intensive analyses of primary sources and related scholarship in Chinese art & archaeology for graduate students who have sufficient knowledge of the field. 

Ability to read Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor required.

History of Money
Gilles Bransbourg
gb1077@nyu.edu; gbransbourg@numismatics.org
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Wednesdays, 9am-12pm

Money is probably more ancient than writing, as most of the earliest Mesopotamian tablets already deal with financial accounts. And money will survive handwriting as it is evolving with the digital revolution. However, it is so ubiquitous that most users of money would not be able to provide a clear definition of it.

This seminar will explore the conditions that surround its birth, its various (de)materializations through time and space, as well as how its functions evolved within the societies it contributed to shaping. It will not follow a linear, chronological path, but will rather adopt a concept-based structure, where several key issues linked to the subject are exposed in a sequential fashion.

Since many of the concepts that have led to money as we know it nowadays were developed in Antiquity, a significant proportion of the seminar’s materials will deal with that period’s coinage and monetary systems. At the same time, the seminar will explore some of the alternative forms of exchanges that have been developed by societies, which do not belong to this tradition. This will allow a fruitful dialogue between economic thinking, ethnography and history. No knowledge of economic modelling is needed, economic concepts will be explored only to the extant they allow a better understanding of historical phenomena and developments. The seminar will approach some of the more contentious topics that increased leverage of money have created in societies, past and present.

Students from many different fields of knowledge will be able to use the course’s relevant contents in order to help them further their research and reflections, particularly in areas but not limited to history, classics, economics, and business. The course’s structure will foster open discussions and participants will be encouraged to contribute by suggesting specific topics that are relevant to the seminar’s broad subject, and then present their findings during short presentations.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Global Approaches to the Ancient World
J. Andrew Dufton
andrew.dufton@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Mondays, 2-5pm

What does it mean to undertake a global study of the ancient world? An ongoing push for academic interdisciplinarity has extended to the study of the past, encouraging both students and scholars to bring their materials into direct dialogue with other regions, eras, and disciplines. How might we effectively craft this type of comparative scholarship, marking meaningful similarities across widely disparate people, places, and periods?

This course explores different scholarly approaches to a global antiquity, including Mediterraneanization, globalization, network theory, and economic or ecological models of connectivity. Through a combination of theoretical overview and practical case studies, we will explore some of the ways academics are working across chronological and geographic boundaries. Weekly discussions will address the strengths and weaknesses of this latest fashion for thinking big, and assessments will focus on applying these ideas to students’ own research. Ultimately, the course will provide the robust intellectual framework needed for a comparative take on the global past.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Late Antique Arabia and the Rise of Islam
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm

Medieval accounts of Muhammad’s life, and the modern ones that are based on them, focus almost wholly on the Mecca-Medina region of Arabia and on the period of the prophet Muhammad’s lifetime (ca. 570-632). Yet if we are to gain a better appreciation of the context of the rise of Islam we need to cast our net wider and deeper. In the three centuries before Muhammad was born Arabia underwent a series of momentous changes. First, the smaller kingdoms of ancient Yemen that had endured since at least the middle of the first millennium BC are replaced in the second half of the third century CE by the single kingdom of Himyar, based at a new capital, Zafar. Second, the pagan gods spoken of in Arabian inscriptions for over a millennium vanish from the epigraphic record and instead it is to the one merciful God, lord of the heavens, that Arabians pay homage.  Third, Arabic begins to be written down for the first time. Fourth, there is a substantial decline in settlement in a number of areas of this land mass. This course will explore these and other changes and consider in what way they played a part in the rise of Islam and the Arab conquests.

Knowledge of Arabic and permission of the instructor are required.

Colonization in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Black Sea
Antonis Kotsonas
ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Fridays, 2-5pm

Permission of the instructor is required. 

Landscapes, Urban Design, Monumentality, and the Interface between Anatolia, Assyria and the Northern Levant during the First Millennium BCE, Part I
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Lorenzo d'Alfonso
bpl2@nyu.edu; lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesday, 2-5pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

The end of the Bronze Age is associated in Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia with a reorganization of sociopolitical institutions, in some regions characterized by a claim of continuity with the legacy of the Late Bronze Age territorial states, in others as a strict change. An adequate understanding of this period once named a dark age is allowing us new insights into the definition and growth of the Assyrian empire during the first centuries of the first millennium and the nature of the growing intercultural contacts between the Syro-Anatolian political entities and Assyria. Social-political dynamics such as the emergence of the Syro-Anatolian kingdoms after the collapse of the Hittite empire, the process of sedentarization of Aramean groups and the emergence of the Assyrian empire were accompanied by the redefinition of use and concepts of space, landscape and population.

What were the landscape visions developed by these various political entities? One characteristic element is the monumentality of urban centers and how space was turned into a semiotic space through deliberate human intervention and meaning making. Landscape as physically built environment is both context for human interaction and socio-political activity as well as a symbolic system of signifiers with wide-ranging affordances activated by social actors to position themselves and others (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010). This seminar will investigate topography as practice and knowledge put to use (Duncan and Levy 1993) and the way in which social formations are made visible on the ground; topography as a strategy of domination and the way it reinforces boundaries, secures norms and treats social conventions as unquestioned social facts; the iconic images of urban centers: buildings, statues, steles, gardens and how they have been incorporated into the imaginings of identity; the indexical signs identifying specific representational and perceptual spaces; as well as at the way landscape features such as mountains, rivers, coastal areas alongside architectural features and engineering interventions were produced to create a semiotic space. Case studies will involve the centers of the Syro-Hittite states as well as the residences and provincial centers in the Assyrian empire.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Problems in the Archaeology of Mesopotamia and Iran
Daniel Potts
daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 11am-2pm

This seminar will consider a variety of issues in the archaeology of Mesopotamia and Iran from late prehistory through the end of the Bronze Age. Emphasis is on interaction between the states of southern Mesopotamia and their counterparts in both the Iranian lowlands (Khuzestan) and on the Iranian Plateau.

Reading knowledge of French and/or German and permission of the instructor are required.

Ritual Text and Ritual Performance in the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisen
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-003
Thursdays, 9-11am
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

Among other media culture is constituted and articulated also in cultural performances including ceremonies, festivals, theater, and games. Inspired by theater studies, in the eighties and nineties, interdisciplinary research of ethnology, anthropology, religious studies, and historical studies concerned with cultural performance of any kind promoted the performative turn by emphasizing the body and bodily action over the thought and mind. This move towards action, i.e. the doing of things entailed a move away from the text. More recently anthropology and sociology sidestepped these mind/body, thought/action dichotomies by introducing the concept of social drama and emphasizing social interaction. Within the last decade ritual studies have turned towards a more precise definition of ritual versus theater and performance and have reintroduced the complex relationship between text and performance. The seminar Ritual Text and Ritual Performance pursues a similar direction by exploring the various forms of ritual texts transmitted in ancient Near Eastern literature; the relationship between ritual text and ritual performance, i.e. of whether and how far we are allowed to consider cuneiform ritual texts as scripts for the execution of ritual action; the role of narrative for ritual performance; the combination of incantation, prayer, and action within the ritual complex; the memoria-aspect of ritual constituting identity, order, and continuity. We will combine the reading of primary sources with the theoretical approaches.

Knowledge of Akkadian and permission of the instructor are required.

Special Topics in Digital Humanities for the Ancient World: 3D Modelling and Virtual Realities
Sebastian Heath
sh1933@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Thursdays, 2-5pm 

The premise of this course is that virtual representations of the ancient world are becoming increasingly important to both research and teaching as the ability to acquire, create, work with, and share such digital resources becomes less expensive and more widely available. Accordingly, the course will combine hands-on experience with creating and using virtual representations of ancient material culture, including objects and architectural spaces, with a review of current practices being employed by museums, archaeologists, and other researchers. In all aspects of the course, the emphasis is on using these highly visual technologies to tell stories and to communicate and illustrate a wide range of recoverable aspects of ancient societies. Students will use such tools as the introductory 3D modeling software SketchUp, the more capable open-source 3D-suite Blender, game editing software, and tools for making 3D models from photographs. We will explore the acquisition, editing, creation and sharing of richly-textured 3D models of real objects as well as create and explore immersive virtual environments. Readings will include reports of ongoing work as well as discussions of why "3D" is important and how it is being used in teaching and in the field. Students will often be using their own computers and should be willing to apply themselves energetically to learning the digital skills the class introduces.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2018: Other Courses

Advanced Ancient Egyptian I: The Ramesseum Papyri
ISAW-GA 1002-001
Marc J. LeBlanc
marc.leblanc@nyu.edu
Mondays, 10am-1pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

This course will focus on the so-called Ramesseum Papyri. Students will read texts in a variety of genres from this collection and consider the historical and archaeological context for these papyri and associated objects.

Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I," and ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II" (or equivalent coursework).

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2018: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Periods

From Late Antiquity to Early Islam in the Eurasian World: 600-800 AD
Robert Hoyland and Sören Stark
rgh2@nyu.edu; soeren.stark@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

The seventh and eighth centuries of the common era witness an enormous amount of change. Old empires vanish (the Persian, Turkic and, in all but name anyway, the Byzantine), new empires emerge (Arab, Tibetan, Tang, Khmer). Some religions boom (Islam, Buddhism), some wane (Zoroastrianism), others mutate (Judaism, Christianity, Manicheism).  Elites seem to be rapidly replaced (it has been observed for Europe and the Near East there are hardly any noble families that maintain their status intact across these two centuries). Patterns of trade routes change (Red Sea ports of the sixth century seem to all go out of use, but new ones emerge across the Indian Ocean, and some overland routes are reconfigured).  Greek, a lingua franca for a millennium or so, is discontinued, but Persian, even though the empire that supported it disappears, reinvents itself as a courtly language of Central Asia, and Arabic enjoys a meteoric rise from nothing to world language. In this course we will explore these and other phenomena and discuss the degree to which the changes reflect long-term processes or were the outcome of pandemics or climatic events. We will also consider in what ways, if at all, the different cultures and polities in this region were linked to one another or were interdependent, and if so whether stresses in one area could therefore influence developments across Eurasia.  The emphasis will inevitably be on change given how many actors come and go in these two centuries, but we will also try to elucidate the continuities that inevitably do exist.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2018: Research Seminars

Early Chinese Manuscripts and Processes of Textual Formation (ca. 3rd-1st Centuries BCE)
Ethan Harkness
harkness@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001
Fridays, 2:00pm-5:00pm 

This seminar will examine a variety of recently excavated early Chinese manuscripts with a focus on those technical subjects specifically exempted from the censorship policy enacted by the Qin authorities in the late 3rd century BCE. When possible, archaeologically recovered texts will be read in conjunction with passages from transmitted counterparts such as Huainanzi, Huangdi neijing, and Jiuzhang suanshu to gain insight into the many ways texts can evolve naturally or be shaped by guiding hands. Variant witnesses among excavated manuscripts will also be closely compared to better understand concepts such as early Chinese authorship, editorial practices, regional idiosyncrasies, and other elements of textual production and transmission. No previous experience with Chinese paleography or technical subjects will be assumed, but students should be willing to grapple with the detailed mechanics of texts in subjects such as divination, medicine, and mathematics.

Knowledge of Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor are required.

Food and Diet in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Thursdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm

This seminar will consider food and diet in Greco-Roman antiquity through three different lenses: science, practice, and culture. Beginning with an overview of theories of nutrition and digestion, we will discuss medical advice on diet, which had an outsized role in both preventative and therapeutic medicine. Next, we will move to the practicalities of diet, considering both textual and archaeological sources; topics will include agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting (both natural and staged), the role of sacrifice, and the role of the state (military diet, grain doles, etc.). Finally, we will turn to the culture surrounding food, including philosophical attitudes, the ethnography of diet, cookbooks, and satire.

Ability to read Greek and/or Latin and permission of the instructor are required.

Holistic Approaches to Modelling Ancient Political Economies
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Fridays, 9:00am-12:00pm

The economies of ancient polities have long been a topic of relevance to disciplines as varied as classics, anthropology, sociology and economics. Nevertheless, and despite significant cross-disciplinary conversation, major differences separate humanities and social science approaches. While the former tend to focus on the particular and specific to the exclusion of overarching theoretical frameworks, the latter tend to be more concerned with model building than with details. These varied approaches also tend to be centred on (or biased by) different sources and types of data. Much more rarely are attempts made to synthesise different disciplines, approaches and bodies of theory, striving to come to holistic perspectives on what are inherently fragmentary objects of study.

This course will build an interdisciplinary holistic approach to ancient political economies in three components. The first part of the course will explore major theoretical approaches to ancient political economies across different disciplines including anthropological archaeology, sociology, history and economics. The second component of the course will introduce a range of methodologies used to analyse past political economic systems, their strengths and their shortcomings. The third and largest component will consist of working through case studies on a number of scales from macro-sociology to institutional history. In addition to exposing students to a range of disciplinary approaches to political economy, their strengths and weaknesses and appropriate scale of analysis, a major goal of this course will be to assemble a flexible toolkit for the construction of holistic political economic models.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Social Groups & Material Cultures: The Archaeology of Ethnicity and Culture Contact
Yitzchak Jaffe
yj14@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Mondays, 2:00-5:00pm

This course will survey the relationship between material culture and social groups and how this in turn plays into discussions on culture contact in archaeological studies. It will be divided into two parts: the first will provide a foundation in key works addressing aspects of group social identity and their archaeological modes of study, including: ethnicity, race, genetics, styles, social class, communities and nationalities. The second part will build on the first to examine the dominant paradigms in studies of culture contact and macro level inter-group interactions, including the notions of diffusion, trade, migration, World Systems, colonialism and globalization. The goal of the class is not to instill any one particular perspective, but instead to provide students with a broad exposure and sound foundation to these topics and theoretical approaches.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Ancient Near Eastern Literature: Topics, Issues, Approaches
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

In the last decades the category of ‘literature’ in the Ancient Near East has come repeatedly under scrutiny. It included among other topics fierce discussions about how to define the literary corpus, orality and aurality, the notion of genre, the validity of historical references in literary works and the fluid boundaries between ‘literature’ and ‘historiography,’ where to locate literary production - school, temple, or palace, and how far the production process determined functional and pragmatic aspects of literary works. 

To isolate literature from its historical context as l’art pour l’art aesthetics favoring formalistic features over pragmatic and historical concerns certainly does not do justice to ancient literary works. While formalistic features such as the use of literary dialects might operate as a way of categorization, recently, due to the nature of the texts, narratology as well as fictionality have been considered equally important. Literature rather should be defined as a particular medium alongside other media as part of the social and cultural discourse. Moreover, what makes an oeuvre historically significant, is not necessarily established by the qualities of the work or by the author but by its history of reception and its intertextuality and intermediality. The seminar investigates what constituted literary works, how literary works became part of the stream of tradition, were affected by and affected historical conditions, and entered intertextual and intermedial relations.

The research seminar is open to graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty. Students are required to do read primary texts in Akkadian and to do short response papers to the readings as well a presentation in combination with a written final paper.

Knowledge of Akkadian and permission of the instructor are required.

Alexander's Conquest of Iran and its Aftermath
Daniel Potts
daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3020-001
Wednesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

This seminar will examine the archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence pertaining to Alexander's conquest of Iran and the region's subsequent fate under his Seleucid successors. The geographical emphasis will be on western Iran (Media, Susiana, Persis). The chronological cut-off point will be the conquest of Susa by the Arsacids in the mid-2nd century BC. No prerequisites but ability to read French and German will be a great advantage.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Mapping and Data Visualization for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Wednesdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm

This course considers tools and methods for the effective communication of scholarly research through data-driven maps and the visualization of small and large datasets. By frequent hands-on use and demonstration of their work, students will gain confidence in using cloud-based tools and software that runs directly on their own computers. A constant focus will be the ability of such tools and software to import, manipulate and export data in standard formats and to enable sharing of the maps and visualizations that students create. While this is not a programming course, students will use the Python language throughout their work. Students will also gain expertise in data interchange formats such as the Javascript Object Notation (JSON). Topics stressed over the course of the term will include the temporal component of spatial data as well as interoperability between data sets. Assigned readings will survey current approaches to the practice and theory of applying digital methods to historical and archaeological research and teaching. A particular outcome for students will be the ability to assess the relevance of both current and future tools for their own work. The majority of assignments will be drawn from the ancient world as ISAW defines it, though students with other interests can enroll. Students are encouraged to pursue their own research as part of the required final project. It is expected that students will bring their own computers to class. While there are no prerequisites, participants should be willing to commit considerable time to rapidly gaining the technical skills that will be presented in class.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2018: Other Courses

Narratives of Power in Text and Image
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-001
Thursdays, 11:00am-1:00pm
6th Floor, Large Conference Room

In the ancient East most of the production in the arts occurred in the context of the temple and the court and was destined to promote a particular world view and particular royal image. The focus of this tutorial will be on the many monuments and artifacts that combine text and image in order to explore their difference in narrativity.  The goal of the seminar will be to investigate their relations from a variety of perspectives to explore how multimodality, multimediality, the shape of the carrier of writing intensified or hid the intended message and promoted inferential and interpretative processes.

Knowledge of Akkadian and permission of the instructor are required.

Fall 2017: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World: Themes

Beyond Content: Materiality, Spaciality, Visuality, and Iconicity of Text and Image in Antiquity
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Roderick Campbell
bpl2@nyu.edu; rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm

Generally, image and language, discourse and icon are considered disjunctive symbolic systems. These distinctions even resulted in scholarly discourses that were classified as the “linguistic turn” and the “iconic turn.” In this approach, writing is considered phonographic only, rendering the spoken word. Writing in its materiality, however, operates on various levels, the structural one, i.e. as medium in space. Here notational iconicity operating with spaces, indentations, paragraphs, etc. comes to the fore; the semiotic one, i.e. as referencing hidden or invisible cognitive contents; and the performative one, which emphasizes the operative function of reading and writing as cultural technique.

Recently in scholarship the notion of notation has been investigated in the broader scope of all kinds notational systems including mathematics, choreography, musical scores and more (Schriftbildlichkeit). In our seminar, beyond writing, we will look at ancient maps and the representation of time as notational systems.

Moreover, many monuments and artifacts in antiquity combine text and image. The goal of the seminar will be to investigate their relations from a variety of perspectives to explore how multimodality, multimediality, the shape of the carrier of writing intensified or hid the intended message and promoted inferential and interpretative processes.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2017: Research Seminars

Introduction to Ancient Astronomical Traditions
Alexander Jones
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001
Mondays, 9:00am-12:00pm

Four Old World traditions of astronomy are well attested through textual sources and, to a lesser extent, material culture. Those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece became interconnected at various periods through transmissions and adaptations, whereas Chinese astronomy appears to have developed with little or no contact with the traditions of the Near East and Mediterranean until the mid first millennium CE, offering interesting possibilities for comparative study. In this course, the focus will be on the character of the surviving evidence, and on the methods and applications of ancient astronomies. Knowledge of one or more of the relevant ancient languages is a desideratum.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The Transmission of Ancient Science into Arabic
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3007-001
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

This course will explore the different paths along which knowledge of Antiquity passed into Muslim intellectual culture and how it was received and interpreted.  The focus will not just be on the so-called ‘translation movement’, but also the broader question of how pre-Islamic histories and cultures fared in the Middle East after the Arab conquests.  There was plausibly a considerable amount of translation from Middle Persian and Sanskrit and maybe even from Central Asian/Buddhist texts, but too little work has been done on this to be sure.  Greek texts translated into Arabic receive vastly more attention, because they are regarded as crucial to understanding how classical learning was conveyed to Europe and because classicists are always hoping to find lost Greek works preserved in Arabic.  There has also been an interest in understanding how the Islamic world dealt with the classical legacy (reception history).

 Permission of the instructor and knowledge of Arabic and Greek are required.

Archaeology of Anatolia from the Neolithic to the Hellenistic Period
Lorenzo d’Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Fridays, 2:00-5:00pm

Within Ancient Western Asia the archaeology of Anatolia has a specific position. Separated from Mesopotamia and the Levant by the imposing Tauros Mountains, Anatolia maintained communication, kept up with the developments taking place in the Fertile Crescent, and developed its own peculiar organization of complex group societies. Starting with the Neolithic, the course will explore the archaeological data reflecting the first evidence of social hierarchies and regional power, the development of metallurgy in the EBA, the creation of an empire in the mountains with a territorial organization, and the many and diverse developments and ultimate fall of this empire. We will then go on to look at the remains of then-new kingdoms of Urartu, Phrygia and Lydia, already in direct contact with archaic Greece, as well as the impact of the Achaemenid conquest, up to the Hellenistic period. The course will offer an overview of the most important historical and archaeological themes connected with the ancient history of Anatolia; for each period, one key Anatolian site will be presented with the scope to make students familiar with the relation between theory, historical reconstruction, and the rough archaeological data on which they are based. Presentation, final test / paper.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Art, Archaeology, & Museology
Lillian Tseng and Jennifer Chi
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu; jyc4@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Wednesdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm

This seminar explores how museology facilitates the study of art and archaeology in the ancient world. We will learn how museums function as cultural institutions through curatorial efforts in acquisitions, exhibitions, conservation and publications. Special attention will be paid to the importance of considering how decisions made around the way in which we install ancient material can significantly affect a viewer’s interpretation and perception of a given artifact or groups of artifacts. Issues for discussion include the history and development of museums from Antiquity to present, narrative methodologies that are currently employed with ancient art exhibitions, the role that cultural property plays in the selection of objects for exhibitions, acquisition and permanent installations, and how digital assets are now changing the way we display art.

Prof. Lillian Tseng and Dr. Jennifer Chi will lead the seminar together. Guest speakers will be invited to address different topics. The class will take place not only in the seminar room and the exhibition hall at ISAW but also in various museums and galleries in New York City. Through the guidance of Dr. Chi, students will participate in the installation of the upcoming exhibition, “Restoring the Minoans: Sir Arthur Evans and Elizabeth Price,” at ISAW in the fall of 2017 as well as the planning of the spring of 2018 exhibition.

 Permission of the instructors is required.

Shang Visual Culture: Beyond Decoration vs. Representation
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Fridays, 9:00am-12:00pm

Shang visual culture, especially that seen on Shang bronzes, has been the contested ground for some of the greatest scholarly battles in the study of Early China. What do the mesmerizing patterns mean? Are they shamanistic masks, references to myth, depictions of spirits, or merely the fanciful elaboration of decorative patterns? Or is the study of Shang visual culture an inherently doomed enterprise – permitting only narrow formalist study at best; anachronistic, subjective or arbitrary speculation at worst?

This seminar will not only explore the history of the debates about the meaning and content of Shang visual culture, but also, drawing on the anthropology of art, look into the wider problem of studying the visual cultures of non-Western traditions. In addition to engaging broadly with contemporary theory, we will also review what is known about the social, political and religious context of Shang visual culture – combing relevant materials from the oracle-bones, Shang archaeology and later texts with a close and systematic analysis of the visual cultural materials themselves. Finally, the seminar will end with an attempt to historicize Shang visual culture within the long traditions of Chinese art.

Prerequisites: work ethic and an inquisitive mind. Permission of the instructor is required.

Assyrians, Urartians, Manneans, Medes, and Others
Daniel Potts
daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Wednesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

This seminar will examine the archaeological and historical evidence available on the indigenous Iron Age populations of western Iran (mod. Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Luristan). It will also investigate the archaeological and historical evidence of the Assyrian and Urartian presence in these regions. No prerequisites but ability to read French and German will be a great advantage.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The History of Assyria in Ancient and Modern Historiography
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Martin Worthington
bpl2@nyu.edu; mw179@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 11:00am-1:00pm
6th Floor, Large Conference Room

This seminar is not geared towards an event-oriented history of Assyria. It is also not concerned with the social science oriented history including quantitative sociological and economic history modeled after the natural sciences and its claim for objective truth. Rather than a history from below, the emphasis is on the study of the textual production as it related to or occurred at the Assyrian courts throughout their history and on how ancient historiography proceeded from facts or empirical events to create a coherent story about the deeds of the king that met the expectations linked with the office of rulership, which were informed by a longstanding tradition and the world view of the time. We will educate ourselves as to how to interpret the various text genres that Assyriologists have classified as chronicles and annals by critically re-evaluating our modern taxonomy applied to the ancient texts and explore how these ‘genres’ interface with what we tend to subsume under fiction and literature. In addition to such critical attitude toward the text, informed by postmodern literary theory and linguistics, linguistic features of the ancient texts and the shape of the tablet as well as the context of the text will illuminate our interpretation of the ancients’ intentionality. We will explore to what degree the writings were indeed concerned with the past, what the inserting of ‘historical factual data’ was aiming at and further critically evaluate the assumption that history needs always to be written in a narrative.

The goal of the seminar is threefold: 1) to familiarize ourselves with the various text categories, 2) to acquire knowledge in the various dialects of the Assyrian language as well as in the ‘hymnic epical dialect’ by reading primary sources related to the general discussion and 3) to acquire an insight into the cultural and intellectual setting in which historiography was written by the ancient scholars for the political elites.

Permission of the instructor and knowledge of Akkadian are required.

Historiographies of Ancient Egypt
Emily Cole
ec124@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3020-001
Thursdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm 

The political history of Ancient Egypt has been constructed and viewed largely through the eyes of Manetho, a native Egyptian writing during the Hellenistic period in the Third Century BCE. Modern scholars continue to use his periodization of Egyptian history into dynasties in order to construct Egypt’s historical narrative. However, it is important to ask how this structure affects our understanding of the Egyptian past. What is the nature of Egyptian historiography, both as it was understood by the Egyptians and then later interpreted by foreign authors and modern scholars?

This seminar will take as a starting point an examination of Manetho’s work and its role in creating the divisions of Egyptian history used by scholars to this day. For the first part of the course, we will then move backward in time in an attempt to understand pharaonic Egyptian concepts of history, time, and antiquity. In the second part of the course, we will look at the ways in which Greek and Roman historical writing was applied to Egyptian history before looking at the place of those Classical traditions in the formation of Egyptology as a modern discipline.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, David Ratzan, and Patrick J. Burns
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu; tom.elliott@nyu.edu; david.ratzan@nyu.edu; pjb311@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3024-001
Mondays, 2:00pm-5:00pm

This course will introduce students to the use of digital tools and computational methods in the study of the Ancient World. There are no technical prerequisites and the course will be of particular interest to early stage graduate students who want a broad introduction that involves hands-on work. The course will progress through areas such as applying structure to text via XML-based markup languages, introduction to the programmatic manipulation of textual data, and how scholarly resources are shared on the public internet and edited in collaborative environments, including GitHub. There will also be a focus on structured datasets stored in relational databases. Students will gain practical experience in acquiring, creating, querying, and displaying spatial data. Visual approaches such as 3d modeling will also be explored. There will be frequent introductions to existing work in disciplines that are part of the study of the ancient world, including papyrology, numismatics, textual studies, history, and archaeology. Readings will introduce students to current trends in Digital Humanities and will encourage discussion of the impact digital methods and open-licensed content are having on research, teaching, and public engagement with scholarly practice. Over the course of the semester students will design and then implement a final project that can overlap with existing research interests. Students are required to bring their own notebook computers to class.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Spring 2017 Research Seminars

Art and Archaeology of the Iranian Plateau and Western Central Asia during the Early Islamic Periods (7th-12th Centuries CE)
Sören Stark and Martina Rugiadi
soeren.stark@nyu.edu; martinarugiadi@gmail.com
ISAW-GA 3009-001
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

The conquest of the Iranian Plateau and the oases of Western Central Asia by Muslim armies since 636 and the subsequent inclusion of these areas into the Caliphate marked the beginning of a profound cultural transformation in these territories. However, this was a gradual and multifaceted process, that was different in the various regions of Iran, in the Indo-Iranian borderlands, and in the territories beyond the Amu-Darya (Mā warāʾ al-nahr). In this course we will follow up these changes, leading to the formation of the classical Islamic culture of the Turko-Persian world, down to the Mongol conquest. Taking the perspective of archaeology and art history, we will specifically look at aspects such as the transformation of old and the appearance of new elites, new economic trends, new forms of urbanism, innovations in architecture and visual arts, as well as in ceramic production. For this purpose we will comprehensively discuss selected important urban centers, such as Nishapur, Merv, Samarkand, Ghazni, and others. Classes will be held both at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art. Assessment will be by means of a final paper.

Oral Presentations, 25% of the grade;
 Contributions to class discussion, 25% of the grade;
 Research Paper, 50%.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Sogdiana: History, Archaeology, and Identity
Fiona Kidd
fjk3@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3009-002
Fridays, 9:00am-12:00pm

As “the most important traders on the Silk Roads,” the Sogdians have traditionally offered an important point of entry for understanding early medieval cosmopolitanism in Central Asia. Yet, despite its pivotal location, the history of Sogdiana prior to this period remains little known because of the scant available sources. This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the Sogdians from their first appearance in the Achaemenid records, to the early medieval period. We ask critical questions to challenge stereotyped views of the region: who were the Sogdians? How has their history traditionally been approached? What does the material culture of Sogdiana tell us about the region? What other approaches can we take to better understand the Sogdians? We will explore the dynamic region of Sogdiana in depth, but our conversations will always be framed by key issues in the historiography and archaeology of Central Asia, including agro-pastoralism, urbanism, exchange, and globalism.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Art and Archaeology of the Qin and Han Empires
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm 

This seminar surveys visual and material cultures from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE in China, a historical period distinguished by the rise and fall of the Qin and Han Empires. It is in conjunction with the special exhibition "The Age of Empires: Chinese Art from the Qin and Han Dynasties" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring of 2017.

This course is intended to provide intensive analyses of primary sources and related scholarship for graduate students who have sufficient knowledge of the field.

Ability to read Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor required.

Sciences and Intellectual Life in the Second Century Roman Empire
Alexander Jones and Claire Bubb
alexander.jones@nyu.edu; cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Mondays, 9:00am-12:00pm

This seminar will cover the wide range of intellectual activity in the Roman Empire in the second century AD. Though its literature has at times been dismissed as second-rate or derivative, the second century was home to some of the most prolific and influential writers in their fields in antiquity, especially in the sciences, making it a fertile period for the study of interdisciplinary cross-pollination. The social history of the period is also of rich interest, especially that around the Second Sophistic, a rhetorical movement that offers insights into the role of Greeks and Greekness in the Roman world, as well as the social and intellectual mores of the time. We will cover a variety of topics, including, potentially, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, miscellany, rhetoric and showmanship, and autobiography.

Knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin and permission of the instructors are required.

The Rise of Islam in the World of Late Antiquity
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Mondays, 2:00-5:00pm 

The rise of Islam in the seventh century and the conquest of the Middle East by Arab Muslim armies led to far-reaching changes across Eurasia that have great consequences for our modern world. Islam's genesis was for long a minor topic of study, but of late, prompted by the greater prominence of Islam in contemporary politics, it has become the subject of intense and sometimes acrimonious debate. This course will explore various aspects of this phenomenon, in particular: the Arabian context, the late antique setting, the emergence of the Arabic language, the background to the Qur'an, Muhammad's audience and inspiration, the impetus for the Arab Muslim conquests and the evolution of Islamic civilization. We will also pay some attention to the influence that present-day events in the Middle East and their presentation in the media have exerted upon scholarly and non-scholarly investigation of Islam's beginnings.

Permission of the instructor is required.

History and the Eastern Eurasian Paleo-environment
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Thursdays, 10:00am-12:00pm
Small Conference Room, Sixth Floor

This seminar will tackle the recent flood of paleo-environmental work on Eastern Eurasia and the attempts to link reconstructed environmental phenomenon to human history. The readings will largely be from the environmental science literature and an advanced understanding of historiography will be assumed. The goal of the seminar will be to produce a paper on the uses and abuses of paleoenvironmental reconstruction for history and, at the same time, the state of the field in Eastern Eurasian paleoevironmental reconstruction.

Pre-requisites: advanced knowledge of one or more paleoenvironmental technique, advanced understanding of historiography and the application of multi-scalar approaches. Reading knowledge of Chinese and or Russian would also be useful.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Current Debates in Classical Art History and Archaeology
Hallie Franks
hmf2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm 

Rather than working around a theme or set of sources, this course aims to delineate some of the major current debates around and approaches to Greek and Roman art. What kinds of questions are presently being asked of visual sources, both those recently discovered and long known? What theoretical approaches are being newly brought to bear on this material, and to what ends? What, in other words, are the kinds of issues that concern ancient art historians and archaeologists today, and how are they moving the study of ancient art forward? In looking to these questions, we will situate recent studies in relationship to the scholarly history on which they depend, trying to anticipate where the field is going next.

Discussion topics may involve the application of sociological theories to ancient space, the construction of ancient “social imaginaries,” recognizing visual jokes and puns, the legacies of connoisseurship, the reception of Classical art, and the use of new technologies. That said, topics for many of our discussions will be determined by the class, based on the students’ interests and on research exercises. In addition to exposing students to a variety of approaches to visual sources, the hope is that this class will help them to form a picture of the field as a whole and to position themselves and their research—present or future—in relationship to contemporary scholarship.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha
Daniel Potts
daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Wednesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Large Conference Room, Sixth Floor 

This seminar examines key problems in the archaeology and early history of the Persian Gulf and adjacent regions. The chronological scope is from the Neolithic through late Antiquity. Evidence will be drawn from Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman. Related areas, including Mesopotamia, Iran and Baluchistan, will be considered in relation to developments in the Persian Gulf region.

Permission of the instructor is required.

The Late Bronze Age in Northern Mesopotamia: Mittanni, Assyria and the Syrian Local Kingdoms
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Lorenzo d’Alfonso
bpl2@nyu.edu; lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

During the Late Bronze Age northern Mesopotamia consists of two major regions that highly differ in their political trajectories. East of the Euphrates, two major powers grew prominent, one after the other, and became major players in what is known as the age of diplomacy: one is the kingdom of Mittanni, the other is Assyria. West of the Euphrates, instead, we see a fragmented political landscape with local kingdoms wavering between the major powers. The two regions, however, strongly interacted from very early times in history; with the Late Bronze Age, the expansion of the kingdom of Mittanni and Assyria toward the west promoted and intensified the interaction between local interests and external hegemonic pursuits in the administrative, political, cultural and economic spheres.

In the seminar we will explore the evolution of the settlement patterns of northern Mesopotamia from the Middle Bronze Age to the Late Bronze Age; the change of the agrarian landscape from the Old Assyrian to the Middle Assyrian period, and the process of centralization; the development of provincial systems and related administrative structures; the fortification systems; the transmission of knowledge from southern and central Mesopotamia into northern Mesopotamia and Syria; the conceptualization of kingship as reflected in major literary works (Epic of Tukulti-Ninurta, Idrimi, Ba’l cycle); the historical and methodological problem of how to interpret the rise of the kingdom of Mittanni; the new phase of balance and conflict between Assyria, Hanigalbat, and Hatti.

Permission of the instructors is required.

Advanced Data Structures and Querying for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3023-001
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm

This course will survey advanced approaches to structuring and querying Ancient World datasets. The semester will begin with relational models that rely on columns and rows queried with SQL. That work will show the rigid structure of such databases to be an uncomfortable fit for much humanities data. We will next look at graph databases that define relationships between entities. Our particular focus will be RDF-based triplestores that are accessed with the SPARQL query language. With these fundamental approaches in hand, students will work on such topics as spatial querying, data visualization, and incorporating structured data into text-based resources. Practical work will include acquiring, manipulating, and querying existing datasets found on the public internet. We will explore the set of best practices known variously as “Linked Open Data” and the “Semantic Web.” Efficient representation and querying of hierarchical typologies will also be a focus. Students will have ample time to develop their own digital resources as a final project, and this course is likely to be useful to students who have defined a research topic that they are pursuing. There are no prerequisites, but also no “holding back” in the expectation that students work to become confident users of the digital tools we explore. It is a requirement that students bring their own notebook computers to class. 

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2017 Other Courses

Introduction to Ancient Egyptian II
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1001-001
Wednesdays, 4:00-6:00pm
Small Conference Room, Sixth Floor 

This course is a continuation of the first semester. The course will proceed at the rate of a chapter per week through J.P. Allen, Middle Egyptian. An Introduction to the Language and Culture of the Hieroglyphs. From time to time, passages from actual Egyptian texts will supplement the examples in Allen’s grammar. Depending on the progress of the class, the last weeks of the course will cover the hieroglyphic transcription of The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, an actual Egyptian literary tale.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Ancient Egyptian II
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1003-001
Wednesdays, 10:00am-12:00pm
Small Conference Room, Sixth Floor 

This is a continuation of the fall semester course, using additional sources of increasing difficulty. Depending on the progress of the class, there will be occasional readings from hieratic primarily based on sources that the students have already read in hieroglyphic transcription during this course and the previous semester.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Reading of Akkadian: Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian Texts
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-001
Thursdays, 11:00am-1:00pm
Large Conference Room, Sixth Floor

In addition to consolidating the knowledge of Akkadian grammar the Advanced Reading of Akkadian Class is designed to introduce into various dialects of Akkadian from a diversity of regions and periods and to familiarize the student with a diversity of paleographies as well as text categories. In particular cases it will include the reading from photos of the originals to provide practice for reading originals of tablet collections in museums.

The course will extend the students’ ability of reading cuneiform writing and consolidate the knowledge of syntax and morphology of Akkadian. It is intended to provide an insight into the dialects of Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian including their particularities in paleography and grammar. The cuneiform readings include a mix of epistolary literature, royal inscriptions, and literary texts including Old Assyrian Sargon Legend, the poem of The Hunter, excerpts from the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic. Ina addition, letters from Tell Sheikh Hamad will provide some insight into the Assyrian conquest of and administration in the West (Habur area).

Grading: Reading of the texts (50%); Mid Term (25%); Final (25%)

Permission of the instructor and at least one semester of Akkadian are required.

Sumerian II
Gina Konstantopoulos
gina.konstantopoulos@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-003
Mondays, 2:00-4:45pm
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, Basement

This course follows the introduction to the language completed in Sumerian I. This term, we will progress to reading texts from a variety of genres and periods, including sections of the Cylinders of Gudea. By working through these texts, students will gain increasing familiarity with cuneiform and cover more advanced points of Sumerian grammar and translation.

Sumerian I or equivalent and permission of the instructor are required.

Fall 2016 Research Seminars

Greco-Roman Scientific Texts
Alexander Jones
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001
Mondays, 2:00-5:00pm

Study of a selection of Greco-Roman texts in the mathematical and physical sciences with particular focus on their presentation in manuscripts, both ancient and medieval, and their manuscript traditions. Prerequisite: knowledge of ancient Greek and/or of a language or languages in which scientific works in the Greek tradition are transmitted.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Art and Archaeology of Early Medieval China
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

This seminar surveys diverse visual and material cultures from the 3rd to the 6th centuries in China, a historical period marked by political division and ethnic integration. We will examine both transmitted and excavated objects, with special attention to their historical and archaeological contexts. Issues to discuss include ideology, religion, identity, patronage, and cultural interaction. Mediums to explore range from architecture, sculpture, calligraphy, painting to decorative arts.

This course is intended to provide intensive analyses of primary sources and related scholarship for graduate students who have sufficient knowledge of the field. 

Ability to read Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor are required.

Reception Studies and the History of Scholarship
Frederic Clark
fnc1@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Fridays, 2:00-5:00pm

This seminar will explore two enterprises that have played important roles in shaping our approaches to, and definitions of, the ancient world—namely, reception studies and the history of scholarship. We will examine both perceptions of the ancient past and the techniques used to study it from approximately 1400 to 1800—i.e. from the emergence of Renaissance humanism to the rise of modern professionalized disciplines in the nineteenth century. In doing so, we will investigate how early modern scholars came to define certain segments of the past as “ancient,” and query the cultural values they attached to the distant past and its reconstruction. By tracing the prehistory of such fields as philology, archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, lexicography and the like, we will interrogate the disciplinary, temporal, and cultural assumptions that went on to shape the study of the ancient world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the legacies of which we still grapple with today. Specific topics to be considered include periodization, the history of “classicism” as concept, debates over authenticity and textual criticism, antiquarianism, the emergence of medieval scholarship, and the study of ancient pasts beyond the Greco-Roman world. We will conclude by considering the uses of reception as an interpretive tool for students of the ancient world.

Students will complete a research paper as part of the course.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Iranian Archaeology in the 21st Century
Daniel Potts
daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Wednesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

This seminar focuses on recent scholarship (since 2000) in Iranian archaeology and pre-Islamic history. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding how new discoveries have advanced our understanding of old problems, or introduced entirely new areas of research. Students will be expected to speak each week about a particular site/region/issue, with reference to recent scholarship and the earlier status quaestionis. Reading knowledge of French and German highly recommended.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Frontiers and Fictional Lands in the Ancient Near East
Gina Konstantopoulos
gina.konstantopoulos@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm

This course will explore how the ancient world described, constructed, and abstracted the concept of space and place, through the creation of an actual frontier, which could and did shift over time, the imagining of the lands and peoples that may lay beyond that same frontier, as well as the creation of lands which were entirely fictional. While we will focus on the creation and articulation of such spaces in Mesopotamia, we will also study comparative spaces in the broader ancient Near East and Mediterranean, as well as more distant geographic and chronological examples. Readings will involve ancient texts in translation as well as secondary source studies, and the reading load in this course is heavy. Methodologically, we will tie the creation of these ancient borders and imagined spaces into a wider framework concerning the creation of fictional lands throughout history and the general themes governing mental maps, invented cartography, and utopian studies, to examine points of connection between the ancient world and later examples. 

Students will complete a research paper and presentation as part of the course.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, and David Ratzan
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu; te20@nyu.edu; david.ratzan@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3024-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

This course will introduce students to the use of digital tools and computational methods in the study of the Ancient World. There are no technical prerequisites and the course will be of particular interest to early stage graduate students who want a broad introduction that involves hands-on work. The course will progress through areas such as applying structure to text via XML-based markup languages, introduction to the programmatic manipulation of textual data, and how scholarly resources are shared on the public internet and edited in collaborative environments, including GitHub. There will also be a focus on structured datasets stored in relational databases, though we will also explore alternative models such as graph databases and the JSON data format. Students will gain practical experience in acquiring, creating, querying, and displaying spatial data. Visual approaches such as 3d modeling will also be explored. There will be frequent introductions to existing work in disciplines that are part of the study of the ancient world, including papyrology, numismatics, textual studies, history, and archaeology. The role of libraries in information-rich scholarly environments will likewise be a regular theme. Readings will introduce students to current trends in Digital Humanities and will encourage discussion of the impact digital methods and open-licensed content are having on research, teaching, and public engagement with scholarly practice. Over the course of the semester students will design and then implement a final project that can overlap with existing research interests. Students are required to bring their own notebook computers to class.

Permission of the instructors is required.

The Ancient World at the End of the Bronze Age (c. 1250-1050 BCE)
Lorenzo d’Alfonso and Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu; lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3025-001
Mondays, 9am-12:00pm

The end of the Bronze age in the eastern Mediterranean is quintessential to the study of Antiquities since it provided, together with the biblical narrative, the main impulse to archaeology from the 19th century onward. Its most representative case, the Graeco-Roman epics of the war and fall of Troy, is considered today only one above a rich number of major Bronze age centers of the eastern Mediterranean experiencing a traumatic and short process of change from rich, interconnected palace-based political system controlled by a club of big powers, to novel forms of knowledge and aggregation. The latter have been labeled for a long time a Dark Age because of the scanty evidence informing us about them, but this situation has rapidly evolved in the last decade. Western Asia experienced between the late 13th and the 11th c. BCE two parallel historical developments. The fall of the Palace systems produced a phase of new local experimentations in Greece, Anatolia, Syria and the Levant. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, by converse, the kingdoms of Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt survived the political turmoil, even though the change of the times was perceived concretely by a significantly reduced territorial control and at the same time by the development of an even stronger sense of preserving and reaffirming themselves and their continuity with their past. At the opposite side of the continent, in East Asia, in the 13th century Anyang in the reign of Wu-ding became the biggest megacenter of Bronze Age China. This is clearly the culmination of a political organization per megacenters, typical of BA China, but at the same time the realization of the new Shang dynasty reached a dimension, and required a socio-political complexity and the development of social practices and technologies—not least writing, not experienced before. As in western Asia, the Shang polity collapses (in the 11th c.); the new west Zhou polity arising after it is presented in the traditional narrative as directly following the previous power, in a typically Chinese narrative of cyclical uninterrupted succession of powers that build up a long lived civilization.  In fact, archaeology and a revision of the sources suggest a strong hiatus and a drastic change in settlement pattern and economic system. For both areas movements of peoples have clearly played a crucial role, and in both cases the impact of populations moving from the steppes in Central Asia are relevant. Central Asia itself had at his time by its own extraordinary developments which we mainly connect with horse breading, chariot riding elites and their sedentary production sites changing into the advent a new phase characterized by the iron metallurgy, and horse-riding nomads. Global climate change occurred at the turn of the 13th century BCE, and the different historical outcomes are there to show how microclimatic features, as well as the social process of perception and response generate multiple, often opposing results both in adjoining regions and in far away regions. The course aims at introducing participants to the different realizations of the process we label “the end of the Bronze age,” along the Asiatic continent. Through the discussion of the main interpretative works, and the focus on paradigmatic and at the same time unique case studies, it will explore the different dynamics and the different questions asked by historians and archaeologists often directly linked with the set of primary sources typical of each area.

Permission of the instructors is required. 

Fall 2016 Other Courses

Introduction to Ancient Egyptian I
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1000-001
Meeting Time and Location, TBD

This course, in the first part of a full year course over two semesters, introduces students to the Middle Egyptian (Classical) dialect of the Ancient Egyptian language in its hieroglyphic form. The classes are structured primarily according to the lessons in J.P. Allen, Middle Egyptian. An Introduction to the Language and Culture of the Hieroglyphs. The course will usually proceed at the rate of one chapter per week, but occasionally a chapter may be skipped or two chapters will be combined. The goal of the first semester is to reach the treatment of the Egyptian verb and the infinitive in Allen’s 13th and 14th chapters. The lessons will be supplemented with readings from A.H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 3rd. edition, M. Collier and B. Manley, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs, revised edition, and occasional excerpts from Egyptian funerary stelae.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Advanced Ancient Egyptian I
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1002-001
Meeting Time and Location, TBD 

This course is based on readings from actual Egyptian hieroglyphic texts in their original form. In the early stages of the course, the readings will be presented in both a “normalized” form with the individual sentences and clauses demarked as well as in the original, continuous text format. The readings will be drawn from a wide range of genres and will increase in difficulty as the course progresses. Where appropriate, photographs and line drawings will be used so that students will learn to handle hieroglyphic text as it actually appears on Egyptian objects. The readings are drawn from a text book in progress.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Anatolian Languages of the 2nd and 1st Millennium BCE: Hieroglyphic Luwian and Lycian
Lorenzo d’Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-001
Mondays and Thursdays, 2:00-2:45pm
Small Conference Room, 6th Floor

With Hittite and Palaic, Luwian is the oldest Indo-European language, attested epigraphically from the early 2nd millennium BCE in Anatolia. While Hittite ended with the end of the Hittite empire, Luwian, also officially adopted within the empire as language for display inscriptions of the ruling elite, survived the end of the empire and is one of the main elements of transmission of the Hittite political and religious legacy to the regional kingdoms of first millennium Central and Western Anatolia.

Lycian is a daughter language of Luwian, attested epigraphically in homonymous Lycia, southwestern Anatolia. The corpus of the Lycian inscriptions is small in number, confined in geographic extension as well as chronological development (6th-4th cc. BCE). Nonetheless, it provides a unique case study of the interaction between inner Anatolian post-Hittite local development and the gradual but growing interaction with the Greek world.

The course is organized as a tutorial. Participants will meet twice a week for short meetings of 45 min., one devoted to the language, one to read and translate inscriptions. The first ten weeks will be devoted to Luwian, while the last four will focus on Lycian and its context.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Sumerian I
Gina Konstantopoulos
gina.konstantopoulos@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-003
Mondays, 2:00-4:45pm
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, Basement 

The oldest written language in the world, Sumerian holds a central place in the history of Mesopotamia, or roughly modern-day Iraq. An enormous number of texts have survived to the modern day, providing us with examples of literary texts and epics, magical incantations and exorcisms, religious rituals, personal letters, royal documents, and economic documents – all of which provide a window into the cultures and lives of people from over four thousand years ago.

This course will cover the grammar of Sumerian and introduce vocabulary and cuneiform signs, allowing students to work through more basic Sumerian texts over the course of the term and provide students the tools for approaching more advanced texts.

Grading will include regular quizzes, a midterm, and a final.

While knowledge of other cuneiform languages will be helpful, it is not a prerequisite for this class.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2016 Research Seminars

ISAW-GA 3007-001
Roman Law and the Papyri
Roger Bagnall
roger.bagnall@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

Ever since the first legal documents on papyrus dating to the Roman imperial period were published in the nineteenth century, it has been evident to jurists that the papyri offered a unique opportunity to look in depth at how the majestic and complex structure of Roman law that we know from the classical jurists (largely excerpted in Justinian’s Digest) worked on the ground in the provinces. A sizable literature on the subject developed in the early twentieth centuy and has continued to evolve. This seminar will take a series of key issues and institutions, including marriage, the legal status of women, slavery, testation, and major contract types. For each we will examine both selections from the jurists and some representative papyrus documents.

Please note that the first meeting of this seminar will be February 4, 2016.

Permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 3010-001
Shang Civilization: Text and Material Culture
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
Fridays, 2:00-5:00pm

This seminar will focus on the Shang dynasty of ancient China from the perspective of archaeology, epigraphy and transmitted texts. The archaeology will cover north China in the 2nd millennium BCE, but focus on the site of Anyang where inscribed oracle-bones and bronzes, monumental tombs and palatial buildings were discovered in the early 20th century demonstrating the historicity of the Shang dynasty. The oracle-bones and bronze inscriptions of the Anyang period will present an opportunity to glimpse a partial image of Shang royal and high elite concerns, especially concerning ritual. A study of Shang history from the perspective of transmitted texts will give both an opportunity to understand the place of the Shang dynasty in later Chinese history as well as its formation as historical subject. This course will be taught at several levels and students of non-sinological background are welcome. While the ability to read classical and modern Chinese would be an asset, neither language is a requirement for this seminar.

Permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 3012-001
Between China and Byzantium
Robert Hoyland and Sören Stark
rgh2@nyu.edu; soeren.stark@nyu.edu
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

This course will look at the world that lies between the empires of Byzantium and China from the middle of the 6th to the middle of the 8th century. Most obviously this concerns the Sasanian Empire (224-651), the Tang Empire, and the Arab Empire (632-945), but it is our particular intention to look also at lesser-known polities, such as the substantial though ephemeral empire of the Türks, the oasis statelets in Sogdiana, and the polity of the Khazars north of the Caucasus and Tibet. Rather than tell their stories separately and in isolation, we will seek to emphasize the connections between these different powers in the arenas of trade, art, literature, and religion. To facilitate this we will take a twofold approach: In the first part of the course we will introduce the main actors and events, such as the emergence of Türk power in Central Eurasia, the Expansion of Tang Rule over East and Inner Asia, the Muslim Conquests, the rise of Tibet and Khazars. In the second part of the course we will look closer at particular phenomena and features that decisively shaped the politics, economics, material culture, and religion during the decades between ca. 550 and 750. Assessment will be by means of a final paper.

Permission of the instructors is required.

ISAW-GA 3014-001
The Formation of Cultural Memory: Ancient Mesopotamian Libraries, Archives, and Schools
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

Ancient disputation and dialogue literature as well as other texts reveal that there was a tradition of competition between ancient centers of learning in Mesopotamia. Knowledge of important Babylonian cultural centers can still be detected in the writings of Strabo. So far, scholarship has occupied itself primarily with publishing the contents of libraries, and often – due to the quantity of texts and particular research questions – such effort has focused on particular genres rather than on entire collections. Much effort has gone into the reconstruction of school curricula. Less attention has been paid to the actual owners of the libraries and their professions, what particular texts or genres were collected and for what potential purposes in one particular place. The workshop intends to approach Mesopotamian libraries holistically, by taking a closer look at their content, situating them in their sociopolitical context, and exploring who owned them. This approach will probe the possibility that Mesopotamian libraries can be defined as much as places for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge as for its construction and production. Further, the workshop will attempt to map a geography of knowledge and to test whether we can identify traditional centers of knowledge as well as staging posts in the flow of knowledge.

The seminar includes a workshop on April 8th. This year’s participants: Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Daniel Fleming, Mark Geller, Gonzalo Rubio, Walther Sallaberger

The seminar is open to all students, VRS and faculty.

Permission of the instructor is required. Akkadian is required for those who attend the reading sessions. Evaluation Criteria:  preparation for the reading sessions (35%); active participation in the discussion sessions on the basis of short written summary statements of the required readings (35%); final paper 30%. 

ISAW-GA 3018-001
Archaeology of the Ancient Near East: Material Culture and Research
Perspectives
Marta Luciani
ml5171@nyu.edu
Wednesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm

The countries of the Middle East have hosted and promoted very diverse archaeological investigations in the last 170 years, from museum-related to salvage archaeology and research-designed projects. The course will review the results of old and new research in order to outline material culture and processes specific to the ancient peoples and societies of the region: from the Neolithic and Urban revolutions to the development of complex administration, sealing practices and writing, from the production of pottery and later glass, to the metallurgy of copper alloys and iron smelting. We will introduce and explore official monuments, art and iconography as well as everyday artifacts, architecture and settlement patterns.

The goal of the course is to achieve a comprehensive knowledge of the main features and research perspectives of the archaeology of the Ancient Near East as attested in ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant throughout six millennia.

Permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 3023-001
Special Topics in Digital Humanities for the Ancient World: Computational Photography and 3D Modeling
Sebastian Heath
sh1933@nyu.edu
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

The premise of this course is that virtual representations of the ancient world will become increasingly important to both research and teaching as the ability to create, work with, and share such digital resources becomes less expensive and more widely available. Accordingly, the course will combine hands-on experience with creating and using virtual representations of ancient material culture, including objects and architectural spaces, with a review of current practices being employed by projects around the world. Students will use such tools as the open-source 3D-suite Blender, the game engine Unity, and applications for making models with smartphone cameras. We will explore techniques for making richly-textured 3D models of real objects as well as create immersive virtual environments. Readings will include reports of ongoing work as well as discussions of why 3D matters and how it is being used in the classroom. Guest speakers will provide a broad perspective on current trends. Students will use their own computers and should be willing to apply themselves energetically to learning the digital skills the class introduces.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2016 Tutorials

ISAW-GA 3014-002
Advanced Akkadian: Neo-Babylonian Historical Inscriptions
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 11:00am-1:00pm
Small Conference Room, 6th Floor 

The Advanced Reading of Akkadian Class of Neo-Babylonian Inscriptions is designed to introduce into the Neo-Babylonian dialect and to familiarize the student with its particular paleography and grammar. Simultaneously, a diachronic choice of Neo-Babylonian inscriptions reaching from Nabupolassar, its founder, to Nabonidus will provide an insight into the history of the Neo-Babylonian empire.

Permission of the instructor and knowledge of Akkadian are required.

Spring 2016 Other Courses

ISAW-GA 1001-001
Introduction to Ancient Egyptian II
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
Wednesdays, 3:00-5:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor

This course is a continuation of the first semester. The course will proceed at the rate of a chapter per week through J.P. Allen, Middle Egyptian. An Introduction to the Language and Culture of the Hieroglyphs. From time to time, passages from actual Egyptian texts will supplement the examples in Allen’s grammar. Depending on the progress of the class, the last weeks of the course will cover the hieroglyphic transcription of The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, an actual Egyptian literary tale.

Permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 1003-001
Advanced Ancient Egyptian II
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
Tuesdays, 10:00am-12:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

This is a continuation of the fall semester course, using additional sources of increasing difficulty. Depending on the progress of the class, there will be occasional readings from hieratic primarily based on sources that the students have already read in hieroglyphic transcription during this course and the previous semester.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Fall 2015 Research Seminars

ISAW-GA 3002-001
Observation and Experiment in Ancient Physical Science
Alexander Jones
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

This seminar explores the empirical elements in ancient scientific traditions that aimed at systematic description, explanation, or prediction of physical phenomena. Scientific practices of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world will figure prominently, but those of other civilizations may be investigated according to the interests and competences of participants. The evidence is largely textual; knowledge of at least one ancient language in which relevant scientific texts exist is required. Participants will choose topics, select study materials, and guide discussion for at least one session.

An initial selection of topics will include the following: the rise of systematic observation of spontaneously occurring phenomena in the context of interpretation of the phenomena as ominous signs; practices of recording and transmitting observations of astral, meteorological, and mundane events; precision, accuracy, and instruments of measurement, especially in astronomical observation records; experiment and experimental apparatus in Greek harmonic theory; empirical claims within deductive scientific texts, e.g. in optics, mechanics, and astronomy; empirical argument in Ptolemy's Optics; adjustment and fabrication of reported observations and measurements.

Permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 3010-001
The Manuscripts of Early Chinese Natural Philosophy
Ethan Harkness
harkness@nyu.edu
Fridays, 2:00-5:00pm

This course will introduce students to a variety of recently excavated Chinese technical manuscripts dating from the late Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods (4th – 1st centuries BCE).  We will pay particular attention to the various calendrically-based divination texts promulgated in the manuscripts known as rishu (“daybooks”), but the fields of astronomy, geography, medicine, and mathematics will all receive due consideration.  When appropriate, reference will be made to connections with transmitted texts and to the later repercussions of ideas developed and refined in the years immediately surrounding the formation of the Chinese empire.  Topics to consider will include the social function of the early technical texts; the nature of their transmission and evolution; regional idiosyncrasies; the interconnected roles of scribes and readers; and the possible function of both political ideology and private interests in shaping the texts.

Prerequisites are good reading knowledge of modern and classical Chinese and permission of the instructor.

ISAW-GA 3010-002
Advanced Study in Chinese Art & Archaeology
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

This course is intended to provide intensive analyses of primary sources and related scholarship in Chinese art & archaeology for graduate students who have sufficient knowledge of the field. Topics to study depend on the research need of the students.

Ability to read Classical Chinese and permission of the instructor are required.

ISAW-GA 3012-001
Archaeology and Historiography: Perspectives on Time, Space, Text and Material
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm

Though treated as separate disciplines and usually housed in different departments, at the highest level history and archaeology share the common goal of understanding the human past. Nevertheless, in both theory and method, not only are archaeology and history internally diverse, but also frequently miles apart. This seminar will embark on an interdisciplinary exploration of the historical sciences: their histories, philosophies and methodologies. Special focus will be on theories of time (change, tradition, process, event, etc.), space (physical space, place, landscape, etc.), text (context, genre, discourse, memory, etc.) and material (material culture, materiality, things, actor-networks, etc.)

The reading load in this course will be heavy. Permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 3013-001
Production, Accumulation, Trade, and Value: Political Economy in the Ancient Mediterranean
Lorenzo d’Alfonso and Elizabeth Murphy
lda5@nyu.edu; elizabeth.murphy@nyu.edu
Mondays, 2:00-5:00pm

During the last decades, renewed attention has been devoted to the importance of market and private enterprise in the economies of the ancient Mediterranean, as exemplified by such works as A history of market performance: from ancient Babylonia to the modern world (van der Spek et al., eds., 2015), Commerce and colonization in the ancient Near East (Aubet, 2013), and The Roman market economy (Temin, 2013). On the one hand, interest in market and private enterprise enables us to traverse artificial distinctions between pre-classical and classical ancient Mediterranean civilizations and to pose cross-culturally comparative questions about ancient state economies. On the other hand, this new trend in some respects pays less attention to institutional and political impacts on ancient economies. This impact has perhaps received too much attention in the historiography of ancient western Asia, but the meaning of political intervention in the economic process acquires a different meaning when embedded in a context of private enterprises. For the Roman world, the interests of imperial institutions (e.g., military supply chains, annona redistributions, imperial monopolies) as influencing the scale and organization of economic activities has been long recognized, but recent approaches have turned to the more subtle and indirect ways that institutions affected regional economic development. In response to these academic trends, this course aims to examine the role of political economy in the ancient Mediterranean from multiple vantages.  The first classes will focus on recent theoretical works on political economy such as Piketty’s Capital, and North’s Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, as well as some of the ‘classic’ works on ancient economies, such as those by Polanyi, Finley, and Rostovtzeff. In the following classes, ideas developed through the theory classes will then be confronted with specific case studies from the protohistory of ancient western Asia and the Greco-Roman world. These thematic classes will consider issues of primary production, storage and hoarding (accumulation of surpluses and wealth), trade, and the definition of value. 

Permission of the instructors is required.

ISAW-GA 3014-001
Texts from the Libraries of the Kingdom of Eshnunna
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

Various cities of the kingdom of Eshnunna have yielded literary texts, among them the city of Eshnunna, which seems to have housed a center for scribal training already during the Old Akkadian period, where a forerunner to The Great Revolt Against Naram-Sin has come to light; the city of Tell Harmal, ancient Shaduppum, where the only copy of Sargon in Foreign Lands has been found; and the city of Tell Haddad, ancient Meturan, which yielded a remarkable collection of tablets from a private house owned by an exorcist. In addition to Akkadian archival texts found in separate rooms, there has come to light from two areas a library containing a fragment of the Laws of Eshnunna as well as numerous lexical, liturgical, literary and magic texts (incantations), two prayers to the sun god, and the earliest attested bilingual forerunner to the hemerological series Inbu bel arhi. Among the literary texts, perhaps the most unexpected discovery is a copy of the Sumerian version of the story of Adapa and two larger fragments of the Death of Gilgamesh. Other Gilgamesh stories represented at Meturan are Gilgamesh and the Bull of An, Gilgamesh and Huwawa, and Gilgamesh, EnkIdu and the Netherworld.

The goal of this seminar is to examine Eshnunna’s role in the transmission of scholarly knowledge through an in-depth analysis of the written compositions extant from the major cities of the kingdom.

Permission of the instructor and knowledge of Akkadian and Sumerian are required.

Fall 2015 Tutorials

ISAW-GA 3014-002
Advanced Akkadian: Old Babylonian Historical Texts
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 11:00am-1:00pm
Small Conference Room, 6th Floor 

This advanced course in Akkadian will emphasize the reading of Old Babylonian texts from the sites of Mari and Eshnunna in order to investigate the rise to power and political relations of these two kingdoms during the Old Babylonian period. Primary texts read will include the treaty concluded between between Zimri-lim of Mari and Ibal-pi-el II of Eshnunna and a lengthy letter from Ibal-pi-el II to Zimri-lim offering a political alliance.  These two texts offer insight into the form and structure as well as the terminology of international treaties during the first half of the second millennium BCE. Additional readings will include not only other historical inscriptions of the kings of Mari and of Eshnunna but also, for the purposes of comparison and contrast, inscriptions of the kings of Larsa.

Students will acquire an in-depth understanding of the variety and scope of historical and particularly royal inscriptions in the time of the competing territorial states of the Old Babylonian period.

Permission of the instructor and Intermediate Akkadian are required.

Fall 2015 Other Courses

ISAW-GA 1000-001
Introduction to Ancient Egyptian I
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
Mondays, 6:30-8:30pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor 

This course, in the first part of a full year course over two semesters, introduces students to the Middle Egyptian (Classical) dialect of the Ancient Egyptian language in its hieroglyphic form. The classes are structured primarily according to the lessons in J.P. Allen, Middle Egyptian. An Introduction to the Language and Culture of the Hieroglyphs. The course will usually proceed at the rate of one chapter per week, but occasionally a chapter may be skipped or two chapters will be combined. The goal of the first semester is to reach the treatment of the Egyptian verb and the infinitive in Allen’s 13th and 14th chapters. The lessons will be supplemented with readings from A.H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 3rd. edition, M. Collier and B. Manley, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs, revised edition, and occasional excerpts from Egyptian funerary stelae.

Permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 1002-001
Advanced Ancient Egyptian I
Ogden Goelet
ogden.goelet@nyu.edu
Wednesdays, 10:00am-12:00pm
Small Conference Room, 6th Floor 

This course is based on readings from actual Egyptian hieroglyphic texts in their original form. In the early stages of the course, the readings will be presented in both a “normalized” form with the individual sentences and clauses demarked as well as in the original, continuous text format. The readings will be drawn from a wide range of genres and will increase in difficulty as the course progresses. Where appropriate, photographs and line drawings will be used so that students will learn to handle hieroglyphic text as it actually appears on Egyptian objects. The readings are drawn from a text book in progress.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Spring 2015 Research Seminars

ISAW-GA 3009-001
Mobile Pastoralists in Late Iron Age Central Eurasia (4th cent. BCE-4th cent. CE).
Sören Stark
soeren.stark@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 10:00am – 1:00pm

The boom of Xiongnu archaeology in present-day Mongolia and Buriatia (Russia) during the past two decades has decisively shaped and improved our understanding of Late Iron age nomadic cultures in Eastern Central Asia. Ever since, new data (not least resulting from a more comprehensive application of scientific analyses) and new methodological approaches have considerably stimulated the discussion of aspects such as elite representation between Han China and the ‘Hellenistic west’, transfer of technologies (in and outside the steppes), or non-elite life-ways among pastoral societies in the area.

At the same time, however, we dispose of a considerable mass of older data on nomadic ‘cultures’ from the territories of the former Soviet-Union, contemporary with the Xiongnu in Mongolia and Buriatia: the so-called ‘Hunno-Sarmatian horizon’. In many ways, this older data now awaits reconsideration in light of the recent advances in Mongolia and Buriatia. In addition, we see the rapid accumulation of new data from present-day Xinjiang, Gansu and Inner Mongolia (China), pertaining to the same cultural horizon. 

The aim of our seminar is to re-evaluate older data and to integrate it together with new data into a systematic, regionally structured overview of Late Iron Age pastoral cultures from the trans-Caspian steppes to Inner Mongolia (China), and from Southern Siberia to present-day northern Afghanistan. This will allow us to better understand regional specifics and supra-regional dynamics within and beyond the nomadic world of the ‘Hunno-Sarmatian horizon’ in an integrated way. And, it is hoped, it will help us to line out potential avenues for future research on pastoral ‘cultures’ in Central Eurasia during antiquity.

Advanced reading knowledge of Russian or Chinese and permission of the instructor is required. 

ISAW-GA 3010-001
Art, Archaeology, and Museology
Lillian Tseng, Jason Sun
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00 pm

This seminar explores how museology facilitates the study of art and archaeology through an upcoming special exhibition on the Qin and Han Empires (221 BCE- 220 CE) in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We will study the objects to be displayed and investigate the characteristics of early imperial Chinese art and archaeology. We will also learn how a museum functions as a cultural institution through the curatorial efforts in acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications, especially how research and diplomacy play significant roles in developing international exhibitions.

Prof. Lillian Tseng at ISAW and Dr. Jason Sun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will teach the seminar together. The class will take place not only in a seminar room at ISAW but also in the storage rooms of the Museum.

Permission of the instructors required.

ISAW-GA 3013-001
Astrological Texts in Papyri and Medieval Manuscripts
Alexander Jones
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
Wednesdays 2:00-5:00pm

This seminar will constitute an introduction to the fundamentals of Greco-Roman astrology and its transmission, through the study of selected texts and documents preserved in Greco-Egyptian papyri and medieval manuscripts.

Knowledge of ancient Greek and permission of the instructor is required.

ISAW-GA 3014-001
Ritual Text and Ritual Performance in the ANE
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm

Among other media, culture is constituted and articulated also in cultural performances including ceremonies, festivals, theater, and games. Inspired by theater studies, in the eighties and nineties interdisciplinary research of ethnology, anthropology, religious studies, and historical studies concerned with cultural performance of any kind promoted the performative turn by emphasizing the body and bodily action over the thought and mind. This move towards action, i.e. the doing of things, entailed a move away from the text. More recently, anthropology and sociology sidestepped these mind/body, thought/action dichotomies by introducing the concept of social drama and emphasizing social interaction. Within the last decade ritual studies have turned towards a more precise definition of ritual versus theater and performance and have reintroduced the complex relationship between text and performance (see the research project Ritualdynamik: Soziokulturelle Prozesse in historischer und kulturvergleichender Perspektive at the University of Heidelberg). The seminar Ritual Text and Ritual Performance pursues a similar direction by exploring the various forms of ritual texts transmitted in ancient Near Eastern literature; the relationship between ritual text and ritual performance, i.e. of whether and how far we are allowed to consider cuneiform ritual texts as scripts for the execution of ritual action; the role of narrative for ritual performance; the combination of incantation, prayer, and action within the ritual complex; the memoria-aspect of ritual constituting identity, order, and continuity.

We will combine the reading of primary sources with the theoretical approaches.

Requirements: Knowledge of Akkadian and permission of the instructor required.

ISAW-GA 3018-001
Archaeology of Anatolia from the Neolithic to the Hellenistic Period
Lorenzo d’Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
Mondays, 2:00pm-5:00pm

Within Ancient Western Asia the archaeology of Anatolia has a specific position. Separated from Mesopotamia and the Levant by the imposing Tauros Mountains, Anatolia maintained communication, kept up with the developments taking place in the Fertile Crescent, and developed its own peculiar organization of complex group societies. Starting with the Neolithic, the course will explore the archaeological data reflecting the first evidence of social hierarchies and regional power, the development of metallurgy in the EBA, the creation of an empire in the mountains with a territorial organization, and the many and diverse developments and ultimate fall of this empire. We will then go on to look at the remains of then-new kingdoms of Phrygia and Lydia, already in direct contact with archaic Greece, as well as the impact of the Achaemenid conquest, up to the Hellenistic period. The course will offer an overview of the most important historical and archaeological themes connected with the ancient history of Anatolia; for each period, one key Anatolian site will presented with the scope to make students familiar with the relation between theory, historical reconstruction, and the rough archaeological data on which they are based.

Permission of the instructor required.

ISAW-GA 3020-001
The Discovery of Iranian Antiquity
Daniel T. Potts
daniel.potts@nyu.edu 
Tuesdays, 9am – 12:00pm

The invention of printing in the late 15^th century, coupled with increased traffic between European capitals and the Safavid court in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, resulted in a growth of interest in Iran’s pre-Islamic past. Europeans visited major sites like Persepolis, Pasargadae and Naqsh-e Rustam; compared their situations with accounts in Classical sources; copied inscriptions; and brought portable antiquities back to their homelands. Enlightenment scholars (philologists, antiquarians, numismatists) of the 18^th century worked assiduously on this material and established a substantial baseline of knowledge that served as a springboard for the better-known investigations, both archaeological and historical, of the 19^th century. This course will look at what early modern Europeans contributed to the growth of Iranology.

Prerequisites: very good reading knowledge of French and German (ability to read Gothic script is an advantage). Permission of the instructor required.

ISAW-GA 3023-001
Mapping and Data Visualization for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath
sh1933@nyu.edu
Wednesdays, 10:00am -1:00pm

This course considers tools and methods for the effective communication of scholarly research through data-driven maps and the visualization of small and large datasets. By frequent hands-on use and demonstration of their work, students will gain confidence in using web-based tools as well as software that runs directly on their own computers. A constant focus will be the ability of such tools and software to import and export data in standard formats and to enable sharing of the maps and visualizations that students create. Accordingly, students will gain expertise in data interchange formats such as the Javascript Object Notation (JSON). Topics stressed over the course of the term will include the temporal component of spatial data as well as connectivity within data sets. We will also survey current approaches to the application of digital methods to historical and archaeological research and teaching. A particular outcome for students will be the ability to assess the relevance of both current and future tools for their own work. The majority of our examples will come from the ancient world as ISAW defines it, though students with other interests can enroll. It is expected that students will bring their own computers to class. While there are no prerequisites, participants should be willing to commit considerable time to rapidly gaining the technical skills that will be presented in class.

Permission of instructor required.

Spring 2015 Other Courses

ISAW-GA 3003-001
Directed Study: Hittite Texts
Lorenzo d’Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu
Thursdays, 5:00-7:00pm (6^th Floor Large Conference Room)

Hittite, the earliest Indo-European language, is attested on cuneiform tablets, and was created as a means of recording numerous and various types of information collected by the royal court of Hattusa, and by some other administrative centers on the periphery of the Great Kingdom of Hatti. In some cases different types of information were recorded in different textual genres, and because of cuneiform schooling it is not rare that different genres used a wider or more restricted number of cuneiform signs, values, as well as a different vocabulary, formulary or phrasary. The course aims at introducing the participants to the different types of texts written in Hittite. Each lesson will be devoted to transcription and translation of ca. 30 lines of one ‘genre’. Thus, a sample from the Hittite Laws, letters, treaties, edicts, annals, prayers, rituals, feasts, oracular inquiries, inventories, poems and mythic narratives will be transcribed and translated along the semester, and for each text genre a piece of secondary literature about form and/or content of the genre will be discussed by the class.

Prerequisites: an introductory course of Hittite Language (Hittite I) and permission of the instructor.

Fall 2014 Research Seminars

The Exact Sciences in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Alexander Jones
Mondays, 2:00pm – 5:00pm
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001

In this seminar we will examine episodes in the circulation of scientific knowledge and practices in the Mediterranean world (broadly conceived) from the third century CE to the end of the first millennium. The approach will be primarily through study of original texts, some of which will be chosen according to the specific interests and expertise of participants.

Knowledge of one or more of the relevant ancient languages (Greek in particular, Latin, Arabic, ...) is required. Permission of the instructor required.

Late Antique Documents
Roger Bagnall
Mondays, 9:00am – 12:00pm
roger.bagnall@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3007-001

The seminar will examine a series of papyrus archives from late antique Egypt and Palestine, mostly in Greek but with some documents partly or entirely in Latin, Coptic, and Arabic. The archives will range from villages to cities, private to public, and secular to monastic. Readings will be mostly of primary documents but also some modern discussions of the archives. The central focuses will be on the formation of what we call archives, their potential for historical study, and their limitations.

A reading knowledge of Greek and either French or German is required. Permission of the instructor required.

Art, Archaeology and Material Culture
Lillian Tseng
Wednesdays, 2:00pm – 5:00pm
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001

This seminar explores various approaches that help us understand and elaborate the unearthed objects of extraordinary craftsmanship, a large corpus of fascinating material that has not yet been fully studied by archaeologists or art historians. The seminar seeks to strike a balance between methodological reflections and case studies. Theories and examples to be investigated are not limited to any specific cultural area.

Permission of the instructor required.

Early Chinese Literary Manuscripts
Adam Schwartz
Fridays, 1:00 – 4:00pm
acs21@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001

This text-reading course will introduce the major corpora of newly discovered Early Chinese literary manuscripts and the philological methods fundamental to work with them.  Readings will be from the Zhou through the Han, with focus on Warring States genre and popular readership, provincial scripts and stationery.

Permission of the instructor required.

Greek and Roman Portraiture
Hallie Franks
Mondays, 2:00pm – 5:00pm
hmf2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001

This course will engage with critical issues that surround the study of ancient portraiture traditions in the Greek and Roman worlds. Some of the questions we will address over the course of the semester include: How do modern assumptions about the function and genre of portraiture, and its relationship to the subject, impact approaches to ancient material? How do we develop a vocabulary for the different potential relationships between subject and visual product? How do we think about intent, and what kinds of material provide context for interpretation? How do portraits serve in public or private roles in different ways? How can we use traditions of portraiture to think about ancient concepts of and expressions of various identities? This course deals primarily with classical material, but it also involves critical engagement with and analysis of the visual and the processes of contextualization.

Permission of the instructor required.

Peoples and Lands of the Zagros: From Gutium to Ellipi
Daniel T. Potts
Tuesdays, 9:00am – 12:00pm
dtp2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001

This seminar will examine the native peoples and regions of the Zagros mountain regions (Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Luristan) from their first appearance in cuneiform sources of the third millennium BC to the end of the Assyrian/Neo-Elamite period. Principle groups and regions that will be considered include Gutium, Simurrum, Lullubum, the Turukkaeans, Mannaea and Ellipi. The role of Ur III, Kassite, Assyrian and Urartian territorial ambitions in the region will be investigated as well as the nature of the landscape and the groups that inhabited it through time.

No formal requirements, but good reading knowledge of German and French would be helpful. Permission of the instructor required.

The Transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam
Robert Hoyland
Tuesdays, 9:00am – 12:00pm
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3020-001

This course focuses on the question of what changed and what did not change in Near Eastern society in the course of the fifth to ninth centuries AD.  Consideration will be given to both the micro level (individual objects, themes, groups etc) and the macro level (was Pirenne right about the disruptive nature of the Arab conquests, is Becker's characterization of Islam as the culmination of late antique culture apt, etc). and to literary and archaeological themes and sources.

Permission of the instructor required.

The Body in the Ancient World
Claire Bubb
Wednesdays, 9:00am – 12:00pm
claire.coiro@gmail.com
ISAW-GA 3020-002

This seminar will consider ancient understanding of and attitudes towards the human body. Our primary goal will be to trace the shifting conceptions of human physiology from Egyptian medical papyri to the Arabic tradition, with a heavy focus on the Greeks and Romans. How did cultures with strong taboos around the body form theories about the organs hidden within it? How did the ancients grapple with the brain, the nervous system, and the interrelationship of the soul and the body? How did the concept of the humors develop and what were the rival theories? How close did the Greeks come to understanding blood and the circulatory system and why did they miss its circular nature? Why did Galen’s physiology come to dominate Western thought for centuries after his death, and how did the Arabic authors responsible for much of its transmission receive and respond to his theories? In order to understand the cultural context behind the development and evolution of these theories, we will also briefly consider religious, literary, and artistic treatment of the body, including burial customs, the centrality of the body to early Christianity, and the fascination with the body revealed across literary genres, particularly rhetoric and the novels.

Permission of the instructor required.

Fall 2014 Other Courses

Advanced Reading of Akkadian: The Political and Cultural Relations between Assur and Babylon
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Tuesdays, 2:00pm – 5:00pm
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-001

In addition to consolidating the knowledge of Akkadian grammar the Advanced Reading of Akkadian Class is designed to introduce into various dialects of Akkadian from a diversity of regions and periods and to familiarize the student with a diversity of paleographies as well as text categories. The text corpus to be studied will include royal inscriptions, letters, letters from gods to the king, and chronicles.

At least one year of Akkadian is required. Permission of the instructor required.

Advanced Reading of Akkadian: Incantations, Prayers, and Rituals
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Thursdays 11:00am – 1:00pm
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-002

In addition to consolidating the knowledge of Akkadian grammar the Advanced Reading of Akkadian Class is designed to introduce into various dialects of Akkadian from a diversity of regions and periods and to familiarize the student with a diversity of paleographies as well as text categories. The text corpus to be studied will include incantations, prayers, and rituals from Ebla, Kanesh, Emar in Northern Syria as well as Assyrian and Babylonian cities.

At least one year of Akkadian. Permission of the instructor required.

Spring 2014 Research Seminars

Perspectives on the Ancient World in Medieval Islamic Histories
Robert Hoyland
Thursdays 9:00am – 12:00pm
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3020-001

In this course we will read from the works of a number of Muslim historians in order to ascertain their attitude, and that of Islamic civilization at large, towards the ancient world.  The aim will be to explore how the Islamic world situated itself with respect to past civilizations, why it favoured some past peoples over others, and how the forces of Time, Fate and God's will played a part in the evanescence of the past.

Arabic and permission of the instructor required.

Wall Paintings in Central Asia
Sören Stark & Fiona Kidd
Mondays 5:00 – 8:00pm
soeren.stark@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3009-001

Wall paintings constitute, since the 1^st millennium BCE, at least one of the major means employed to decorate architectural spaces of various sorts – religious (temples, monasteries), communal-palatial, private dwellings, tombs, etc. – throughout Central Asia. As such, murals constitute, in particular for the pre-Islamic period, one of the main categories of visual arts at our disposal. Yet wall paintings are not only significant for the study of art history in pre-Islamic Central Asia: in fact – and considering the near complete loss of other visual materials such as textile wall hangings and illuminated books, and the general scarcity of written sources – murals constitute a critical source for our understanding of the religious, social, economic and sometimes even political history of the area before the advent of Islam.

This class aims at a comprehensive overview of the most important sites and architectural ensembles with substantial wall painting remains in the area. Chronologically they range from the final centuries BCE to the 9^th/10^th century CE. Geographically we will focus on the regions of Choresmia, Sogdiana, Bactria-Tokhāristān and the Tarim basin. This will allow us to review difficult and still much-debated questions concerning the production of wall paintings in Central Asia. Those include questions regarding the significance of regional styles as evidence for regional schools and itinerant workshops, the social and economic background of artists and patrons, ways of transfer of artistic models, and regional variances regarding cultural preferences in elite representation.

Permission of the instructor required.

Literature and the Question of Genre in the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Tuesdays 2:00pm – 5:00pm
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-001

In the last decades the category of ‘literature’ in the Ancient Near East has come repeatedly under scrutiny. It included among other topics fierce discussions about how to define the literary corpus, orality and aurality, the notion of genre, the validity of historical references in literary works and the fluid boundaries between ‘literature’ and ‘historiography,’ where to locate literary production - school, temple, or palace, and how far the production process determined functional and pragmatic aspects of literary works.

To isolate literature from its historical context as l’art pour l’art aesthetics favoring formalistic features over pragmatic and historical concerns certainly does not do justice to ancient literary works. While formalistic features such as the use of literary dialects might operate as a way of categorization, recently, due to the nature of the texts, narratology as well as fictionality have been considered equally important. Literature rather should be defined as a particular medium alongside other media as part of the social and cultural discourse. Moreover, what makes an oeuvre historically significant, is not necessarily established by the qualities of the work or by the author but by its history of reception and its intertextuality and intermediality. The seminar investigates what constituted literary works, how literary works became part of the stream of tradition, were affected by and affected historical conditions, and entered intertextual and intermedial relations.

Knowledge of Akkadian and permission of the instructor required.

Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha
Daniel T. Potts
**This is a condensed seminar. The class will meet twice a week from January 27 – March 18; Mondays 1-4pm and Tuesdays 9am-12pm**
dtp2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001

Third millennium cuneiform sources refer to three lands associated with the 'Lower Sea' (Persian Gulf): Dilmun, in the northern and central Gulf, centered on Bahrain, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and Failak (Kuwait); Magan, in the Oman peninsula; and Meluhha, conventionally identified with the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley. In this seminar we will examine the archaeological and cuneiform sources from and about this region, paying particular attention to the period c. 6000 BC to the 1st century AD. The seminar will emphasize local developments in the region, including both funerary and settlement data, and evidence of inter-regional contact (ceramics, stone vessels, metals, semi-precious stones).

Permission of the instructor required.

Greco-Roman Astrology and Astronomy and the Antecedents
Alexander Jones
Mondays 2:00 – 5:00pm
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001

This seminar will be an introduction to the goals, methods, and practices of Greek mathematical astronomy during the period from the second century BCE through the second century CE (essentially from Hipparchus to Ptolemy) and to the Greco-Roman astrology that depended on this astronomy. Sources will include texts transmitted via medieval manuscripts (e.g. Ptolemy's works in Greek and Arabic), papyri, and presumed adaptations of Greek astronomy and astrology in other traditions such as those of India. Particular attention will be paid to the Greek reception and modification of elements of astronomy and astrology from Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Knowledge of Greek or other languages significant for these traditions and permission of the instructor required.

Landscapes and Territoriality in Western and Eastern Asia BCE
Lorenzo d’Alfonso and Roderick Campbell
Wednesdays 9:30am – 12:30pm
lda5@nyu.edu , rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001

How is place and landscape conceived in times and places before nation states, maps and national borders? What, if any, notions of territoriality were in operation in ancient polities like the Shang kingdom at Anyang or the Neo-Hittite polities of Anatolia? How are they linked to such concepts as community, town/city, and land? And on the other hand, how do modern scholars reconstruct landscapes and territoriality of ancient polities?

The course will approach these and similar questions dividing between classes on theory where some basic methodological contributions are discussed, and classes devoted to case studies, where specific aspects are dealt with in well-defined historical context.

At lease one foreign language and permission of the instructor required. 

Early Chinese Epigraphy: Bones, Bronze, and Bamboo
Roderick Campbell and Adam Schwartz
Thursdays 2:00pm – 5:00pm
rbc2@nyu.edu, acs21@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001

In this course students will acquire a foundation in epigraphic methodology and work through a selection of epigraphic texts from Shang through Warring States times. Fundamental epigraphic training will include an understanding of the basic principles of Chinese graph formation as well as the fundamentals of phonological, morphological and syntactic reconstruction. Consideration of writing media, context and register will also be addressed. Familiarity with corpus access (through compendium, on-line databases, etc.) and resources (dictionaries, concordances, etc.) will form part of the training on each corpus discussed. The main corpuses of excavated texts will be Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, Shang and Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, and Eastern Zhou bamboo slips. We will attempt to cover a wide range of genres with an eye to giving students as broad a paleographic base as possible.

Coursework will consist of weekly assignments – usually in the form of translations and preparation to read specific texts in common. The final course assignment will be the annotated translation of a text of reasonable size and complexity.

Ability to read classical Chinese and permission of instructors required. 

Maps, Models, and Databases: Digital Tools for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath
Wednesdays 2:00pm – 5:00pm
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001

Our goal in this course is to gain hands-on skills with the digital tools that are changing the nature of research and the publication of scholarship related to the Ancient World. The focus is material culture and throughout the term students will work with free tools that enable sharing of results. Students will not only learn how to make 3D models of objects in museum collections, but also how to choose open formats that let one publish those models on the Internet. Google Maps and Earth will play a prominent role, and students will also use the more capable web-based GIS CartoDB (http://cartodb.com). A goal will always be to explore how these tools can work together to make innovative presentations of scholarly research. Other topics include the role of open licenses in modern scholarship, database structures appropriate for capturing the heterogeneity of ancient material culture, network analysis, the geographic component of ancient primary sources, and the deployment of Linked Open Data. Throughout the term students will evaluate both cloud-based tools and downloadable software, while also reviewing websites and digital publications that provide access to important resources. Students will gain an ability to use current tools as well as the confidence to assess new tools as they become available in the future. This course will be of particular interest to students needing to incorporate digital manifestations of material culture into their dissertations or other scholarly work. 

Fall 2013 Research Seminars

Public Health in the Ancient World
Roger Bagnall and Roderick Campbell
Mondays 2:00-5:00 p.m.
roger.bagnall@nyu.edu; rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3022-001

Revolutionary developments in the biological sciences, accompanied as well by discoveries in the physical sciences, have opened up possibilities for study of the human past unimaginable a generation ago. To long-established methods dependent on description and quantification have been added technologies that allow us to find out, for example, whether people buried at Rome were also born and raised there, or what kind of carbohydrates dwellers of an Egyptian oasis were eating. The routes of transmission of plant species can be seen as never before; modern demographic techniques like model life tables have given new life to ancient demography, once a laughingstock; scientific excavation of arid sites coupled with new technologies has produced information on morbidity and mortality unobtainable until now. We have now the opportunity to begin to put together a comprehensive sense of the factors of health over the vast span of human history we call antiquity, while at the same time study changing, collective human responses to disease, nutrition, risk and ultimately, mortality.

This course will have a symposium format with different specialists each week presenting on a range of topics from paleopathology to ancient demography. In addition to weekly response papers students will write a final paper relating one or more of the symposium’s topics to the overarching theme of public health in the ancient world.

Permission of the instructor required.

Iranian Archaeology in the 21^st Century
Daniel T. Potts
Tuesdays 9:00am – 12:00pm
daniel.potts@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001

The publication of recent excavations (post-2000) in journals like Iran, Iranica Antiqua and Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan, as well as in monographs and conference volumes (published inside and outside of Iran) has resulted in a significant addition to our knowledge of Iranian archaeology in all periods of the pre-Islamic past. Accessing that new data and integrating it with what was already known is not always easy, however. This seminar will involve close reading of the past 13 years of scholarship in Iranian archaeology with an emphasis on primary publications of excavations and museum collections (rather than secondary literature). The aim will be to evaluate this new material and assess how it fits in with what was already known about the relevant site, region and/or period; consider where it challenges previous beliefs; and discuss what new questions it raises.

Permission of the instructor required.

Hittite History, Language & Archaeology
Lorenzo d’Alfonso
Mondays, 9:00am – 12:00pm
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001

The Hittite empire had a profound impact on the history of Pre-classical Western Asia. After a period defined by the presence of local principalities, and a formative phase in the 17^th century, a complex political machine developed in Central Anatolia. The creation of a system of large structures for containment of water and seeds allowed local societies to overcome for the first time the regional challenges resulting from the weather and landscape. These important structures are part of a comprehensive approach to complex social life, whose effects became concretely observable in the so-called Early Empire. In this period, for example, normative texts were produced, some defining the administrative function of the capital and peripheral districts, some –what we call rituals and feasts-, defining the cultic activity between the core to the periphery, and the syncretic pantheon. The tension between the “possible empire” emerging from these texts and the local developments produced by various actors can be understood through the lens of the historical context in which the empire operated for almost 500 years. The course aims at providing participants with basic information and updated research on the Hittites. Each class will be divided into two parts: one touching different themes of the history and archaeology of the Hittites; the other providing an introduction into the Hittite language and script.

Participation 30%; one presentation during course 40%; final written exam 30% (no final paper)

Requirements: one foreign language: either French, Italian or German

Permission of the instructor required.

Introduction to GIS & Spatial Analysis in Anthropology & Archaeology
Emily Hammer
Wednesdays 9:30am – 12:30pm
ehammer@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001 – Class takes place at 24 Waverly Place, Rm. 668

This course aims to provide a basic understanding of how remote sensing data (satellite imagery and aerial photographs) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used to visualize, analyze, and integrate archaeological, anthropological, historical, environmental, and hydrological data.  It also aims to introduce students to the process of designing and carrying out a spatial research project.  Students will learn basic techniques for acquiring, manipulating, and creating geospatial data in several forms, including pixel-based satellite imagery and digital terrain models as well as point, line, and polygon representations of data.  Each week, these techniques will be applied to sample archaeological data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.  In addition to lab-based work, students will learn basic field techniques of field survey, including how to navigate and record using a Global Positioning System (GPS) handheld receiver, how to integrate GPS data into a GIS database, and how to produce maps for fieldwork and publication.  The course will use ESRI's ArcGIS software.

Permission of the instructor required.

Time in Greco-Roman Antiquity: Texts and Material Culture
Alexander Jones
Thursdays 2:00 – 5:00pm
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001

In the ancient Greek and Roman world time was initially flexible, inexact, and tied to the natural environment. The risings and settings of the Sun, the phases of the Moon, and the cycle of the seasons supplied the basic framework of days, months, and years by which people organized daily life, commerce, religion, and government. However, astronomers, mathematicians, mechanicians, and scholars developed increasingly precise ways of measuring, organizing, and keeping track of time. This seminar will investigate the varied technologies and practices of time management known from textual sources and artifacts, and the interaction between the development of these technologies and practices and the awareness and representation of measured time in Greco-Roman society.

Permission of the instructor required.

Fall 2013 Other Courses

Advanced Reading of Akkadian - Literary Texts in Ancient Mesopotamia
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Tuesdays 2:00 – 5:00pm
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-001

This course is intended to provide an insight into the corpus of literary texts of Mesopotamia. It includes a mix of poems, epics, and myths, the Agushaya Hymn, Tukulti-Ninurta Epic, the Erra Epic, Anzu Myth and Etana Myth, just to name a few. Most of these texts come in various versions from different periods thus allowing for investigating their transmission through time. They are written in the Hymnic-Epical Dialect or the Standard Babylonian dialect. Consequently, beyond acquiring knowledge of great Mesopotamian literary works, the students will train in reading these literary dialects. At least one year of Akkadian is required.

Permission of the instructor required.

Spring 2013 Research Seminars

Transmission of Ancient Science into Arabic
Robert Hoyland
Thursdays 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3002-001
rgh2@nyu.edu

The aim of this course is to explore the different paths along which knowledge of Antiquity passed into Muslim intellectual culture and how it was received and interpreted.  The focus will not just be on the so-called translation movement, but also the broader question of how pre-Islamic histories and cultures fared in the Middle East after the Arab conquests.  A core part of the course will be reading original Arabic texts and assessment will be via a final paper that must involve study of extracts from Arabic texts.

Permission of the instructor required.

Greek Texts on Mechanics
Alexander Jones
Mondays 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3007-001
alexander.jones@nyu.edu

A selection of Greek mechanical texts, including Pappus of Alexandria's "Introduction to Mechanics" (Book 8 of his Synagoge) and Heronian works from the "Mynas Codex" (Par. suppl. gr. 607) will be studied on the basis of medieval manuscripts, with particular attention to the manuscript diagrams.

Knowledge of ancient Greek is required. Permission of the instructor required.

“Soghdians in their Homeland” – the Archaeology of Soghdia from ca. 600 BCE to ca. 750 CE
Sören Stark
Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m; March 26 – May 9
ISAW-GA 3009-001
soeren.stark@nyu.edu

Spectacular finds and a general interest in Old World connectivity has in recent years sparkled much interest in Soghdians abroad, in particular in their colonies along the so-called Silk Roads and in the Chinese plains. Much less attention has been paid, outside a small scholarly circle, to their homeland at the banks of the rivers Zerafshan and Kashka-Darya (in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) – with the result that the discussion of “Soghdians along the Silk Roads and in China” is often based on too imprecise (sometimes even wrong) assumptions about their ‘original’ cultural traditions.

Particularly regrettable is a certain tendency to use the term “Soghdian” almost in a generic way, subsuming everything “Iranian” east of the Iranian plateau under one fashionable label.

This seminar aims for some clarification on this issue by systematically and comprehensively assessing our current knowledge on the archaeology of Soghdia, from the dawn of constitutive cultural features in the region during the pre-Achaemenid Iron Age to the incorporation of Soghdia into the Dar al-Islam in the course of the 8th century. The approach will be micro-regional, that is we will follow the main trends of development regarding settlement patterns, site typology, architecture, ceramic, metal and textile production, as well as burial costumes and visual arts for each micro-region separately – as far as possible. This is an ambitious aim that has not been undertaken in a systematic way. As a result, it is hoped, we will be able to not only distinguish more precisely “Soghdian” cultural features from those associated with Khorezmia, Ferghana, Bactria or Sasanian Iran, but also to perceive intra-regional variations and trends.

This seminar is held intensively from March 26^th – May 9^th. Russian and permission of the instructor is required.

The Art of Antiquity in the Metropolitan Museum: A Global Perspective
Lillian Tseng/Paul Zanker
Tuesdays & Thursdays 3:00pm-6:00pm January 29 - March 14
ISAW-GA 3012-001
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu

This seminar explores the collections of Ancient art in the Metropolitan Museum with a global perspective. It seeks to clarify the distinct features of art objects produced in the Greco-Roman World and in Early China through contrast and comparison. Mediums to be studied range from sculpture, pictorial arts to decorative arts. Topics to be discussed include heroes, deities, mythology, auspiciousness, monumentality, and femininity.

The seminar encourages students to establish direct connections with objects. All classes meet in the galleries or storerooms of the Museum. The seminar is led by Lillian Tseng and Paul Zanker. Dr. Zanker is the author of Roman Art (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010) and Pompeii: Public and Private Life (Harvard University Press, 1998).

This seminar is held intensively from January 29^th to March 14^th. The first class meets in the lecture hall of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. No languages are required.

Permission of the instructor is required.

Beyond Apogee and Collapse: Empires and other Polities in the Ancient World (BCE)
Roderick Campbell/Lorenzo d’Alfonso
Fridays 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3013-001
rbc2@nyu.edu, lda5@nyu.edu

“The fall of the Assyrian empire”; “the collapse of the Mayan civilization” – the idea of collapse fascinates the contemporary imagination, conjuring images of melancholy ruins and vanished civilizations. The apogee of empires is what is generally contrasted with the post-collapse situation, but what of everything in between? When researchers detach their gaze from successful military deeds, or abrupt changes in the archaeological record, a sort of skepticism on the consistence and the sense of ancient polities occurs, and lower scale social organization –urban, kin, or primary production based, appears as the main ‘real’ elements defining the scenario.

The course will discuss how empires and other polities of the ancient world (4^th to 1^st millennium BCE) operate over the long-term.  On the basis of more recent studies, it will reconsider the concepts of “apogee” and “collapse” as embedded in a more dynamic understanding of historical processes. These and similar questions about the nature and functioning of ancient political forms over time will be the focus of the seminar, divided in a group of classes on theoretic approaches, followed by a series of case studies.

SYLLABUS

Permission of the instructor is required.

Arabia in Antiquity c. 3500 BCE – 750 CE
George Hatke
Tuesdays 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3018-001
geh2@nyu.edu

While ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Syria-Palestine have been the subject of scholarly investigation for the better part of two centuries, the Arabian Peninsula remains an understudied region by historians and archaeologists alike. This results not only from the difficulties of traveling to, and conducting research in, Arabia, but also from a long-standing view that ancient Arabia was little more than a peripheral region of the Near East whose nomadic tribes periodically migrated into more northerly regions but which had little history of its own.

This seminar seeks to demonstrate that, far from being peripheral to the ancient Near East, the Arabian Peninsula was in fact an axis of the Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds and must therefore be considered an integral part of antiquity. From this broader perspective, such developments in ancient Arabian history as the diffusion of Semitic languages, the rise of state societies, the growth of long-distance trade, and ultimately the spread of monotheistic tradition(s) will be studied against the backdrop of the political, social, economic, and cultural history of the ancient world at large. In this way students of antiquity will learn how to interpret and evaluate evidence for contact between cultures, using the Arabian Peninsula as a case study. Particular emphasis will be placed on three key regions of Arabia: 1) South Arabia and the Red Sea, 2) East Arabia and the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and 3) the desert frontier of the Fertile Crescent that constitutes North Arabia. The timeframe of the seminar extends from the Early Bronze Age (beginning in the mid-fourth millennium BCE) to the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE).

Among the questions that will be dealt with in this seminar are: 1) What role did agriculture and trade play in ancient Arabian society, and what evidence survives of these two facets of the Arabian economy? 2) To what extent were ancient Arabian politics shaped by external political and economic factors? How and why did some foreign polities (e.g. the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum and the Sāsānid Empire of Iran) establish spheres of influence while no Arabian polity expanded beyond the Arabian Peninsula until the seventh century CE? 3) Who were the Arabs and what made them different from other Arabian peoples? Is it possible to speak of the Arabs as a single, coherent group in pre-Islamic times? 4) How did monotheistic traditions reshape Arabian society during Late Antiquity (c. 200-700 CE)? Why did Islam emerge when it did, and why in Arabia, as opposed to another desert region like the Sahara?

Permission of the instructor required.

Relations between Mesopotamia & Iran
Daniel T. Potts
Wednesdays 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3019-001
kel306@nyu.edu

This seminar will consider a variety of issues in the archaeology of Mesopotamia and Iran from late prehistory through the end of the Bronze Age. Some of those issues will be examined in a synchronic fashion while others will be investigated diachronically. Accounting for changes in material culture and cultural practices, as well as continuities, is a constant theme in much archaeological research, sometimes centering around specific domains of material culture or cultural activity, sometimes taking a more global approach. This year’s seminar will examine a range of different issues diachronically. The intention is to initiate a discussion around the role of technology and demography as variables which impact upon the continuities and changes that are attested in a number of different domains.

This course poses a series of key questions of a series of cultural domains and practices attested in Mesopotamia and Iran (6^th-2^rd millennia BC), with a view to charting structural continuities and discontinuities through time. The appropriateness of technological and social explanations of these phenomena will be discussed and evaluated.

Knowledge of French and/or German required. Permission of the instructor required.

The History of Assyria in Ancient and Modern Historiography
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Tuesdays 2:00p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3020-001
bpl2@nyu.edu

This seminar is not geared towards an event-oriented history of Assyria. Its also not concerned with the social science oriented history including quantitative sociological and economic history modeled after the natural sciences and its claim for objective truth. Rather than a history from below, the emphasis is on the study of the textual production as it related to or occurred at the Assyrian courts throughout their history and on how ancient historiography proceeded from facts or empirical events to create a coherent story about the deeds of the king that met the expectations linked with the office of rulership, which were informed by a longstanding tradition and the world view of the time. We will educate ourselves as to how to interpret the various text genres that Assyriologists have classified as chronicles and annals by critically re-evaluating our modern taxonomy applied to the ancient texts and explore how these ‘genres’ interface with what we tend to subsume under fiction and literature. In addition to such critical attitude toward the text, informed by postmodern literary theory and linguistics, linguistic features of the ancient texts and the shape of the tablet as well as the context of the text will illuminate our interpretation of the ancients’ intentionality. We will explore to what degree the writings were indeed concerned with the past, what the inserting of ‘historical factual data’ was aiming at and further critically evaluate the assumption that history needs always to be written in a narrative.

The goal of the seminar is threefold: 1) to familiarize ourselves with the various text categories, 2) to acquire knowledge in the various dialects of the Assyrian language as well as in the ‘hymnic epical dialect’ by reading primary sources related to the general discussion and 3) to acquire an insight into the cultural and intellectual setting in which historiography was written by the ancient scholars for the political elites.

The reading of Akkadian texts related to the seminar will be complemented by a further tutorial on Thursday 11AM - 1PM.

As in former years the seminar will be concluded with a workshop. This year’s participants:  Jean-Jacques Glassner; Peter Machinist; Piotr Michalowski, and Nele Ziegler. Akkadian is required for those who attend the reading sessions.

Permission of the instructor required.

Pottery and Empire in the Roman Mediterranean
Sebastian Heath
Wednesdays 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3021-001
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu

This course surveys the types of pottery available in the Roman-period Mediterranean and encourages students to consider how that material contributes to the study of large-scale economic and political history, as well as its contribution to focused questions of individual consumer experience and the interpretation of specific archaeological contexts. Students will gain familiarity with the basic vocabulary and techniques of ceramic study while always asking why this material is important to understanding the Roman Empire. The majority of the readings concern the Eastern Mediterranean, but we will consider the Mediterranean as a unit.  Some titles in the required readings are drawn from fields entirely outside the ancient Mediterranean. Students will be able to explore specific regions or issues within the study of Roman pottery in their research paper.

Permission of the instructor required.

Fall 2012 Research Seminars

Introduction to Papyrology
Roger Bagnall
Tuesdays 2:00-5:00 p.m.
roger.bagnall@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3007-001

This seminar will introduce students to both technical and substantive sides of papyrology. It will read a representative selection of published papyri from the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods, with an emphasis on the interpretive challenges posed by documentary evidence; and students will learn to decipher Greek handwritings and prepare a critical edition of a papyrus.

A knowledge of Greek is required; Latin and Coptic would be useful, and there will be readings in French and German. Permission of the professor is required.

Conceptions of Ethnicity in the Ancient World
Lorenzo d’Alfonso and Soeren Stark
Wednesdays 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
lda5@nyu.edu, soeren.stark@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3009-001

The problem of ethnicity is a recurring and widely discussed topic in studies related to a wide range of pre-modern societies and cultures. Historical conceptions, rooted in national movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have taken for granted that terms like “people”, “tribe”, etc. refer to racially and culturally homogeneous groups, sharing a common descendance and destiny, speaking the same language and living within one state. In this way, “peoples” (and not individuals or social groups) were seen as something immutable, almost as a natural rather than a historical phenomenon.

Although the ideological origins of these conceptions are now common knowledge, “ethnicity” in pre-modern societies remains a much-debated issue. One of the most pertinent questions is whether an “ethnic” identity existed and, if so, how it differs from other group identities. Other core questions to be discussed in the seminar are “ethnic identity” and the concept of “cultural memory”, “ethnic identity and the archaeological record”, “ethnicity and name-giving” and “ethnicity and migrations”. The seminar approaches these problems from a cross-cultural perspective, drawing on cases from the Ancient Near East to the Early Medieval Steppes in Inner Eurasia.

Reading will be in English and German. Permission of the professor is required.

Redrawing the Map: Art & Archaeology of Northeast Asia in the First Millennium CE
Sarah Laursen
Thursdays 2:00-5:00 p.m.
sarah.laursen@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001

This seminar will investigate the interrelationships between the arts of China, Korea, and Japan in the first millennium CE. We will first identify the historical political borders between these regions, and then compare them to the evidence provided by the material record. Key themes of ethnicity, religious affiliation, and the transfer of technology will be explored through case studies, such as the wall paintings in China’s Han dynasty tombs, the shimmering gold jewelry of Korea’s Three Kingdoms period, and the surviving traditional architecture of Japan’s Asuka and Nara periods.

Chinese, Korean, or Japanese reading knowledge preferred. Permission of the professor is required.

Genealogies of the State: Polities in the Ancient World
Roderick Campbell
Wednesdays 2:00-5:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3012-001
rbc2@nyu.edu

What is an "ancient state"? What assumptions about history are packed into the often heard but seldom explained phrase, "state level society"? In the first half this course we will explore the intellectual history of "the state" from early modern to 21st century theorists and the rise of the concept of "the ancient state" in 20th century archaeology. Armed with a genealogy of the state concept we will then turn to case studies of ancient polities and empires from antiquity. The case studies will be presented by a series of leading experts brought in as guest speakers.

This course will be reading intensive and interdisciplinary. There will likely be a contingent of faculty and post-docs as well as graduate students. Graduate students of disparate disciplines with an interest in deep-time political development are welcome. Prerequisites are interest, industry and imagination.

Permission of the professor is required.

Art & Archaeology of Early Medieval China
Lillian Tseng
Mondays 2:00–5:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3013-001
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu

This seminar surveys diverse visual and material cultures from the 3rd to the 6^th centuries in China, a historical period marked by political division and ethnic integration. We will examine both transmitted and excavated objects, with special attention to their historical and archaeological contexts. Issues to discuss include ideology, identity, gender, and cultural interaction. Mediums to explore range from calligraphy, painting, architecture, sculpture, to ceramics, silverware, and glassware.

Reading knowledge of modern Chinese is required. Permission of the professor is required.

The Arab Conquests and the Worlds of Late Antiquity: Arabization, Arabicization, and Islamization
Robert Hoyland
Thursdays 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
ISAW-GA 3014-001
kel306@nyu.edu

This course will examine the interaction between the Arab conquerors and the late antique worlds that they encountered.  It will do so principally through the lens of contemporaries and near contemporaries rather than through that of ninth- and tenth-century Muslims, as is the usual practice.  This is crucial for gaining a better understanding of the Middle East as it was when the Arabs first arrived in it as conquerors instead of as it came to be after a couple of centuries of their rule.  A considerable amount of attention will be paid to the various polities that existed shortly prior to the conquests - the kingdoms of the Romanised Berbers, Nubians, Caucasian Albanians, Soghdians, Gurjarans etc - and the different ways in which they dealt with the invaders.

Spring 2012 Research Seminars

Archaeologies of Production / Traditions of Making: Ancient China and Beyond
Roderick Campbell
Fridays 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3010-001

This seminar will focus on an interdisciplinary study of production and the making of things in Early China using case studies from China as well as other parts of the world for comparison. The aim is to not only understand the history of Chinese production but also work toward a better understanding of making, innovation, creation and provisioning in human history.

Permission of the professor is required. Chinese language reading required unless instructor’s permission is obtained first.

Dark Ages in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Aegean, Anatolia and the Levant 1200-800 BCE
Lorenzo d'Alfonso
Thursdays 9:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m.
lda5@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001

The turn of the second Millennium BCE caused a dramatic caesura in the History of the Eastern Mediterranean. Before that passage Western Asia was divided into large territorial states characterized by the so called “palatial economy”. After that passage, we face a great variety of new political entities in the Levant, which current research is bringing more and more to light. In the East the regional powers of Assyria and Babylon evolve into Empires. Although these are embedded in a much older tradition of representation of kingship and state organisation, the dimensions of their territories and of the military and administrative apparatus and propaganda also identify a clear distance from the previous era.

The course will reconsider the different hypotheses about the short process of profound change which took place at the end of the 13^th century and during the first half of the 12^th century BCE, and the following evolution until the end of the Dark Ages. The focus will be set on specific case studies in the Aegean, Anatolia and the Levant during that time, with a critical approach to the way these processes have been reconstructed.

Permission of the professor is required.

Writing, Law, Divination and Religion in the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Tuesdays 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-001

Generally scholarship puts the cult of the gods at the center stage of religious systems in antiquity. This seminar takes a different approach investigating the origins of writing, law, and divination, to demonstrate their intricate relationship with each other, and only then with cultic practice as well as the theological meta-structures of religion.

We will explore the early clay tokens and their potential relationship with early signs written on the first archaic tablets, as well as their combination with counting systems in order to understand the emergence of writing. Such inventions are linked with the more general and universal cognitive capacities for object recognition, naming, and categorizing. Consequently, a further aspect of research will be concerned with the archaic and Early Dynastic lists and their organization.

In Mesopotamia, the earliest samples of writing (ca. 3100 BCE) represent contracts reflecting oral transactions, which evince the existence of a legal system regulating social and economic interaction. The conceptualization of legal norms, however, is attested only in the early royal edicts (ca. 2600 BCE) evincing the royal appropriation of the legal system into their ideological self-representation which again was framed by the larger religious system.  By that time the three main areas of constitutional law, administrative law, and economic activities were covered by the royal decrees using an elaborate legal terminology, which is then appropriated by the specialists for divination. A major aspect of our inquiry will be investigating the notion of kittu, which is generally translated as ‘truth,’ and ‘dīnu ‘case, trial’ and how they link law to divination and beyond, to the larger world view.

The compelling feature about Mesopotamian divination is not only its direct link with legislation as expressed in the use of judicial language but also with the cuneiform writing system. The cognitive process of transforming pathological forms observed on the liver into signs with cultural meaning which then are interpreted within a complex semiotic system show a similar cognitive process as the creation of writing. Both cultural systems, writing and divination, are dominated by the impact of the notion of drawing and writing to outline recognizable patterns, which can be traced back to representational prototypes. The question of representational prototypes then will lead us to understand cultural key metaphors of Mesopotamian religion.

Specialists for early writing (Gonzalo Rubio), law (Norman Yoffee), and cognitive sciences (Rita Watson) will lead some of the sessions and provide their expertise and insight to these questions.

Requirements: The research seminar is open to graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty. Permission of the professor is required. Any primary sources will be provided with translations. Students are required to do short response papers to the readings and a presentation in combination with a written final paper. 

Cultural Interactions in Eurasian Art & Archaeology
Soeren Stark/Lillian Tseng
Wednesdays 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu, soeren.stark@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3015-001

Cross-cultural inquiries over the Eurasian continent are still, to a considerable degree, hampered both by the fragmenting character of traditional academic divisions (such as Near Eastern, Central Asian, East Asian, South Asian studies) and considerable language barriers. Whereas the current academic divisions encourage the in-depth investigation of issues derived from the ‘core areas’, it does not facilitate the cross-border inquiry that addresses the interconnectedness between assumed ‘core areas’.

This seminar is intended to bridge academic gaps by exploring a wealth of cultural interactions between Central Asia and East Asia through a series of representative cases dated from the fifth century BCE to the ninth century CE. In the class we will revisit the so-called “Scythian animal style” that embodied the art of the steppe stretching from Ukraine to Northern China. We will compare how the Han Chinese perceived the Northern ‘barbarians’ and how the Xiongnu elites expressed their cultural identity themselves by commissioning and consuming prestigious art objects. We will have a closer look at how Soghdian funerary practices and the related visual arts persisted or were subsequently altered in their trading colonies in Northern China. The class will tackle material culture of Tang China, its shaping and its impact on the Türk Qaghanats in the northwest and on Japan in the east. Finally, we will also consider the religious factor in cultural interaction by examining Buddhist grottos in Bāmiyān and Dunhuang.

Permission of the professor is required. Reading knowledge of German or French is recommended, but alternate English readings are available if necessary. 

Fall 2011 Research Seminars

Archaeology and Historiography: Perspectives on Time, Space, Text and Material
Roderick B. Campbell
Mondays: 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
roderickbcampbell@gmail.com
ISAW-GA 3010-001

Though treated as separate disciplines and usually housed in different departments, at the highest level history and archaeology share the common goal of understanding the human past. Nevertheless, in both theory and method, not only are archaeology and history internally diverse, but also frequently miles apart.

This seminar will embark on an interdisciplinary exploration of the historical sciences: their histories, philosophies and methodologies. Special focus will be on theories of time (change, tradition, process, event, etc.), space (physical space, place, landscape, etc.), text (context, genre, discourse, memory, etc.) and material (material culture, materiality, things, actor-networks, etc.)

The reading load in this course will be heavy. Permission of the instructor is required.

Scientific practices and practitioners in Greco-Roman society
Alexander Jones
Wednesdays: 1:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
alexander.jones@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3002-001

This seminar will explore the contexts and conditions in which scientific research, practice, writing, and teaching were conducted in the Greco-Roman world from c. 500 BCE to c. 600 CE. While a broad and comprehensive conception of science cannot be applied to Classical antiquity, intellectual traditions involving a systematic approach to the description, explanation, and prediction of phenomena and the prescription of actions were interrelated in various ways, for example by sharing methods and theoretical frameworks, by having some of the same people as practitioners, or by serving analogous social functions. The principal focuses of the seminar will be the richly documented conditions of activity of physicians and medical theorists from the Hippocratic to the Imperial periods, and the more fragmentary and challenging evidence pertaining to mathematicians, astronomers, and astrologers.

Students must have proficiency in ancient Greek, and reading knowledge of at least one of French, German, and Latin. Permission of the instructor required.

The Archaeology of the Egyptian Oases
Roger Bagnall
Thursdays: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
roger.bagnall@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001

This seminar will center on the ISAW-sponsored excavations in the Dakhla Oasis in the western desert of Upper Egypt, including the ongoing excavations of Amheida and the excavations carried out in 2006-2008 at the smaller site of Ain el-Gedida. Most of the material excavated at these sites to date has belonged to the third and fourth centuries CE, but at Amheida occupation goes back to the Old Kingdom or earlier, and there are substantial remains of the pharaonic periods of the first millennium BCE. There will be a specific focus on the relationship of archaeological contexts and the objects found in them, particularly but not only objects bearing writing. Special attention will be paid to the problems of insecure contexts and the interpretation of finds coming from such contexts.

There will be reading in French, German, and Italian. Students must have proficiency in at least one language, preferably two. Permission of the instructor required.

Divinatory Texts in Ancient Mesopotamia
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Tuesdays: 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3014-001

This course is intended to provide an insight into omen literature of Mesopotamia. It includes a mix of scientific and literary texts that in their formal structure derive from omen literature. We will read through an array of primary sources including Old Babylonian liver models, Old Babylonian extispicy omina and Neo-Assyrian omina containing historical allusionas, a Neo-Assyrian tamītu-text as well as excerpts from the celestial omen series Enuma Anu Enlil. The reading of literary predictive texts from the Neo-Assyrian and Hellenistic periods - Prophecy A and the Uruk Prophecy - will illuminate the dependency of historiographic prophecies on astrological omina.

Students must have had at least one year of Akkadian. Permission of the instructor required.

Spring 2011 Research Seminars

Chronology, Calendars, and Astronomy
Alexander Jones
Fridays: 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
alexander.jones@nyu.edu

A selection of recent and current research on astronomy and practices of short-term and long-term time reckoning in ancient Old World civilizations, with particular focus on ancient Near Eastern, Greco-Roman, and related traditions.

Permission of the professor is required.

Fall 2009 Research Seminars

Globalization of Knowledge in the Multilingual and Multi-ethnic Milieu of the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00pm

Cuneiform culture, originally invented in Sumer, dominated the entire region of the ancient Near East despite local, political, and cultural differences and despite the fact that in many cultures Sumerian or Akkadian did not represent the spoken language. Throughout three thousand years of history, the body of educational and scholarly texts remained more or less uniform. The professionalism reflected in the textual corpora speaks in favor of a virtual community of intellectuals. Scribes and scholars viewed themselves as an established community of users of a shared traditional knowledge which was acquired by means of a common curriculum. Owing to their control of information and knowledge these scholars played an essential role among the elites of society. The same is true for craftsmen who, in antiquity, showed great mobility, and who, because of their skills, were among the first to be deported during times of war. 

The seminar will explore the nature of knowledge as transmitted in the cuneiform tradition, the relationship between science and religion, the carriers of knowledge, i.e. the communities of scholars and scribes; libraries and the findspots of the scholarly material and what these tell us about scribal practices, training, and competences in regions that were distant from Mesopotamia. These investigations will serve to detect the human agency behind the texts and material culture and the relationship between texts, objects and persons. The goal is to obtain a better grasp of the cultural mechanisms and strategies of the spread of knowledge in antiquity.

The Exact Sciences in Antiquity
Alexander Jones
Wednesdays, 2:00-4:00pm

Topic: Greco-Roman astrology
The seminar will be devoted to several aspects of the history of Greco-Roman astrology, including: (1) the evidence for its date and place of origin, (2) the practice of astrology from the Hellenistic period to late antiquity as reflected in papyri, artifacts, and medievally transmitted texts, and (3) Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos (or Apotelesmatika) and the ancient tradition of commentaries on that work.

Society, Economy, and Culture in Late Antiquity
Roger Bagnall
Thursdays, 10:00am-12:00pm

Presentation of current research in the society, economy, and culture of the Late Antique world, including the entire Roman world and the Near and Middle East.