Course Descriptions
©Kahn: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau
To enroll in an ISAW course, you must first obtain the permission of the instructor. You may then forward the permission email to isaw.academic.affairs@nyu.edu to get the registration access code. All classes will be held in the 2nd-floor Seminar Room at ISAW unless indicated otherwise.
Spring 2025: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World
The Interconnected Ancient World: 1-500 CE
Lillian Tseng and Sebastian Heath
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu; sebastian.heath@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructors is required.
Spring 2025: Research Seminars
The Animal Across Disciplines in the Roman Mediterranean
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Mondays, 1:30-4:30pm
Animals were integrated into many aspects of life in antiquity and have left their mark in the textual, material, and archaeological records. This class will focus on human interactions with animals in the Roman Mediterranean, offering a synthetic view of the different types of evidence available. With this goal in mind, the course will begin with sessions devoted to cattle, flock animals, and equids, respectively, each taking a holistic look at the animals in the historical record, including literary appearances, artistic representations, ancient technical writing, and zooarchaeological remains. Subsequent weeks will consider the more diverse groups of species (real and imagined) that fall under the heading of pets, exotic animals, and (quasi-)mythical animals, including the role that fossils may have played in the ancient zoological imaginary. The second half of the class will turn more directly to the study of human-animal interactions, covering the topics of the religious role of animals, hunting, diet, the scientific study of animals in antiquity, and literary and artistic deployments of animals.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Early Iron Age Complex Societies in Ancient Western Asia and the Emergence of the Scytho-Siberian Phenomenon
Sören Stark and Annarita Bonfanti
soeren.stark@nyu.edu; ab11866@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Around the turn from the 9th to the 8th century BCE an innovative combination of highly effective forms of mobile warfare and new (together with older) elements of elite representation emerged in the pastoral milieu of eastern central Eurasia, pointing to the appearance of new modes of socio-political organization of highly mobile and thoroughly militarized pastoral elites (the “Scytho-Siberian phenomenon”). In the course of less than a century (perhaps really only during a few decades) this new cultural phenomenon spread across almost all the Eurasian steppe zone—all the way to the steppes and forest steppes in the southern Urals, to the north of the Caucasus, and to the north of the Black Sea. Moreover, these militarily potent pastoral elites soon came in direct contact with communities in the agro-pastoral and agrarian zones further south—from the Western Zhou in the Chinese plains, over the oasis regions and high mountains in southern Central Asia, to the various early Iron Age polities in the southern Caucasus, in the northwestern parts of the Iranian plateau, in Anatolia, and in the northern parts of the Fertile Crescent.
The result was a previously unknown intensification of various forms of direct and indirect connectivity between East Asia in the east and Western Asia and Eastern Europe in the west, as well as between the Siberian forest zone in the north and the Indo-Iranian high mountain zone in the south, encompassing several interaction zones. This connectivity was both fostered by and resulted in individual and group mobility, military and diplomatic contacts, resource exchange, technology transfers, and shared systems of cultural expression and status representation. This was arguably history’s first age of globalization on a truly Eurasian scale. In our seminar we will inquire into how this interconnected world of the Early Iron Age evolved out of the worlds of the Late Bronze Age, how it spread across large parts of Eurasia, and how it is manifest in material culture, scientific data, and written testimony, with a particular focus on interactions and sharings between the Scytho-Siberian cultural complex and the 8th-7th century polities in Western Asia.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Antiquarians and Curators: Ancient Art Collecting and Displaying Practices
Roberta Casagrande-Kim and Maya Muratov
rck3@nyu.edu; mbm224@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
This course explores major issues pertinent to the collection, display, and curation of ancient art by offering a historical and contemporary perspective. Central topics will include history of collecting from Antiquity onwards and early history of museums, historical and contemporary issues of acquisition, development of cross-cultural thematic exhibitions, use of design and technology in contemporary modes of display, as well as audience development and engagement.
The seminar will alternate between lectures from both professors and meetings in ISAW's galleries and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Ancient Worlds and World Systems: Interaction, Interconnection and Comparison
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Fridays, 2:00-5:00pm
The terms "interaction" and "interconnection" are much invoked in academic discourse (indeed are considered to be foundational to the mission of this Institute), but what do they actually mean? How have these terms been used in ancient studies and its multiple overlapping disciplines? What concepts do they entail and how do they relate to one another? How do they map across different disciplines and what sorts of historical subjects do they imagine? Is interconnection, for instance, in opposition to comparison or its complement? Should it be ancient "world", "worlds" or "world systems" and how does this conceptualization relate to the sort of relationality one chooses to embrace or the historical subject one chooses to imagine?
This course will engage diverse theories concerning interaction, interconnection and comparison in the past, exploring their theoretical assumptions, the modes of relationality they invoke and the various engagements with the past they imply. Readings will range across a number of disciplines and from foundational figures of historiography and social theory to recent developments. This seminar will be reading intensive.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Introduction to Oracle-bone Inscription Chinese
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
This course will introduce students to the earliest extant form of the Chinese script - the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions. The seminar will proceed from a brief historical and archaeological contextualization of the corpus to the fundamentals of Chinese paleography and work up to translating increasingly difficult inscriptions. The seminar will cover basic issues in oracle-bone studies, the fundamentals of Shang grammar and morphology and a grounding in paleographic principles. Students will be taught the use of various dictionaries, concordances and oracle-bone collections.
Prerequisites: working knowledge of modern and Classical Chinese.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Borderlands and Peripheries: Political Archaeology of the Liminal Regions of the Assyrian Empire (9th-7th cc. BCE)
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu; bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
With its overwhelming military force, and an ideological and material apparatus the Assyrian empire features in the Old Testament, in the indigenous political narrative, and in the archaeological record as the most effective, powerful and visible political machine of ancient western Asia. Exactly because it has been so widely investigated, the Assyrian empire offers a unique case study for investigating processes of cultural interaction in non-core and border regions.
The seminar will first introduce theoretical literature on the theme of borders, group identity formation and cultural contact, with attention to the specific case of unbalanced political circumstances. It will then consider the study of the different non-core and border zones of the empire with their different histories and traditions (Babylon, Elam, the Zagros, Urartu, the post-Hittite canton states, Muški, the Syro-Hittite world, the Canaanite city-states, Israel and Judah) using the epigraphic and OT textual materials, but moving particularly from the evidence emerging from the archaeological record.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Spring 2025: Other Courses
Advanced Ancient Egyptian II
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 1003-001
Fridays, 9:00am-12:00pm
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.
Statistical Programming for Ancient World Study
Patrick Burns
pjb311@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-001
Mondays, 5:15-6:45pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
This two-credit course introduces students to statistical programming in R with a focus on working with archaeological data, historical-language philological data, and other types of ancient-world data. The course uses Thulin's Modern Statistics with R: From wrangling and exploring data to inference and predictive modelling book, supplementing the examples used here with datasets directly relevant to ancient world study. Topics covered include data collection and transformation, exploratory data analysis and visualization, and basic introductions to regression models and predictive models, though the primary focus of the course will be instructing students on best practices for working with R for quantitative research. Weekly readings will supplement coding assignments with special topics related to the role of statistics in archaeology and philology. For the course's final project, students can either reproduce a quantitative analysis from their area of ancient world research or develop one of their own. There are no prerequisites for this course.
Permission of the instructor is required.
The Culture of Production in the Administrative and Literary Texts in Ancient Mesopotamia
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 10:00am-1:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
Permission of the instructor is required.
Race and Roman Art
John Hopkins
jnh1@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-002
Mondays, 2:00-4:45pm
Location, TBD (Downtown, NYU)
4 credits. Roman art history is tinged with race. It is epitomized in canonical artforms that have been made to seem appropriate (so, appropriated) for Europeans/Whites but not others. It is clouded by the racialization of peoples and by a history of racism and supremacist thought that appropriated a diverse population for one region's dominance. At the same time, from the first moments of modern critical study of art in the fifteenth century and through Enlightenment study of the ancient Mediterranean, Roman culture has held a place at the center of the Humanities, the field of Art History, and the idea of what it means to be intellectual. This course examines the racialization of ancient peoples, their use in the supremacist creation and maintenance of a "Western" canon and the ways that Romans, people living under Roman occupation, and their art has been appropriated and assimilated for European intellectual and historical hegemony. Just as importantly, this course looks to antiquity itself to assess how the diverse and entangled peoples of the whole Mediterranean came under Roman occupation, all the while composing a world of art that was only Roman in part. For many apologists and intellectual champions of "Classical" art, the diversity of the Empire and the powers that elites (even a few emperors) who hailed from multiple backgrounds wielded has seemed a means to champion an open culture. Two important correctives to this are 1) how assimilationist tendencies often cleansed the empire of its diversity or tokenized othered people, and 2) that scholarship still focuses on the role of a select canon of art and an elite ancient community who pushed a predatory imperialist agenda that often fueled epistemicide and the cleansing of heritage. With this in mind, we will close the semester by considering how the field might "re-member, re-claim and re-empower" ancient Mediterranean peoples.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Akkadian II
Quinn Daniels
dqd204@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-003
Meeting time and location, TBD
This course is the second module of a four-semester sequence that covers the essentials of the Akkadian language. Here, the student will continue to sharpen their facility with the grammar, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and writing system of the Old Babylonian dialect.
In order to take the course, the student must have taken the first installment, Akkadian I, as a prerequisite.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Fall 2025: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World
The Materiality of Writing in the Ancient World
Lillian Tseng, Antonis Kotsonas, & Greg Woolf
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu; ak7509@nyu.edu; g.woolf@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar explores the physical and tangible aspects of writing in the ancient world. It examines how the medium, material, and technology used in the practice of writing affect the creation, interpretation, and preservation of written works. Thematically structured, the seminar encourages students to explore key concepts, ideas and theories that transcend specific periods and regions, while still engaging with a variety of cultures and contexts. Topics include the physicality of writing materials (e.g., clay, papyrus, parchment, bone, bamboo, silk, paper, bronze, stone, etc.) and how they influenced both the writing process and the readers' experience. The seminar also explores how durable materials contributed to the monumentality of writing and the shaping of public memory, the preservation, collection, curation, and circulation of written objects in archives and libraries, and the physical production, handling, and reverence of religious texts. The seminar group will be visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss the materiality of a range of inscribed objects.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Fall 2025: Research Seminars
Arabia, East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean in Late Antiquity
Robert Hoyland
rgh2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructor is required.
How to Think Through Primary Evidence: A Research Seminar in Western Asian Studies
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
Over the past hundred years or so, Western Asian studies have developed into a host of specialized subfields which often challenged, if not prevented, communication among them. Often, this inability to communicate is tied to a lack of adequately contextualizing specific materials historically and/or within a conceptual approach. This seminar is about research strategies and weaving together primary sources through theory. It is intended to help students to develop an argument about the material they want to address in a paper, an article, a dissertation, or a book project and turn it into a relevant academic contribution. Beyond methodological strategies linked with specific kinds of primary sources, it seeks to train students in conceptual thinking that allows for communicating their research to a broader audience beyond the few initiates in the area of their research and reveal its relevance for further study. Identifying and developing adequate questions rather than ready answers is key to success in this regard and requires the combination of deep knowledge of the material, past research related to it, as well as theoretical approaches that might help think through the sources. However, as there exist a multitude of concepts and theories nowadays that have been developed over the past decades in cultural-historical studies, anthropology, archaeology, etc., the seminar also provides a platform to just explore a particular concept or theory that is of interest to a participant in the seminar linked with her or his primary material. The seminar is open to students of all levels in Western Asian Studies.
Requirements: 3 submissions of aspects or questions related to specific research material; active participation in the discussion based on required readings. Submissions prior to the first session are particularly welcome to help develop a program.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Cities and Hinterlands in Early China
Roderick Campbell and Chris Kim
rbc2@nyu.edu; chriskim@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Permission of the instructors is required.
Women's Health in the Ancient Mediterranean
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Women's health forms a significant subsection of the discourses of health in antiquity. This class will cover an array of primary sources and recent scholarship on the topic. We will read the gynecological texts of the Hippocratic Corpus (including discussion of their relationship to Egyptian gynecological material), the tenth book of Aristotle's History of Animals, the fragments of Herophilus' anatomical studies of the female form, Soranus' Gynecology, Pliny's insights into female practice, and relevant passages from Galen and other Roman medical authorities. In addition, we will look at votives related to fertility (both Greek and Italic), inscriptions recounting religious healing of women, epigraphic evidence for midwives and female doctors, legal texts addressing childbirth, and ritual practices surrounding menarche, marriage, and post-natal cleansing.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Gods are Not Just Out There: Conceptualizing the Divine from the Upper Paleolithic to the Rise of Monotheism in the Ancient Near East
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Gods are not just out there, they are the product of human metaconceptualization, which emerges with the evolution of the homo sapiens during the Upper Paleolithic. This course will explore religion as a social-historical phenomenon. Conceptualization of the world beyond is the expression of and modelled on lived social experience. It is anchored in the cultural notion of personhood which, in the ancient Near East, did not have the concept of individuality. Rather the person was conceived as an assemblage of parts which operated as the extension of the body. This understanding of the person had its impact on imagining divine agency, the sociomorphic conceptualization of the polytheistic pantheon, and the interaction with the divine which was based on knowledge rather than on faith and personal choice. The course will further investigate the scholarly concepts of animism and the way the ancients assigned divine status to nature, all kinds of objects as well as to the king and ancestors in certain contexts. We will look critically at the notion of anthropomorphism and how it is applied in modern scholarship. The disappearance of indigenous kingship with the collapse of the Neo-Babylonian empire, different forms of governance during the Persian and Hellenistic empires and increasing mobility and drastic deportations of huge numbers of people had a deep impact on how the individual related to the divine. Overlapping diasporas of Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, and Romans who brought their cults with them merged with local cults wherever they went which led to multiple translations of deities. Individuals started to make their own religious choices creating even their own cults and religions. Mystery Cults arose along the official state religion and numerous strands of Christianity and Judaism emerged leading to a huge diversity of religions, which ultimately resulted in an officially supported religious pluralism.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Fall 2025: Other Courses
Intro to Ancient Egyptian I
Marc J. LeBlanc
marc.leblanc@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 1000-001
Fridays, 2:00-5:20pm
This course, the first in a two-semester sequence, will introduce students to the Middle Egyptian (Classical) dialect of the ancient Egyptian language. Students will become familiar with the hieroglyphic writing system, as well as key elements of the grammar and vocabulary of Middle Egyptian.
There are no formal prerequisites, but previous study of foreign languages and a strong general understanding of grammar are recommended.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Spring 2026: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World
Christianity from the Middle East to China in the First Millennium CE
Sören Stark, Robert Hoyland, & Rong Huang
ss5951@nyu.edu, rgh2@nyu.edu, rh4210@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3030-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructors is required.
Spring 2026: Research Seminars
Lived Religion between Polytheism and Monotheism
Beate Pongratz-Leisten & Greg Woolf
bpl2@nyu.edu; g.woolf@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Rather than looking at the religious systems of polytheism and monotheism from a theological point of view, this seminar approaches religion in terms of community, practice, institution, and theological discourse. The historical-geographical focus will be on the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East in order to trace the social-political conditions of the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman empires that promoted an increasing mobility and migrations which lead to profound changes in how the individual related to the divine. Religion in local and/or regional terms mediated through traditions, customs, institutions and social players moved from the context of the city-state towards religion as choice of different groups offering a diversity of religious doctrines and stories. Diasporic communities emerged as new additional social players undermining the traditional distinction between local and translocal cults. A focus on discrete social worlds or fields rather than thinking merely in ethnic or political-historical terms will allow for evaluating the agency of scribal/scholarly/monastic centers, the role of their networks, as well as the materiality of religion and craftmanship in defining the transition from knowledge-oriented religion to faith and belief dominating the interaction with the divine. Neither Judaism nor Christianity can be seen in isolation from the wider cultural and historical-political context from which they emerged nor does their diversity in practices allow for a monolithic view or single master-narrative.
Students may like to look in advance at: Albrecht et al. "Religion in the Making: The Lived Ancient Religion Approach." Religion 48, no. 4 (2018/10/02 2018): 568-93.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Scientific Methods in Archaeology
Federico Carò
Federico.Caro@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm
This course explores the application of scientific methodologies to the investigation of archaeological objects and works of art, with a specific focus on inorganic materials. This introductory course aims at providing the students with the appropriate knowledge and tools to understand advantages and limitations of traditional and cutting-edge analytical techniques commonly available to archaeologists, and to implement them into successful interdisciplinary archaeological research. Students will be introduced to the science of most common archaeological materials and will examine how scientific analysis can help characterizing them, disclosing manufacturing processes and techniques, and reconstructing raw material procurement and trade.
The goal of this course is to give each student the knowledge necessary to understand, for each technique, its primary area of application, its strengths and weaknesses, and finally, how to couple complementary scientific techniques to tackle specific archaeological problems.
Upon completion of the course, students will have gained a basic knowledge of the techniques presented and will be able to discuss and design an analytical protocol around an archaeological question of their choice. Students will be involved in lectures, classroom discussions, hands-on exercises and analytical projects that will take advantage of the equipment and materials in the department of Scientific Research of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while certain portable analytical instruments will be made available at ISAW.
Permission of the instructor is required.
The Phoenicians and the Mediterranean
Antonis Kotsonas
ak7509@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Wednesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
This seminar will address questions of Phoenician archaeology, history and historiography, and it will explore the identity and culture of these people by investigating a wide range of textual and material evidence from the homeland of the Phoenicians and the areas of their overseas activities around the Mediterranean. The scholarship to be covered encompasses theoretical approaches to Phoenician identity, society and economy; models of interaction of these people with others in the Near East and the Mediterranean; art-historical accounts of Phoenician craftsmanship; and reports of archaeological fieldwork and important discoveries in the Levant, Cyprus, the Aegean, north Africa, the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia, and Iberia. Also, we will investigate the ways in which the history and archaeology of the Phoenicians has been communicated to the wider public through museum exhibitions, and we will reflect on the relevance of ancient Phoenician history and heritage to present-day communities.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Empire and Frontiers: Art and Archaeology in Han China
Lillian Tseng
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Mondays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructor is required.
Early Chinese Time: Calendars and Hemerology in the Warring States, Qin, and Han Periods
Ethan Harkness
harkness@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-003
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Permission of the instructor is required.
Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, & Patrick Burns
sebastian.heath@nyu.edu; tom.elliott@nyu.edu; pjb311@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3024-001
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructor is required.
Spring 2026: Other Courses
Intro to Ancient Egyptian II
ISAW-GA 1001-001
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
Fridays, 9am-12pm
This course, the second in a two-semester sequence, will introduce students to the Middle Egyptian (Classical) dialect of the ancient Egyptian language. Students will become familiar with the hieroglyphic writing system, as well as key elements of the grammar and vocabulary of Middle Egyptian.
Prerequisite: ISAW-GA 1000-001, “Intro to Ancient Egyptian I” (or equivalent coursework).
Permission of the instructor is required.