Writing, urbanism, agriculture, imperialism: the ancient Near East is known as the place where earliest agriculture flourished, cities were developed and writing was invented. In the recent decades, the Middle East has largely been a place of political instability and unrest, while the archaeological field research in the region has been overwhelmingly impacted by the current socio-political climate. In this course we will explore the archaeological history and current archaeological practice in the Middle East, in connection with Western colonialism, the formation of nation states and ongoing military conflicts. The social and cultural history of the Near East from prehistory to the end of Iron age (300 BC) will be covered as well. Studying the material remains of the ancient past is never entirely about discovering and recovering ancient societies from the deep corners of antiquity: it is more about our modern concerns of self-definition, cultural identity, ideals and ideologies of the present. Throughout the semester therefore, we will also investigate some of interpretive approaches and concepts used within Near Eastern archaeology. The main goal of the course is to develop a critical understanding of ancient societies and their material culture from an interdisciplinary, post-colonial perspective.

We will study the art and material culture of various Middle Eastern societies (including Mesopotamian, Syrian, Anatolian, Levantine, Iranian). We will explore their major cities like Ur, Nineveh and Babylon as well as their villages, their festivals and rituals, their kings, priests, craftsmen as well as their peasants, their impressive palaces, temples and ziggurats as well as modest mudbrick houses, their mythologies, poems, royal inscriptions as well as mundane letters. We will explore how the textual sources and archaeological evidence can be put together to arrive at novel interpretations of the past. In the Middle East, archaeology is frequently a politicized field, and the contemporary political circumstances have a massive impact on how the ancient past is documented, studied and represented. Using several archaeological case studies in the ancient Middle East, the course intends to unpack the modern scholarly and public context of archaeological discourses. It will not only provide a broad empirical bases for the region’s social and cultural history but also will allow students to see how particular ways of writing history is embedded in contemporary socio-political climate. The class will be a mixture of lectures and class discussions.

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