Meets Monday, Wednesday, Fridays 2:00-2:50 am. (The so-called G-hour) Classroom TBA
Instructor: Ömür Harmansah (Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology)
Office Hours: TBA. (by appointment) Office: Joukowsky Institute (70 Waterman St.) Room 202 E-mail: Omur_Harmansah@brown.edu Tel: 401-863-6411

See here the Course Preview Page.

Course description

What went into the creation of the Parthenon? Who lived in the Tower of Babel? Why do we still care about the buildings, cities, and art of the ancient past? This course offers an introduction to the art, architecture, and material culture of the ancient world in Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean world. We will explore a diversity of powerful things and monuments from Egyptian pyramids and Near Eastern palaces, to the 'classical' art of Greece and Rome.

This course offers a survey of the art of the ancient world. We will explore important architectural monuments and works of art from Mesopotamia, Egypt, prehistoric Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece and Rome, through visually rich, chronologically structured lectures. The intention is to give students a well-rounded background in the art, visual culture, architecture and archaeology of the Western Asian and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. The course starts with the monumental stone-henge like ritual architecture of the Near Eastern Neolithic, and stretches all the way to the late antique-early Islamic Jerusalem and Byzantine Istanbul/Constantinople. The survey will highlight monuments such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Assyrian Palaces, Minoan palaces and frescoes, Egyptian pyramids and mortuary complexes, the Acropolis and the classical city of Athens, Ephesus, Alexandria and Pergamon, ceremonial capitals of the Persian empire in Persepolis and Pasargadae, cities and victories of Alexander the Great, Hellenistic altar of Zeus from Pergamon, Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Seven Wonders of the World, Republican and imperial monuments in Rome, Pompeii, and the great North African cities of the Roman Empire.

Course requirements

• Midterm and final exams (involves short essays and slide comparison)
• Short paper assignment on a museum exhibit and/or object (RISD Museum or Museum of Fina Arts in Boston).

Books ordered at the Brown Bookstore (both required)

• Marilyn Stokstad, Art History Portable Edition, Book 1: Ancient Art (3rd Edition, Paperback) Prentice Hall, 2008.
• Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (2nd Edition, Paperback). Oxford University Press, 1995

Resources ~ Rethinking the Art History Core Course ~ Weekly Schedule ~ Other courses Omur has taught ~ Omur's research page