Spring 2010
A course with Ömür Harmanşah (Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies)
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World @ Brown University
E-mail: Omur_Harmansah@brown.edu Tel: 3-6411
Meets Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:30-11:50 am at Rhode Island Hall

Course description

What do phaoroahs mean to modern Egyptians? Why did Saddam Hussein consider himself the last Neo-Babylonian king? Who suggested that ancient Hittites were the ancestors of Turks? Why do modern Assyrian Christians still celebrate ancient Assyrian festivals? How do archaeological projects in Israel-Palestine attempt to verify Biblical texts?

Our understanding of the past is profoundly impacted by political ideologies of the present. In this course, we are interested in exploring the use (and abuse) of archaeological pasts among the modern nation states in the Middle East since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Discussing the constructions of secular modernity in the formation of modern nation states in the Middle East, we will explore various case studies of the integration of imagined ancient pasts in the making of collective identities and state ideologies. While we explore the related archaeological activities that intended to satisfy such needs, we will interrogate how the pervasive force of archaeology become nationalistic obsessions from the late 19th century to this day.

Bibliography (Books to be read)

• Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman; 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.

• Meskell, Lynn (ed.); 1998. Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Routledge.

• Goode, James F.; 2007. Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1919-1941. University of Texas Press.

• Goody, Jack; 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge University Press.

• Abu El Haj, Nadia; 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israeli Society. University of Chicago Press.

• Colla, Elliott; 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Duke University Press.

• Galaty, Michael L and Charles Watkinson (eds).; 2006. Archaeology Under Dictatorship. Springer.

• Kane, Susan (ed.); 2003. The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context. Archaeological Institute of America.

• Kohl, Philip L; Mara Kozelsky and Nachman Ben-Yahuda (eds) 2007. Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration and consecration of national pasts. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

• Özyürek, Esra; 2007. The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey: the politics of public memory in Turkey. Syracuse University Press.

• Shaw, Wendy M. K.; 2003. Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire. University of California Press.