The Archaeology of Empires in the Ancient Near East

Catalog description

Imperialism has long been a central topic in archaeological research, with the Roman Empire in particular occupying an especially prominent place. Yet the earliest empires in recorded history emerged in the ancient Near East (including Egypt), and the region was very often either an imperial core or subject to foreign rule. It is thus an especially fascinating place to consider how archaeologists study empires. Earlier generations of scholars tended to see ancient imperialism as either a civilizing force or as Oriental despotism, depending on who was dominating whom. Since the era of modern decolonization, however, scholars have employed a range of new approaches, drawing, for example, on landscape archaeology, world-system analysis, entanglement and globalization, that go beyond the simple dichotomy of ruler and ruled. Instead, they focus on how imperialism transformed social, economic and political structures and how various imperial subjects experienced and reacted to empire in diverse ways. In this course we will examine Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Achaemenid, Greek, Parthian and Sasanian imperialism in light of these new approaches, with a view towards understanding what archaeology can teach us about ancient empires.