Ancient Empires: From Persia to Rome, 550 BCE to 14 CE

Catalog description

This seminar explores how ancient empires developed and were administered as well as how the experience of empire in the modern world and the writing of its history in the ancient world are intertwined. Which ancient empires receive scholarly attention? How are those empires’ histories told—and do those histories change when we reflect on lessons from modern colonialism? In this course, we look at the Achaemenids and the Seleucids in Western and Central Asia as well as Carthage in Northern Africa and Western Europe to situate Classical Athens and the Roman empire within the history of ancient empires in the latter half of the first millennium BCE. Major themes will include ethnicity and identity among imperial elites, citizenship as power, and economic institutions as means of territorial control. (HIST-HTR, HIST-HPE)