The Beginning of Everything: Tracing the Earliest Written Traditions

Catalog description

This course offers a global, comparative introduction to the ancient world through some of humanity's earliest surviving texts, moving across Mesopotamia, Canaan, the Eastern Mediterranean, including Greece and Rome, Africa, China, South and East Asia, and beyond to explore multiple beginnings. Rather than presenting a single origin story of "civilization," the course places diverse traditions in conversation, examining how different cultures imagined the cosmos, authority, justice, knowledge, and the human condition, as well as how ancient texts portrayed private life, emotion, and aesthetic values. Through close reading of foundational works from a wide range of regions and genres, students trace both parallels and differences across traditions while considering historical and intellectual connections among them. The course also invites students to question and complicate familiar assumptions about the relationship between science and religion, literature and truth, myth and history, change as progress, the dynamics between local and global, the formation of canons, and the opposition between centers and peripheries, sometimes challenging these frameworks, at other times reconsidering or refining them through comparative analysis. By approaching the ancient world globally, the course illuminates how early societies articulated enduring questions about power, meaning, community, and knowledge, and how their debates continue to shape our intellectual and cultural horizons.