Thousands of years after the pyramids were built and the last hieroglyphs were written, ancient Egypt remains a source of mystery and intense interest. Why are we so fascinated with ancient Egypt, and what does that fascination reveal about us? This course explores the reception history of ancient Egypt: how people in various periods and areas of the world have thought about ancient Egypt, what it has meant to them, why they were interested in it, and how they brought the ancient Egyptian past into the present. We will focus not on ancient Egypt itself, but on the history of perceptions of, ideas about, and interactions with ancient Egyptian culture. Our investigation will include how Egyptians of later periods thought about their ancient past, as well as European and American representations (and appropriations) of ancient Egypt. A major focus of the course will be the impact of political and cultural relations between Egypt and the West on perceptions and uses of ancient Egyptian culture.
This interdisciplinary course will combine multiple areas of history—intellectual, cultural, and political—and multiple types of sources, including historical writing, literature, film, and opera. Beginning with ancient Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt, we will investigate changing modes of understanding, constructing, and representing ancient Egypt, from the medieval sultans of Egypt to Mozart to W. E. B. DuBois to protesters in Egypt’s 2011 revolution.
Over the course of the semester, we will explore questions such as:
- What does it mean to think of Egypt as African vs. Middle Eastern vs. Mediterranean? Is Egypt Western, Eastern, both, or neither?
- To whom does ancient Egyptian heritage belong? How do colonialism and conceptions of race and ethnicity factor into this question?
- How do the past and the present shape each other? What is the impact of modern politics and culture on perceptions of the past? What role does the past play in the formation of modern political, social, and cultural identities?
- How can we learn about modern problems and concerns from representations of the past?

This course introduces students to selections from the best literary works written in Hebrew over the last hundred years in a relaxed seminar environment. The goal of the course is to develop skills in critical reading of literature in general, and to examine how Hebrew authors grapple with crucial questions of human existence and national identity. Topics include: Hebrew classics and their modern "descendents," autobiography in poetry and fiction, the conflict between literary generations, and others. Because the content of this course changes from year to year, students may take it for credit more than once. This course is conducted in Hebrew and all readings are in Hebrew. Grading is based primarily on participation and students' literary understanding.

The body has long been the focus of social and scientific inquiry, as well as the foundation of religious, philosophical, and artistic thought. This seminar examines premodern and modern notions of the body in the Middle East as they intersect with colonialism, nationalism, religion, labor, law, military, gender, race, medicine, and art. Students use the notion of the body as a "useful" historical category to investigate the broader social, cultural, and political transformations occurring in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran, followed by post-empire and colonial modern Middle Eastern contexts. The course addresses diverse views and theories as manifested in the constructions and practices over the body by using literary texts, primary sources, medical recipes, religious orders, and even public monuments to unearth the role of the body in the making of Middle Eastern history.

Visual expression was first developed in Mesopotamia in the same environment as the invention of writing. This lecture class will introduce the arts of the major periods of Mesopotamian History ending with the "cinematic" effects achieved by the Assyrian artists on the walls of the royal palaces. The strong connection between verbal and visual expression will be traced over the three millennia course of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest periods through the imperial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians of the first millennium BCE. The class and the assignments will regularly engage with objects in the collections and on display in the galleries of the Penn Museum.

This course treats monotheism as a particular historical development of the texts in the Hebrew Bible (that is, the Jewish Tanakh/Christian Old Testament), and thus analyzes the idea of “one God only” as the product of a complex set of historical conditions. It will take extensive time to examine the early history of the Hebrew Bible’s familiar God, Yhwh, in inscriptional, biblical, and archaeological evidence, showing that he was once at home in the polytheistic environment of the ancient Near East (Southwest Asia). By embracing these longstanding entanglements, this course will explore the means by which Hebrew scribes came to define this deity not only as the most important god among many, but as the only all-powerful deity to exist in the entire cosmos. A variety of topics will be covered, addressing a number of questions raised by the evidence at hand: what is the evidence for Yhwh outside of the Bible? How do historians define his emergence in history? Did he really have a wife named Asherah? What did he look like and where did he live?
What circumstances caused Judean writers to consider him the only all-powerful deity the universe? And finally, how did the subsequent Jewish imagination re-inscribe the older polytheistic world in light of monotheizing changes? While knowledge of the Bible, its languages, and its history may seem like a desired feature for the prospective student, there are no prerequisites. This course will be able to introduce the material to those at a beginner’s level.

Thousands of years after the pyramids were built and the last hieroglyphs were written, ancient Egypt remains a source of mystery and intense interest. Why are we so fascinated with ancient Egypt, and what does that fascination reveal about us? This course explores the reception history of ancient Egypt: how people in various periods and areas of the world have thought about ancient Egypt, what it has meant to them, why they were interested in it, and how they brought the ancient Egyptian past into the present. We will focus not on ancient Egypt itself, but on the history of perceptions of, ideas about, and interactions with ancient Egyptian culture. Our investigation will include how Egyptians of later periods thought about their ancient past, as well as European and American representations (and appropriations) of ancient Egypt. A major focus of the course will be the impact of political and cultural relations between Egypt and the West on perceptions and uses of ancient Egyptian culture.
This interdisciplinary course will combine multiple areas of history—intellectual, cultural, and political—and multiple types of sources, including historical writing, literature, film, and opera. Beginning with ancient Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt, we will investigate changing modes of understanding, constructing, and representing ancient Egypt, from the medieval sultans of Egypt to Mozart to W. E. B. DuBois to protesters in Egypt’s 2011 revolution.
Over the course of the semester, we will explore questions such as:
- What does it mean to think of Egypt as African vs. Middle Eastern vs. Mediterranean? Is Egypt Western, Eastern, both, or neither?
- To whom does ancient Egyptian heritage belong? How do colonialism and conceptions of race and ethnicity factor into this question?
- How do the past and the present shape each other? What is the impact of modern politics and culture on perceptions of the past? What role does the past play in the formation of modern political, social, and cultural identities?
- How can we learn about modern problems and concerns from representations of the past?

Who could approach and speak with the Sumerian Queen? What rules governed a banquet with the Persian king? What was the most elegant way to drink wine? Where were the women in the Assyrian court? With hundreds of people crammed into a palace, was hygiene important? How were court guests treated? What games were played at court? Is the stereotypical image of the “Oriental” court characterized by lust, backstairs intrigue, flatteries, and secrets sustainable in the light of new evidence and theoretical approaches? The court at the same time is considered as a large amorphous body in a physical location or an institution, or a group of people, or even to particular events. This seminar style course considers Middle Eastern courts from the Sumerians through the Assyrian and Persian empires articulating shared and diverse features. Textual, visual, material and archaeological sources are considered through sociological and anthropological theories and core concepts such as groups, individuals, ultrasociality, proxemics, sociopetal, sociofrugal and purity to name a few. Comparisons with later courts in the Middle East are welcome.

Visual expression was first developed in Mesopotamia in the same environment as the invention of writing. This lecture class will introduce the arts of the major periods of Mesopotamian History ending with the "cinematic" effects achieved by the Assyrian artists on the walls of the royal palaces. The strong connection between verbal and visual expression will be traced over the three millennia course of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest periods through the imperial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians of the first millennium BCE. The class and the assignments will regularly engage with objects in the collections and on display in the galleries of the Penn Museum.

The Arabian Nights (more accurately known as The Thousand and One Nights) is a collection of stories that circulated in the medieval Islamic world and would later become a canonical classic of world literature thanks to various stages of addition, translation, and creative retelling. It is a heady agglomeration of tales written with a distinctive frame story and form about characters and deeds that have been considered in turn memorable, hilarious, disgusting, arousing, thrilling, repugnant, and inspirational by various audiences since its beginning—and possibly even before it ever existed.
In this course, we will read almost the entirety of the 14th century collection of tales that constitute the earliest existing version of The Thousand and One Nights and analyze it both in relation to the medieval genres and historical contexts that shaped it and through contemporary theoretical frameworks. The Thousand and One Nights is a fluid and changing collection, so it is not our goal to focus on some clearly-defined “original”. We will instead discuss this collections’ origins, famous later additions such as the stories of Aladdin and Sindbad, and the role that its reception and translation in Europe played in making it a key text of world literature. We will also study some of its many later adaptations in film, poetry, and narrative. By analyzing key components of the text such as the frame story, fantasy, romance, and representations of race and gender, and by considering the aesthetics and politics of literary engagement with The Thousand and One Nights in modern contexts, we will come to appreciate the stories’ many travels across time and genres and develop our own ideas on what The Thousand and One Nights can teach us about the enduring power of storytelling. This course is taught in English, including all readings.

Exploration of intellectual, social, and cultural developments in Jewish civilization from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the assault on established conceptions of faith and religious authority in 17th century Europe, that is, from the age of Mohammed to that of Spinoza. Particular attention will be paid to the interaction of Jewish culture with those of Christianity and Islam.