| Representing
the Ancient World: Babylon the Great, Babylon the Whore (Spring
2005)
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This course fulfills Category IV of the General Education Requirement. Faculty:
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Course Description: This course explores the manifold ways of representing the ancient world, from native forms of expression, through ancient and medieval perceptions of other cultures, to modern scholarly reconstructions and contemporary political uses of ancient cultures. The general organization of the course is to expose a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches using a series of case studies. By design, the choice of case studies may vary according to the instructor. The case studies selected for this instance of the course focus on the city of Babylon, in modern Iraq, which provides a particularly rich set of materials for study from the ancient Babylonian account of the creation of the city through Herodotus's descriptions to modern archaeological rediscovery and reconstruction. In addition, Babylon has served for millennia as a symbol of decadence, foreign captivity and the scattering of humanity. Participants in this course will indulge in an eclectic examination of Babylon's ancient and modern realities, as well as its wide-ranging symbolic value. |