History 180: Antiqui-tea: Spilling the Ancient Mediterranean

This course takes a self-conscious approach to what has long been asserted (and weaponized) as a “foundational survey” of the “Ancient” histories of Western Asia and the lands bordering the Mediterranean. As such, it calls attention to, while reading against the grain of, a “civilizational” narrative that has hitherto privileged certain assumptions regarding “progress,” sought to engrave a teleology (“from Ancient Near East [sic] to Egypt to Greece to Rome”) used to underpin and define “Western modernity,” and which actively manipulates, marginalizes, and dehumanizes millions of peoples – past and present – through its imperial/colonial framework. This course explores the contours of these interlocking processes, while also tracing the fractures, interstices, and ongoing struggles in the “surviving” evidence, usually boxed into categories of disciplinary “knowledge,” literary as opposed to oral, voices heard over the silenced, and/or the archaeological/artifactual/art-historical – all of it curated by modern geo-politics. Spanning thousands of years, a broad geography, and a diversity of worldviews, this course seeks to dispel oppressive myths inscribed as “universal,” be they linearities drawn from “Prehistory” to “History,” discourses surrounding “Agricultural” and “Urban/Industrial” “Revolutions,” “Empires” as cyclical inevitabilities, or essentializing narratives regarding humanity, social hierarchies, gender identities, place, and the peoples of a place (with an exploration across the labels of “Mesopotamia, Egypt, Levant, Greece, north Africa, Europe, the Roman Empire”). On a weekly basis, we will unpack the historicizing of hegemonic structures that have ‘splained “Antiquity,” while then countering those edifices with perspectives “traditionally” unseen in the textbooks.