The potent heritage of empires employed by modern nation-states stems from millennia of experiments in imperial political cultures. While empires the world over have emerged in profoundly different environments and taken profoundly different forms, many of these exhibit similar forms and themes of materials that created a rich culture of empire – ones that permeated the lives of numerous communities spread over vast territories and helped pronounce imperial realms. This course dissects a series of contiguous or contemporaneous empires in antiquity, from China in the East to Rome in the West, and engages students with materials of these empires in museums at the University of Michigan. In addition, we discuss narratives of ancient regimes in the course of early modern empires of Britain and Russia, as well as depictions of ancient empires in modern movies.

HISTART Concentration Distributions:Ancient, Middle East, Asia