From the world's oldest known megaliths at Göbekli Tepe to the monumental city gates of Babylon, this course surveys nearly ten thousand years of visual (and material) culture in ancient Mesopotamia - a region comprising modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and western Iran.

Credited with the development of many firsts (cities, writing, law, institutionalized religion, political empires, etc.), the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia also produced a spectacular body of images, sculpture, monuments, and architecture using a remarkable variety of materials and technologies. In this course, we will explore these works within their visual, cultural, and archaeological contexts. Our survey will span the Neolithic through Hellenistic Periods and will focus on a variety of themes: art before agriculture, human-animal relationships, urban landscapes and public architecture, iconographies of power, the relationship between text and image, monumentality and miniaturization, cultural interaction and hybridity, and more! We will also consider the reception of ancient Mesopotamia in modern art and imagination.

HISTART Concentration Distributions: The Middle East; Ancient