Ancient Near East: Introduction

About the course

This course provides you with broad historical and cultural-historical knowledge of the Near East, from when people began to settle down until the beginning of our era.

We study the many cultures that inhabited the area stretching from the Mediterranean east coast, through Syria, Iraq and southern Turkey, to Iran. We see trade, ideas and technology, migrations and conflicts connecting people across the region and beyond. The earliest state formations in Iraq and eastern Syria, Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, take center stage. Here we find the most varied evidence in the region for investigating human living conditions, their perception of the world, and the historical developments, all due to the number of archaeological finds and hundreds of thousands of preserved texts in cuneiform, written on clay tablets.