HIST3054: Ancient Egypt and its Neighbors

Ancient Egypt exerts fascination upon modern societies, as it did upon its ancient contemporaries. The decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, in the early 19th century CE, opened the way to recovering its history all the way back to the invention of the writing system more than 5,000 years ago. Ancient Egypt has meanwhile been a special focus of racialized interpretations of civilization, from the birth of modern Egyptology onward. Europeans of the colonial age saw Egyptian civilization as an anomaly in Africa, measured excavated skulls in an effort to prove its extraneous origins and segregated it from its geographic context. But Egyptian civilization did not develop in isolation. Rather it developed in concert with its neighbors upstream along the Nile, across adjacent deserts and seas, and over the land bridge to southwestern Asia. Its most important neighbor in northeastern Africa was the land of Kush (Nubia), where a series of cultures and states co-evolved with those of Egypt. Archaeological exploration continues to add to our knowledge of these interconnected pasts. This course will examine the history of Egypt, Kush, and adjacent regions from the late 4th millennium BCE, when the first states formed in the Nile Valley, to the late first millennium BCE, when Egypt fell under Roman rule while the kingdom of Meroe ruled the upper Nile. While the civilizations of northeastern Africa are the focus, the course will also examine their interactions with cultures of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. Since knowledge of ancient societies is derived from the texts and artifacts they produced, complete with their original context so far as possible, this course will emphasize primary sources, including texts (in translation), images, and archaeological remains.There are no prerequisites for the course; the only preparation necessary consists in college-level writing skills, and readiness to learn new information. Be advised that the study of ancient history requires learning a great number of foreign names and terms, as well as a lot of dates. One cannot understand relations between events and phenomena, in particular relations of cause and effect, without knowing their chronology, the participants involved, and their locations. Students must therefore learn the geography of the regions under discussion, the dates of events and periods during the three millennia the course covers, the names of populations and individual persons, and terms pertaining to the subjects of study. These kinds of information form the basis for knowledge and meaningful inquiry.

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