MELC 10

Lamassu

Ancient meso deity statue, meant to protect from other gods, statues of this in front of palaces. Carved from large alabaster stones

• face of a man, but a winged bull, and has a beard

• carved in Zagros Mountains

Marduk

powerful Meso deity, lived around Babylon, back then was supreme ruler of Meso

Dinger

shaped like a star, cuneiform for god or goddess bc it’s believed that gods lived up in the stars

Assyrian Empire

Pharaonism

Egyptian nationalism linking back to ancient Egypt

Alexander the Great

• in 330 BCE, Alexander the Great builds massive empire —> falls in 33 BCE

• Integrated Egypt, Meso, and Greek culture

• Large amts of cultural exchange btwn these groups, but lots of works written in Egyptian or Meso langs were translated and plagiarized by Greek scholars during this time

Hermeticism

• philosophy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus

• combines the Greek god of wisdom Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth

• God is viewed as creator

• “authored” Hermetica, which had lots of science topics, and Greeks believed Hermetica was the secret knowledge Egyptians and Mesos used

• The Hermetica was deemed fake by Isaac Casaubon (French, 1559-1614)

Written between 200-300 CE and then passed off as Ancient Egyptian

• Hermetic tradition isn’t considered real science anymore

• “As above, so below” (pointing up to the sky and down to the ground)

  What happens in the heavens will happen down here

  
  

Hellenization

Greek practices that Greeks bring to places they conquer

Napoleon’s Campaign to Egypt

• considered a failure bc last min, Napoleon decided to start a campaign in Egypt in SUMMER

  • succeeded in conquering Lower Egypt, but many died

French Savants

documented everything in Egypt during Napoleon’s campaign

• stayed for 60 yrs and made the Description de l’ Egypte, which has useful scientific guides + technical paintings of ruins

• discovered Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone

• written in three dif scripts

• this was found bc it was reused by Egyptian army who used it as a stone to build a fort

• TOP: hieroglyphs

• MIDDLE: demotic, formed from hieros

• BOTTOM: Greek

• able to use it to understand Egyptian hieros + demotic

What is this image of?

Description de L’Egypte:

It helped launch modern Egyptology and fueled European “Egyptomania,” giving scholars (including Champollion, who later deciphered hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone) their first comprehensive visual record of Egypt’s monuments.

It is also a product of colonial ambition

What is this image of?

• Can I identify the object/text?

• Can I analyze its major visual and textual elements?

• Can I describe its significance?

Rosetta Stone

• fragment of a dark granodiorite stele, about 112 cm tall, inscribed in 196 BCE with a decree issued at Memphis on behalf of the Ptolemaic king Ptolemy V, and it was found in 1799 by French soldiers near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.

• TOP: hieroglyphs

• MIDDLE: demotic, formed from hieros

• BOTTOM: Greek

• Because scholars could read the Greek, the stone provided the key for comparing the three scripts

• The stone was seized by British forces after the French defeat in 1801 and has been in the British Museum since 1802

Egyptomania

the deep Western fascination with the art, history, and symbols of ancient Egypt

READING WEEK 1 : REDISCOVERING ANCIENT EGYPT

• scared that Western influence on Egypt is ruining it

• Champollion is the one who opened ppl’s eyes to ancient Egypt (before 1800s)

• before 19th cent, ppl thought OG pyramids were the ones in Rome vs the ones of Giza

• disturbances in Upper Egypt kept Europeans out for half a century

• Bonaparte’s savants built on a cumulative, if still severely limited, body of Western knowledge of ancient Egypt

• Ottoman governor Muhammad Ali issued a landmark decree on August 15, 1835 (influenced by al-Tahtawi), banning the unauthorized export of Egyptian antiquities, halting the destruction of ancient monuments

Afrocentrism

worldview that places African history, culture, and agency at the center of analysis for people of African descent, challenging traditional Eurocentric perspectives

Fertile Crescent

• The Fertile Crescent is not correct

• James Henry Breasted claimed this with almost no data

• Agriculture did take place in the Fertile Crescent, but it was not the only location

Egyptian Nationalism: Different Paradigms?

• One is pan-Islamism; that all muslim nations could, with their cultural/religious similarities, unite into one national identity

• Another is pan-arabism; the groups of people that speak Arabic should unite and form a coalition or one nation regardless of religious affiliation

• Both of these extended beyond Egypt

Prehistory

• Paleolithic Era; 1.5 mya - 12,000 BP

• Stone tool technologies, migration in Middle East

• Neolithic Era; 12000 BP - 8000 BP

• Farming, sedentary life, and ceramic tech gets made

• Chalcolithic era; 8000 BP - 5000 BP

• Hierarchies starts to establish, copper age, first signs of organized religion

Protohistory

• Bronze Age 3000 BCE-1000 bce

  • First cities and kings, int. trade, writing, use of bronze

  • need someone to bring copper from Southern Jordan (?)

• Iron Age, 1000 bce-330 bce

  • First EMPIRES —> global trade patterns, use of iron, merchants move across large distances

  • much easier to get than bronze + lighter

  • Have to be mindful abt where you use it

  • Can’t be as detailed as bronze bc higher melting point

• Christian Jurgensen Thomsen dev’d three age system in attempt to classify early world history (Stone Age, bronze Age, Iron Age)

• Copper Age?

  • copper only in restricted areas

  • soft and malleable, used to craft detailed objects

Breeding + Domestication

• domesticated certain qualities in reproducing animals

• Sheep and goats domesticated first

• People began adopting sedentary life

• gazelle and deer die off, but sheeps suddenly become more domesticated bc easier

• Pig consumption only in niche environs

Early Village of Mallaha

• first evidence of architecture + stone tech + sedentary life

• located near Golan Heights

• Made structures in form of circles

• First closet + storage bin for food!

Crops + Agriculture

• humans selected plant species w larger nodes to hold onto grains + sturdier grains

• Carbonized Seeds are pieces of wheat that was carbonized bc got too close to fire - kinda like fossil

• Believed that agriculture encouraged pop growth, not the other way around

• climate pushed humans toward argiculture

  • Younger Dryas —> temps plummetted around 14K yrs ago

• degraded landscape bc of deforestation, soil salinization, overgrazing, hunting to extinction, and poor soil management

Paleoethnobotany

study of Ancient Plant Remains

Zooarchaeology

annalysis of ancient animal bones

• no category of artifacts that we find more than animal bones

Nomadic Pastoralism/transhumance

• alternative lifestyle where ppl traveled w herds seasonally

  • Bedouin communities — under threat bc climate change

Berossus

• lived around 320 BCE, witnessed Alexander the Great’s conquests

• Babylonian astronomer, came in contact w Greek histories —> wrote Meso histroy called the Bayloniaca

• the OG is lost, but copied fragments in other langs survive

Manetho

• 3rd century BCE

• Egyptian priest, authored the Aegyptiaca in Greek

• compiled list of diff kings + order they ruled

Mesopotamian history

• not linear march thru a single civilization

• a story of the rise and fall of diff societies over 5 millenia

• Northern Meso sometimes called Assyria

  • Northern Iraq + Eastern Syria

• Southern Meso

  • Southern Iraq + Southern Iran

• Assyrian = Northern

• Babylonian - Southern

Egyptian History

• Early Dynastic period (dynasty1-2)

• Old Kingdom (3-6)

• Middle Kingdom (11-22)

• New Kingdom (23-?)

Dating

• relative dating is comparing the ages to things around it, like how the top clothes in laundry are newer than ones at bottom

• Absolute dating is putting actual dates

  • radiocarbon dating/historical records

  • dendrochronology - looking at tree rings

Archaeology

how to find and read ancient objects

• practiced by antiquarians - wealthy precursors to archaeologists

• study of humans through material remains

Four goals of analysis

Form: describe and classify archaeological evidence, being able to make observations + group them tgt

Function: reconstruct how ancient objects used

• more than half of what is found, we can’t figure out what it is

Process: determine HOW and WHY societies change over time

Meaning: understand how ppl in the past thought abt the world and their place in it

Ubeidiya

• located near Dead Sea, 1.2-1mya

• homo erectus settled there

• no skeletons though…near Jordan Valley in Israel

What is this an image of?

• Can I identify the object/text?

• Can I analyze its major visual and textual elements?

• Can I describe its significance?

Ubeidiya

• many ridges bc of tectonic movements on Jordan River

• used to make many stone tools

Tell

an artificial mound w human debris, accumulated over millennia of time

Anthrosol

soil created by human interaction

Artifact

portable, discrete object created or altered by human behavior

Feature

non-portable artifact unrecoverable from excavated context

• Neolithic Tower in Jericho

• temples in Karnak Egypt

Assemblage

all artifacts and features associated w a particular time period or ancient society

Philology

study of ancient langs, scripts, and how both change over time

• examine how words and meanings change over time

• draws studies from linguistics

• philologists lack direct access to ancient speech communities

Speech

• context informed by culture, time, situation, and perspective

• members of speech community share explicit and implicit rules abt “rules'“ of lang and meanings of words and expressions

• speech changes too much over time —> living members of descedant speech comms are imperfect guides to ancient ones

Texts

• ancient texts are artifacts of speech event

• attempt to represent or record speech in a patterned format, uses script/scripts and follow unwritten rules of a writing system

Incantation: Against Toothache

• starts off w the creatin story of a orm

• dialogue btwn tooth worm and Shamash

• tooth worm wants to harm humans, so God Ea is called upon to destroy worm

Wadi el-Hol

• first alphabetic inscription in Egypt

• \represents spoken sounds, not whole words

• alphabet eventually turns into early Phoenician and spreads

How did Roman rule of Egypt work?

• Rome banned Egyptian religion and culture, but hieros still preserved

What is this an image of?

Can I identify the object/text?

Can I analyze its major visual and textual elements?

Can I describe its significance?

• Seated Scribe of EGYPT

• it breaks away from rigid, idealized royal portraiture to offer a remarkably realistic, humanized depiction of an elite bureaucrat

• rolls of belly fat, moves away from typical Egyptian portrayals of perfection

• VIDEO OF THE SEATED SCRIBE SAYS…

  • the eyes represent alertness

  • relaxed, cross-legged position is rare

  • funerary sculpture meant for a tomb

Hieroglyphs

• sourced from things that ppl would see everyday

• record spoken Egyptian language

• Distantly related to semitic langs like Arabic or Hebrew

• after hieros forgotten, Egyptian still spoken but written in Greek alphabet

  • Coptic, associated with Egyptian Christianity

Grapheme

• the building blocks of writing

• the meaning of a grapheme is still debated

Hieratic

simplified versions of hieros

Cuneiform

• script used throughout much of Middle East

• written primarily on clay tablet w reed stylus

• Cuneiform tablets found in Iraw and up thru Syria thru Med Sea + Turkey

• 4000 yrs in which cuneiform script was used

• used for record-keeping

• syllabic, so easy for other, new communities used it to write down a new lang

Law of Superposition

things on the bottom are generally older than those on the top; material bottom was deposited first, and top was deposited after

Uruk

• huge increase of ubranization - Uruk major place of cuneiform development

• administrative accounts become popular (4000-3000 BCE)

  • used to keep track of what workers get in exchange for labor

Lexical Lists

• proto-cuneiform lists of professions, wood objects, fish, birds, cities

• remain important for all of Sumerian history

• served as practice for scribes, helped maintain continuity

• precursor to dictionaries

• no grammar - we don’t know how it was pronounced or what language it is

Logographic

type of sign in cuneiform - what it depicts as a noun - whole characters = whole words (ex. dinger= god)

Determinative

type of sign in cuneiform - combines with another sign to give more info (ex. dinger = divine)

Syllabic

A writing system where each written symbol represents an entire syllable rather than a single letter or sound

Dedicatory Objects

• also had cuneiform, commemorating the project

• cuneiform indicated who originally built the structure

• not always necessarily meant to be read, sometimes written directly to gods to communicate w them directly so written up high

Myths and Epics

• mostly written down in the Neo Sumerian period

What is this an image of?

The Royal Standard of Ur

• 4500 yrs old, come from Ur - early city of Mesopotamia

• divided into 3 registers - shows us long distance trade that Meso culture was involved w

• reminds us why society was successful was bc of agriculture

• common laborers at bottom, royals at top

• there’s a hierarchy of society - some members larger than others

abecedary

written list of letters of the alphabet, starts from right to left

Book of Genesis

Egyptian hieroglyphic Alphabet Video

• some sounds in English and Egyptian are same, but Egyptian has some English doesn’t

• no vowels in Egyptian writing

• some English sounds didn’t exist in Egyptian

What is this item?

Palermo Stone

• preserves yr by yr records of Egyptian kings, first thru fifth dynasties

  • black basalt slab

• records cult ceremonies, taxation, sculpture, building, and warfare

• also records the DEPTH of the Nile, lower depth = indicative that king isn’t doing a good job

• Can use RTI on the backside of the Palermo Stone to identify additional text

What is this?

• Inscriptions of the Battle of Djahy against the Sea Peoples depicted on Temple’s North

• Ramsess III maintaining ma’at by battling these foreigners

  • he has a structured + clean scene

• Nekhbet is the vulture, protecting the pharaoh - carries an ankh - symbol of ma’at

• victims are captured under pharaoh’s feet

The Biography of Pepynakht Heqaib

• represents how the welathy can and would afford their own funerary monuments

• Heqaib was a seal-barer for the king

• talks highly of his achievements

Introduction: Chronologies and Cultural Change in Egypt

• Dynastic vs. Socio-Cultural Frameworks: Historically, Egyptian chronology relies on Manetho's system of dividing pharaonic rule into "dynasties." While convenient for tracking political sequences, Shaw argues this approach often obscures regional variations and gradual socio-economic transformations revealed by modern archaeology.

• Dating Methodologies: Egyptologists combine three dating methods to build timelines:

  • Relative Dating: Archaeological methods like stratigraphy and seriation (e.g., tracking changes in pottery styles or wooden coffin decorations).

  • Absolute Chronology: Written records, king-lists, and astronomical observations (such as records of the rising of the dog-star Sirius/Sothis).

  • Radiometric Methods: Radiocarbon dating and thermoluminescence, which are essential for dating prehistory and verifying absolute historical timelines.

• Early Commemoration and Royal Records: Early sources—such as votive palettes, ceremonial maceheads, and the Palermo Stone (a 5th-Dynasty basalt stele listing early rulers and key annual events)—blur the line between real historical events and ritualistic or magical acts. Their primary purpose was commemoration and ancestor worship rather than pure historical narration.

• Royal Titles and Kingship: By the Middle Kingdom, pharaohs used a fivefold titulary system that balanced their divine identity (e.g., Horus) with their temporary human role as ruler. Features like king-lists (such as the Turin Canon) served primarily to honor legitimate royal ancestors rather than record objective history.

• Chronological Challenges:

  • Co-regencies: Period overlaps where two pharaohs ruled simultaneously make establishing exact regnal lengths complex.

  • "Dark Ages" / Intermediate Periods: Times of disunity or political fragmentation are often overly simplified in political narratives, whereas material culture (like ceramics) often shows continuous, gradual evolution.

  • Egyptian Concept of History: For ancient Egyptians, history was an ongoing balance between preserving order (Maat) and carrying out sacred duty to the gods, making ritual and historical event inextricably intertwined.

Assyria v. Elam

• war broke out bc Elamite ruler Teumman seized the throne and demanded the return of fugitives protected by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal

• Battle of Til-Tuba

• Assyrians have better weapons and better armor, as depicted in stone carving

• Elamite king and son (Teumman is king) gets injured and caught by Assyrian soldiers - they cut both heads and take it back to camp

• in the carving, images and scenes cut from place to place, so there’s captions to help understand what’s happening

• Aftermath of Battle: Assyrians bring puppet king to Elamites and in the carving, he is defaced

• overall, Assyria wins, and Ashurbanipal asserts dominance, saying that those who disobey him will end up like the Elamites

Battle of Kadesh

Major military conflict fought in c. 1274 BCE between the Egyptian Empire under Ramesses II and the Hittite Empire under Muwatalli II near the Orontes River

• Renowned as the largest chariot battle in ancient history

• Ended in a tactical stalemate, though Ramesses II widely memorialized it as a dramatic personal triumph across temple reliefs (e.g., Abu Simbel, Ramesseum, Luxor)

• Culminated years later in the earliest surviving recorded international peace treaty (the Egyptian-Hittite Treaty)

Battle of Kadesh reading

• 2 nomads go to Ramses' II and say that king of Hittite is far north (lie)

• Egyptian scouts found out they were lying and uncovered that ruler actually formed a large coalition and was waiting outside of Kadesh

• Hittites surprise attack, but Ramses was like “I got this” and beats them single-handedly bc his chud army can’t do jackshart

What is this?

Battle of Kadesh

• first documented major battle

• oversized Ramses II —> supreme power over the others

• Chaos vs Order —> Egypts = order, Hittites = chaos

• blocks of hieroglyphs to narrate what was happening

• this is considered propoganda bc the battle was actually lowkey a stalemate, but it establishes Ramses II’s divine power and dominance rarwr

Significance of Venus

• Venus was chief god Ishtar

• had to check for Ishtar’s mood bc that could mean king is gonna die

• When Venus disappears, Ishtar is angry

• Completely whole Venus has symbolic meaning

Enuma Anu Enlil

• very strong lines that separate the diary entries

• Venus disappeared for three days and came back which means there’s going to be rain and peace so yay

• has astronomical events + predictions

• Connects celestial movements (such as the disappearance and reappearance of Venus) to earthly predictions like rain, peace, and societal well-being

Sumerian Kings List

• Scholars would find copies of past tablets and write down lists of kings’ names and sometimes, the lengths of their reigns

• The lists were copied and recopied over centuries because they don’t want the knowledge to decay

• Sumerians thought of the past kings are more mythological and could live super duper long lives

• Early Mesopotamian Kings at the beginning of the Sumerian Kings’ List were descended from Gods and considered “deified”

  But later mesopotamian kings were not deified!

  
  

Cyrus Cylinder

• 538 BCE - talks abt the relationship w kings vs gods - to what extent are Mesos deifying themselves?

• Cyrus sent gods back to their own shrines + collected ppl and brought them back to their own settlements

• talked abt making Babylon a bigger, stronger city

Ma’at

Egyptian virtue that valued justice, truth, and order

• personified as a woman with an ostrich feather, holds an ankh (slightly like aura..?)

• Sustaining ma’at held back chaos (isfet) and sustained the balance of the universe

  • Ma’at was being a good person, but also meant castrating and beheading your enemies

  
  

What is this?

Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III in Luxor

• text and image comes together

• Inscriptions of the Battle of Djahy against the Sea Peoples depicted on Temple’s North Wall

• Ramessess III maintaining ma’at by battling foreigners

Lugal

king

lu = man

gal = big

Roles of Kingship

• Builder

• Warrior

• Governor

• Priest

• Scholar

Example of being a builder: Ur-Nanshe Plaque

• depicts Sumerian king of Lagash

• Records Ur-Nanshe’s building activities in pictures and in texts

• VISUAL ANAYLSIS:

• 2 large figures, one is sitting and one is standing

• large one is king, but he is a builder in one and a ruler in another (basket)

• circle in the center meant for hanging up the plaque

• chairs are expensive, so being able to sit is a privilege only king has

• mu-du inscription is repeated - means to build

• 
  

Warrior Role: Naram-Sin’s Victory Stele

• 2m high stone monument

• 2250 BCE

• records victory of King Satuni of Lullubi tribe in Western Iran

VISUAL ANALYSIS

• the lullubi lived in Zagros mtns

  • the stone signals that it’s the mtn

• the stone’s material adds to the spectacle

• Naram-sin depicts himself as Godly, but gods are still present

Governor Role: Code of Hammurabi

• written w moving up and down columns

• Hammurabi is trying to gain legitimacy for his law code by using an older way of writing his laws to make it seem older

• created 1750 BCE, portrayed as oldest legal code, but it was more of a public monument

• prologue is royal propaganda

• There are 282 laws that all start with ‘shumma awilum’ or “if a man”

• Describes what should happen if a man does something

• Epilogue describes how to use the stele

• Code presents an idealized view of Babylonian social structure:

• Awilum – a free person who pays taxes to the state

• Mushkenum – probably a dependent on the state–need hand outs

• Wardum – slave

VISUAL ANALYSIS

• Shamash proportionally much taller than Hammurabi IFFF he were standing, but bc he’s sitting, they’re the same height

• Shamash handing Hammurabi the rod and ring

• giving part of power to Hammurabi to rule

• Shamash has the headress of horns, indicating that he has power to rule + make laws and punish ppl

• Hammurabi’s gesture is pious - he’s covering his mouth

What is this?

Kadesh Relief of the Ramesseum

PRACTICE:

This image depicts the Kadesh Relief of the Ramesseum, a piece showing Pharaoh Ramesses II and his people fighting off the Hittites. The left side, where the pharaoh is, clearly highlights a more organized battle frontier. This emphasizes how Egyptians practice ma'at to fight chaos, which is represented by the Hittites. The enlarged pharaoh establishes his role as a warrior despite the fact that this battle actually ended in a stalemate. This piece is left for the public to see to further legitimize the Egyptian empire and the pharaoh's rule.

The Bulletin of Ramesses

The Bulletin provides a structured, pseudo-documentary campaign report. It details specific logistical events: setting up camp, receiving false intelligence from captured Bedouin spies, the sudden Hittite ambush, and the king holding a council of war.

Divine Kingship & Solitary Heroism: Despite its official, report-like tone, the text reinforces royal ideology. When his generals fail and his troops retreat in panic, Ramesses II is described as standing alone—empowered by Amun—to break through enemy lines and save his army from destruction.