HIS 101 WEEK 2: ANCIENT
NEAR EAST
Reading Assignment for the week:
- Read the appropriate chapters in the textbook (chapter
1 in the 7th or 6th ed. of Perry).
- Read Gilgamesh (You
may wish to participate in an Online Discussion of this reading.).
-
Listen to some further information about the Ancient Near East
as a Realaudio file
or as a wav file. You can also read the information as
a txt file.
Questions to
Consider while studying this week's material:
- Why did cities first form
in Mesopotamia?
- What enabled ancient Egypt
to exist for so long a period of time as a cultural unit?
Key Terms to study
while reading the textbook:
- Mesopotamia
- Hammurabi
- Phoenicians
- Pharaoh
- Old Kingdom
Suggested Websites for further study:
- Check out Flood Stories from around the World. Gilgamesh, which you are reading this week, has an
early flood tale; surprisingly there were a lot of ancient cultures who told of a
great flood.
- There is an online version
of Gilgamesh available, translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs. You can also find a
summary with some comments by Richard Hooker.
- Exploring Ancient
World Cultures includes very interesting resources on these ancient
Societies: India, Greece, Rome,
Egypt, China, the Near East and Early Islam.
- For extra credit please suggest to your instructor a
relevant website for this unit of the course. Send the title of the site, the url and a
brief explanation why you find the information interesting and applicable to
the material being studied this week.
Submit the Gilgamesh Paper:
You have recently been hired by the
U.S. Department of State. The Department has decided to send a special
envoy to the Near East to deal with some difficult oil-related issues. You will not
be that special envoy; but seeking to understand the region a bit better, the
new envoy has set up a team to provide a briefing on various aspects of
the area (politics, religion, economics, etc.). You have been assigned to that
briefing team to summarize the political culture of the region. One of the books
that you have been asked to examine is the old epic poem about Gilgamesh. More
specifically, the new envoy wants a clearer understanding of
the role of political authority in the Near East, and so you have been asked
to Explain the role of kingship in ancient Sumerian society in a one-page
paper. You should use
direct material (quotes, evidence) from Gilgamesh to support your points.
This exercise will be your first as historians
in this course. The paper requires that you gather evidence from a textual
source (Gilgamesh) to reconstruct the past (task 1), and that you then
interpret that past by analyzing the evidence (task 2). As you read the
epic and take notes, you should look for any information that sheds light
on Sumerian politics, for example, mention of the "Council of Elders" is
certainly an important piece of evidence.
Your paper must follow the following format:
- typed using a word processor
(font size 10 or 12 only)
- one-inch margins
- double-spaced
- page number citations for your
quoted evidence
- not to exceed one (1) page--I
will not read beyond one page
- name, date and HIS 101 at
the top left
- must have a brief introduction
and conclusion (each not to exceed two sentences)
-
must follow the specific writing requirements of this course
as explained in
Charlie's History Writing Center.
- You may consider submitting a draft
of your paper to
your instructor for feedback before submitting the paper for a grade. Along
with your draft, please send
three questions that you would like answered about your draft; the questions can
be general (Is my introduction clear?) or specific (Is the phrase, "Gilgamesh was
king," written correctly?). Your instructor will not edit your paper, but will answer your
three questions.
- At times, you may be asked
to rewrite your essay before it is graded. This is done for your own benefit
and will result in an improved grade.
- You may also choose to resubmit
your paper--along with the original--after making the corrections and taking into consideration the
comments noted on the original. This will result in an additional two (2.5)
points being added to your paper grade, if your paper is improved.
Before proceeding, you might wish to read
the short background information and
review the study questions on Gilgamesh.
This assignment should be sent by e-mail according to the Electronic Submission
Information instructions.
You may also wish to post or respond in the
Blackboard online discussion forum
for this assignment. Please review the instructions for
Using the Blackboard
Discussion Forums, if necessary.
Note about the Textbook:
I selected this particular
textbook (and I have been known to switch every few years) after
careful consideration of the book's content and organization and the author's
goals and objectives; those areas closely match my objectives in
teaching this course. I want you to pay close attention to your reading in
the textbook, because that reading is a crucial part of your
learning in the course. Look for the weekly key terms and reflect
on the questions to consider as you read your textbook. In addition:
- Write down questions that come to mind
- Make marginal notes in your textbook when something strikes you
- Underline or highlight important concepts or definitions/events
The Gilgamesh Paper is worth a maximum of
50 points.
Notes:
The ancient Near East was one of five
locations in the world where civilization first emerged about five thousand
years ago. (China, India, Meso-America and Egypt were the other areas.) Most of these
early civilizations are termed "riverine" because they were based on river locations, and in
the Near East,
early societies arose along the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia. The region featured a succession of
kingdoms/empires over time, and is generally considered by scholars to
have lacked long-term stability. In
the long run, the Near East proved especially important to the development of Western
civilization because it was there that the basic religious forms
of the Western world evolved.
The West has always had a rather peculiar
view of its Near Eastern origins. Most history texts begin with the first
chapter devoted to the ancient Near East, come back to the region in chapter
19 on nineteenth-century British imperialism and then return to the area
in chapter 26 for a discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It seems strange
to credit the area as being the origin of Western civilization, especially
in regard to religious experience, but then pay little attention to what
happens in the region for long sweeps of time; and, it is even stranger
that many people today do not even view Islam, the dominant religion of
that area, as being part of Western civilization.
One of my former students has made available some photos of Babylon.
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