This module traces the rise and fall of one of the most important cities of the ancient world. Located 75 km south of modern-day Baghdad in central Iraq,...

Babylon from Hammurabi to Alexander (c.1800-300 BC) (HIST0650)

This module traces the rise and fall of one of the most important cities of the ancient world. Located 75 km south of modern-day Baghdad in central Iraq, Babylon exerted political, social and intellectual influence across the wider Middle East, from its first emergence as a regional power under king Hammurabi in the 18th century BC to its conquest by Alexander of Macedon in the late 4th century BC.
The lectures will lay out the main outlines of Babylon’s history over the this long span of time, as a city, as the centre of a state, and as a regional power. We will explore Babylon’s changing social, economic and religious institutions, its political structures, territorial ambitions and diplomatic efforts. The seminars will focus on the textual, visual and material evidence from which historians construct these narratives. How are objects found on Middle Eastern archaeological sites deciphered and made meaningful? How should we weigh them against sources from other cultures? How should we deal with gaps in the evidential record? How are historical ‘facts’ negotiated, agreed, and renegotiated?

Visual culture in many diverse forms was crucial to the modernization of the city of Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The module will focus on...

Rome: Urban Space and Early Modern Visual Culture (HART0180)

Visual culture in many diverse forms was crucial to the modernization of the city of Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The module will focus on new forms of painting, sculpture, printing, architecture, urban planning, and street performances and rituals through which a new kind of city and urban life was forged. It will take into account the existing city, with its charged historical legacies that physically marked the city and was constantly re-appropriated or suppressed. We will consider attempts to centralize political and cultural authority but also to open up visual forms to exchanges within increasingly wider and contested communities. The emergence of papal power with its grandiose architectural and fresco decoration will be considered but also shown to be in conflict not only with civic and private uses of visual arts but also with the larger forces of the new technology of printing, the emergence of the art market and the formation of public pace. The module will work between the visual image and urban space, and will be attentive to the ways our thinking of the past is itself constructed through these contested visual histories.