OLD, Religion in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (F27)

The course focuses on the world’s two oldest historical religions and is taught in an interdisciplinary manner through a collaboration between Egyptology and Assyriology. The course is theme-oriented and organized into two academic tracks with a series of thematic modules focusing on texts, material culture, and buildings from the approximately 3,000-year-long historical periods in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The individual themes include gods and conceptions of the divine, mythologies, temples and sacred spaces, ritual actors, rituals and magic, the art of divination, and conceptions of the afterlife. Students will also be introduced to the most important religious texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Myth of Isis and Osiris, the Babylonian Epic of Creation, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, excerpts of which will be read and discussed in English translation.