Ancient Studies Courses 2024/2025
Note: This list of course offerings for 2024/25 is subject to budgetary approval and changes. Please check back on a regular basis for updates. For the most up-to-date information about courses, including classroom locations, check LORIS Browse Classes.
To make course registration easier, we have provided you with the course registration numbers (CRNs). You won’t have to search for each course one-by-one, which will save you a fair bit of time.
- Enter the CRN number of each course you wish to enrol in, in the boxes along the bottom of the course registration screen in LORIS.
First-Year Courses
- CRN: 3024
- Time: MW 11:30-12:50 p.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Karljurgen Feuerherm
This course introduces students to peoples and cultures of the ancient world across several continents, including Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe prior to European imperialism and contact. These cultures may include the Kingdom of Mutapa, the Olmecs, Han China, Classical Greece and Rome, and the Celts. The focus will be on seminal characteristics and achievements in their respective historical, political, and economic contexts such as the burial of royal retainers, the development of writing, forms of worship including sacrifice, alignments, menhirs, and henges, and ziggurats and pyramids.
Second-Year Courses
- CRN: 3386
- Time: TR 11:30-12:50 p.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Karljurgen Feuerherm
Mesoamerica defines a region of relative historical and cultural continuity that also contain distinct ancient civilizations. This course will examine the roots of pre-conquest Mesoamerican culture and its development, with particular focus given to the Maya and Aztec civilizations. Emphasis will be placed on architecture, religion, social organization, and values.
- CRN: 1438
- Time: TR 2:30-3:50 p.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Kristin Lord
A survey of Greek history from the rise of the city-state to the empire of Alexander with emphasis upon the evolution of Athenian democracy and upon movements toward unification of the Greek cities. (Cross-listed with AR225)
- CRN: 1252
- Time: MW 8:30-9:50 a.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Scott Gallimore
A survey of the development of Rome from its founding to the later Roman Empire. The emphasis is upon the unification of Italy, the growth of political institutions and the expansion of the Empire. (Cross-listed with AR226)
- CRN: 4156
- Time: TR 8:30-9:50 am
- Instructor: Dr. Karljurgen Feuerherm
There's more to Egypt than mummies and pyramids. Egypt can also be seen as a cradle of civilization. This course will provide an introduction to the rich and fascinating civilization of Ancient Egypt. Topics to be addressed may include Egyptian religious beliefs, developments in medicine and mathematics, social relations, burial practices, and warfare.
- CRN: 3387
- Time: TR 1:00-2:20 pm
- Instructor: Michael Fulton
Third-Year Courses
- CRN: 3892
- Time: TR 10:00-11:20 a.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Judith Fletcher
A survey of historical beliefs in the afterlife, covering the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, and Medieval societies. Topics may include the geography of the underworld, Mystery cults, Heaven and Hell, literary and artistic representations of the kingdom of the dead, ghosts, revenants, and reincarnation.
- CRN: 3396
- Time: MW 4:00-5:20 p.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Judith Fletcher
- CRN: 4174
- Time: TR 11:30-12:50 p.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Karljurgen Feuerherm
With the emergence of writing the mid-fourth millennium BCE, treasured tales began to be recorded and new ones composed in a variety of genres and for a number of purposes. Signature narratives from selected ancient Near Eastern cultures will be examined in light of their audiences' world view, including creation myths, legends, spells and incantations, and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Fourth-Year Courses
- CRN: 1560
- Time: M 1:00-3:50 p.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Blaine Chiasson
HI 448 is a ‘reading’ or ‘historiographical’ course that examines how historians, anthropologists and archaeologists have asked and answered questions about the global trade routes known as the Silk Roads. The Silk Road has had many meanings for different eras. It was, and is, a network of trade routes that connected East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East & Europe. It was a land and sea route. As a means of trade and contact it could be said to have existed between the 2nd millennium BCE to 1450 CE, although some argue its globalized paths continue to this day. It was the means by which ideas, technologies, disease and material goods crisscrossed the Eurasian continent. It was a means of military conquest. Its entry into our historical and material consciousness was itself the result of global imperialism, when European archeologists and explorers, gave the phenomenon its name in the late 19th century. In our own globalized era, the Silk Road has been reborn as an academic field, an online darknet black market in illicit goods and ideas, and a PRC trans Asian/European transportation project for goods and people, largely financed and controlled from Beijing. Not only will we be reading about all these interpretations we will be examining how our ideas of the Silk Road are weighted with our own western fantasies of wealth, luxury, travel and the exotic ‘other’.
- CRN: 1288
- Time: M 1:00-3:50 p.m.
- Instructor: Dr. Blaine Chiasson
- Prerequisite: HI448 (offered fall 2024)
HI 498 is the research class continuation of HI 448, which is the prerequisite for 498. In this class students will formulate a research topic of their choosing (in consultation with the professor) related to the theme of Silk Road history. They will find and interpret primary documents and will write a major research paper of no more than 25 pages that is based on those primary sources and related secondary sources. Students will be meeting as a group at the beginning of term and then have weekly individual meetings with me to access their progress and discuss their research. When we resume as a class students will read and critique one another’s work and will present their findings to the class in a formal academic presentation.
- CRN (fall): 1138
- CRN (winter): 1560
Directed study and research on a topic appropriate to the student’s specialization and chosen in consultation with the faculty supervisor. Students in the single honours History BA program who receive departmental permission to take this course must also take two 400-level seminars (either two readings seminars or one readings seminar and one research seminar). Students in the combined honours History BA program must also take a 400-level readings seminar.