The course has two major goals: to give you the necessary skills and intellectual tools to study and unpack ancient objects and works of art, and to provide you a geographically informed, historically well contextualized overview of the art of the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. How do art historians approach ancient artifacts and works of art, how do they interpret them thinking through their function, materials and techniques, style, and iconography? How can we have access to the cultural meanings and social significance of ancient objects that are housed in museums and archives today? Why are they relevant to us in the 21st century, why do we care? Why do communities around the world care about antiquities and consider them as their heritage, and how does this shape their identity? How does globalization and the gradual breaking of national boundaries impact the status of ancient objects as heritage? We will seek answers to some of these questions.

Our central objectives for the course is to help you critically analyze objects of art, crafts and architectural monuments, on the one hand, and to gain the necessary skills and conceptual vocabulary to write about them critically. These skills then involve both looking, as well as thinking, as well as reading critically and producing creative ideas about creative objects.