HSEM3257H

The idea of liberty is central to the West’s story of itself. Western civilization originated with the conceptualization of freedom, so the story goes, and it is distinguished from non-Western civilizations by its values of liberty, individual rights, and democratic governance. The invention of liberty and democracy alike is attributed to the Greeks who defied Persia, which serves as synecdoche for both Asia and autocracy. This construct holds politics as well as history in thrall, for the ideology of a sempiternal conflict between the democratic West and the despotic Orient denies even the idea of freedom to Eastern civilizations past and present. But sources from the ancient Near East tell us otherwise. The umbrella term “ancient Near East” encompasses southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa over more than three millennia, from the invention of writing in the late fourth millennium BCE to the transformation of civilizations around the turn of the era. Collective governance, popular participation in power, and ideas of liberty are in evidence across all this span of time and space, sometimes in the foreground and sometimes submerged, depending on what types of sources are extant and who produced them. The societies of the ancient Near East knew liberty and participatory governance long before Athenians invented democracy.
This seminar will examine evidence for personal and political liberty in theory and in practice, principally in Syro-Mesopotamian societies and states, from the third to the first millennium BCE. Our approach to the subject will take three main routes by studying 1) ancient Near Eastern sources in English translation, 2) modern Anglophone scholarship on these sources and the societies that produced them, and 3) the intellectual history of the antinomy that attributes freedom to the West and despotism to the Orient. We shall investigate the development of interpretation during the modern period, since about 1800 CE, when excavation of ancient sites and decipherment of extinct scripts began opening the portals to the pre-biblical and pre classical past. This line of interpretation will focus on key interpretive issues such as theories of “primitive democracy” or “primitive communism” and their critics.

000571

Periodic Fall & Spring