Ancient Times: Myth, History, Measurement

4 credits · Undergraduate

What time is it? How old is the earth? Where are we located in history? For us these questions may have simple answers: we can look at a watch or a calendar or a timeline. But ancient people thought very differently about these questions. The aim of this class is to see how. We will look at a variety of ancient evidence, including literature (in translation) and archaeology, to discover how Greeks and Romans thought about the deep past (mythic time), how they understood the direction and order of history, and how they organized and calculated time in their communities. We will also consider how ancient Jews and Christians came to reject classical conceptions of time and how this rejection still informs modern ideas about time and history.