Arts of Asia: Beginnings to 1300

This course surveys the history of art in Asia from the earliest times through the Mongol Empire. Organized around a series of exemplary objects, the course explores the temporal, geographic, material, and thematic range of early Asian art through the life stories of individual things. Tracing histories of human ingenuity and value, we will examine the ways these things changed the people who saw them and were themselves changed in the process of being seen. And we will come to know them through the ways they change us.