Sickness, Death, and Dying in the Ancient World

Undergraduate / Graduate

As Ben Franklin once famously said, "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." This was no more true in early America than it was in the ancient world, in which humans invested significant amounts of time and energy responding to the seeming inevitability of death. In this course we will investigate how ancient peoples understood, mediated, mitigated, observed, mourned, sought to escape, accepted, and continued on after death. To do this, we will examine literary, inscriptional, and material evidence from the eastern Mediterranean (Greece, Egypt, the Levant) and Mesopotamia (Assyria, Babylonia, Persia) that reflects how the ancients thought about death and the processes that ultimately led to it. No prior knowledge of religion, the ancient world, or death is required for this course.