aim of the course is to introduce the students to the archaeology of western Asia, and to the critical discussion of the analysis of the archaeological evidence. The ultimate goal is to become aware of an early cultural tradition and become able to integrate this tradition in the wider discourse on memory and identity connected with the ancient Mediterranean and the study of the Ancient World.
In western Asia the LBA-IA transition was felt nowhere as politically disruptive as in the core of the Hittite empire. After considering the discussion on a 'Hittite collapse’, the course will try to trace the different local political trajectories developing during the Early and the Middle Iron Age in the former territories of the empire, with a particular attention to material remains and figurative art. While exploring the micro-regional, specific developments of the single post-Hittite polities, questions of economic strategies, strategies of political legitimation, (re)definition of cultic institutions, of social stratification, of long and short distance contacts, the impact and modalities of movements of peoples, of technological innovations and of the specific intercultural contacts with the east (Assyria), the west (Mediterranean), and the south (southern Levant, Biblical world) and the models used to represent them in modern scholarship will be widely discussed.
2022 Monographic course:
After the Empire: post-Hittite polities of Anatolia, Syria and the north-eastern Mediterranean (1200-700 BCE)
- Teacher: LORENZO D'ALFONSO