The archaeology of empires

Towards the beginning of the first millennium BCE the Assyrian state in upper Mesopotamia started to expand its borders. Many territorial states had done this before, but the military and economic ideology of conquest that motivated this expansion created a new kind of political entity -the empire- which was to set the stage for the political strategy of the next one thousand years. When the Assyrian empire finally collapsed, its territory was quickly taken by the Babylonians and Medes, who in turn were conquered by the Persian Empire, which, after 200 years of dominion over a territory stretching from the Mediterranean to the mountains of Afghanistan, itself fell to the army of Alexander the Great and his generals. In this unit we will examine how the material culture recovered by archaeology - from the palaces, battle accounts, and art of the elite to the houses, pottery, and ritual figurines of those they conquered - can tell us how these early empires extended their power to neighbouring communities and how these communities adapted to, and sometimes resisted, the encroaching empires that surrounded them. Cultures covered include Egypt, Ancient Judah-Israel, Assyria, Urartu, Babylon, Media, Persia and the Hellenistic empires.