Department of Ancient History
Within the shadowed halls of Miskatonic University, the Department of Ancient History offers a solemn passage into the inscrutable depths of the Classical Period and the civilizations whose enigmatic legacies still echo across the millennia. Here, amidst tomes worn by centuries and palimpsests whispering secrets, students and scholars alike confront the inexorable tides of antiquity, probing into times whose very dust harbors riddles beyond familiarity.
The department, in vital concert with its peers in Classical Languages and Philosophy, presides over a curriculum both rigorous and expansive, traversing the annals of Greek and Roman civilization. Yet, our inquiries resist the fetters of geography; studies in Ancient Chinese history unfold alongside Early Middle-Eastern investigations, urging each mind to confront the universality and strangeness of human endeavor beneath alien stars.
To pursue ancient history here is to accept that the past is neither inert nor silent. Each artifact and text is regarded not merely as a relic, but as a potential cipher, signifying forms of wisdom and dread which once moved the hearts of forgotten peoples—and may yet exert their cryptic influence over our present age.
Classes Offered
Ancient Greece and Rome
This course undertakes a sober appraisal of the rise and dissolution of the classical polities known as Greece and Rome, those remote dominions whose ruined columns and palimpsestic records remain enshrouded by both the dust of centuries and the impenetrable shadows of human ignorance. Through a rigorous survey of political transformations, lineages disrupted by ambition and fate, and the relentless expansion of empire by sword and stratagem, participants are drawn into the vertiginous procession of rulers and the inexorable undertones of power. While military conquests are charted with precision, the underlying currents—of ambition, hubris, and the frailty of civic order—are never far from consideration. The curriculum encourages not only the acquisition of names and dates, but also a deeper, more troubling contemplation of how the legacy of these vanished civilizations impresses itself upon the modern intellect, like ancient footsteps echoing in the vaults beneath the world we dare to name our own.
Mesopotamian History
Within the hallowed precincts of scholarly pursuit, this intensive course traverses the submerged epochs of Mesopotamian civilization. Its arc sweeps solemnly from the dawn-touched settlements of the Bronze Age—nameless Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian dynasts—through the iron-forged ascendency of later empires shrouded in the mist of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian dominance. Further, it descends into the shadowed dominions of the Achaemenid and Seleucid realms, and thence into the turbulence of Parthian and Persian overlordship. The student’s progress, conducted under the ominous awareness of time’s inescapable flux, ends with the transformative arrival of the Islamic conquest in the shrouded years of the seventh century. Herein, amidst suppressed chronicles and the debris of antiquity, one confronts both the grandeur and the inscrutability that mark all human record where it disappears into unremembered abyss.
Credits: Photo by Lady Escabia from Pexels