Reddit mentions of Ancient Empires: From Mesopotamia to the Rise of Islam

Thanks for your questions. As to the first, the whole issue of why the four palaces (Daba, Qatna, Alalakh, and Kabri) chose to decorate with Aegean-style art is an interesting one which we have explored in a couple of articles to date, but it is as yet unclear. I would refer you to an article we published in AJA, which can be found here and another in a conference volume here (follow the bibliography found in the footnotes to articles by other scholars).

As for your second question, there is quite a bit of discontinuity, in my opinion, and so I’m not at all surprised that you start with the Neo-Assyrians. In the book Ancient Empires (see it here), Mark Graham and I put the Bronze Age Empires into Chapter One “Prelude to the Age of Ancient Empires” and then began Chapter Two with the Neo-Assyrians…

Third question: yes, 1177 BC is an attempt to make this material accessible to a wider audience. But I'm not sure exactly what you are asking in terms of "what has your experience been with that?" If you mean how has it been received, it seems to have worked pretty well; my colleagues seem to appreciate that I told things as they are, without beating a particular drum, and the general public seems to like learning about the Late Bronze Age, though some have complained on Amazon that there are too many names and dates and that I didn't give them a definitive answer for why the Late Bronze Age collapse occurred. Yes; guilty as charged — welcome to ancient history, I would say to them! I enjoy trying to make ancient history and archaeology accessible, though it is essential to keep publishing scholarly articles at the same time.

Fourth question: yes, I think is authentic, but I would not put it past Schliemann to have “touched it up a bit”..that beard looks suspiciously Victorian, doesn’t it?

And last, my first “great” find was a small bronze statuette of the Greek god Pan, which was part of a furniture decoration probably from a chair. I found it at Tel Anafa in Israel, on the very first dig that I ever went on.

(EDIT: I read your post too quickly, and thought you were asking for textbook recommendations, my apologies. i'll leave my reply here anyways, in case it's helpful for someone. Sorry!)

I just finished teaching western civ 1 with this textbook, and it worked very well. The book is organized around a simple theoretical framework (Michael Mann's Sources of Social Power), and focuses on themes of imperial power / resistance which helps to structure the vast amount of material it covers. The students really liked it, and it told a strong enough narrative that I was able to focus most of the time together in the classroom on in-depth case studies and primary source discussion.

The book focuses mostly on Neo Assyria through early Islam, so you have to supplement on either end if your course has more chronological coverage (I added a week on early Babylon and Egypt, and then dug deeply into Neo-Assyria and Persia, Greece, and Rome for the rest of the semester - for which this book was ideally suited).

And it's pretty inexpensive, easy to unde and the students said good things about it in my evaluations.

Cline and Graham. Ancient Empires (Cambridge University Press: 2011).