Course Information

Course Name	Turkish	Medeniyetlerin Doğuşu
	English	The Rise of Civilizations
Course Code	ITB 234	Credit	Lecture (hour/week)	Recitation (hour/week)	Laboratory (hour/week)
Semester	1	3	3	-	-
Course Language		English
Course Coordinator		Bülent Arıkan Bülent Arıkan
Course Objectives		The aim of this course is to expose students to the roots of the modern civilizations while enabling them to ask and answer more in-depth questions about the persisting issues such as socio-economic inequalities, political injustice, disparities in economic growth, various types of racism (i.e., ethnic, cultural, environmental), environmental disasters, political and economic collapse. Consequently, students that study how these relationships evolved through time will be better equipped to develop solutions to such problems in the near future.
Course Description		This course focuses on the last 10,000 years of the humanity, from the start of agriculture in the New Stone Age (ca. 10,000 BC) to the end of the Roman Imperial Period (AD. 476), in order to understand the dynamic, complex, and multifaceted relationships among social organization, technology, economy, politics, and environment. The underlying theme of this course is that all of our modern-day problems that seem insurmountable have their origins in these early complex societies; the scale and intensity of these problems depend on the scale of organizational complexity of societies.
Course Outcomes		The lectures will cover theoretical perspectives (e.g., Structuralism, Marxism, Processualism, Post-Processualism, and Neo-Evolutionism), methods of assessing complexity (i.e., history, archaeology, anthropology), and case studies from around the world. In this survey of various early complex societies from the Mesopotamian Uruk to Mesoamerican polities, both unique aspects and shared elements of complex societies will be discussed in their own environmental and socio-political contexts. Comparisons of different developmental trajectories, the patterns of economic development and political organization will be used to assess the socio-cultural evolution of various early complex societies.
Pre-requisite(s)		NONE
Required Facilities		NONE
Other		NONE
Textbook		Yoffee, Norman. 2005. Myths of Archaic State Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (ISBN: 9780521521567)
Other References		Price, T. Douglas and Gary M. Feinman. 1995. Foundations of Social inequality. Springer, New York (ISBN: 9780306449796). Earle, Timothy K. 1997. How Chiefs Come to Power. The political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford University Press, Stanford (ISBN: 9780804728553). Chris Scarre. 2013. The Human Past: World Prehistory and Development of Human Societies. Thames & Hudson (ISBN: 9780500290637). Michael D. Coe. 2002. The Maya. Thames and Hudson (ISBN: 978-050028902), Akurgal, Ekrem. 2014. Anadolu Kültür Tarihi. Phoenix Yayınevi. (ISBN: 6054657917) Düring, Bleda. 2016. Küçük Asya’nın Tarihöncesi: Karmaşık Avcı-Toplayıcılardan Erken Kentsel Toplumlara. Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, İstanbul. (ISBN: 6059389037) Nissen, Hans J. 2004. Ana Hatlarıyla Mezopotamya. Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, İstanbul. (ISBN: 9756561335) Özdoğan, Mehmet, Nezih Başgelen. 2011. Türkiye’de Neolitik Dönem. Anadolu’da Uygarlığın Doğuşu ve Avrupa’ya Yayılımı. Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, İstanbul. (ISBN: 9944750226)

Courses

Help

About