Concept

"Spaces, Images, Forms of Life in Ancient Civilizations"

Project Outline

– Short version; for long version see German text –

The Graduate Academy aims at exploring the relationship between spaces, images and the various forms of social and cultural life in ancient societies. Beyond the mere description and classification of various types of spatial structures (in architecture or urbanism) and images (artefacts as well as performative images or inscriptions) its intention is to analyze how social and cultural patterns create their specific spaces (e.g. buildings reflecting power structures or the creation of the public sphere) and images (e.g. for religious purposes) and, even more important, how space and images actively and dynamically influenced actions and actors, structures and situations in the social and cultural life. The resulting "power of space and images” is a pivotal but only recently fully acknowledged phenomenon of ancient cultures. Analyzing this phenomenon requires a combined approach of historians and archaeologists. The Graduate Academy, therefore, brings together Egyptology, Ancient History, Assyriology, Byzantine Archaeology and Art History, Classical Archaeology, Prehistory and Near Eastern Archaeology. Its main educational objective is to familiarise graduate students with the concept of transcultural studies (as realised, uniquely within Germany, in the Heidelberg Centre for Studies of the Ancient World) and, for this purpose, to train them in the technical, methodological and theoretical requirements of such an approach. Interdisciplinary courses, joint lectures in theory and combined tuition will be central to the program. Heidelberg’s Centre for the Study of Antiquity with its unique concentration and cooperation of the relevant subjects offers ideal conditions for research projects in the area outlined above.