Ancient Cities, Modern Inquiries: Contemporary Debates Focusing on Africa and the Middle East

Garth Myers earned a Ph.D. in Geography (1993) from UCLA with an allied field in Urban Planning. Myers has an M.A. (UCLA, 1986) in African Area Studies, with Geography and Urban Planning as the major and minor fields, and a BA with Honors in History from Bowdoin College, with concentrations in African and African-American History. He has taught at the University of Kansas, University of Nebraska-Omaha, Miami University (Ohio), California State University at Dominguez Hills, and UCLA. Myers is comfortable with large lecture classes and small seminars. His teaching philosophy rests on a belief in student engagement; the best learning takes place in engaged classrooms, where the professor facilitates student discussion and debate. Myers has conducted research in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Senegal, South Africa, Finland, and the UK over the past 20 years, and he regularly uses his research to inform his teaching. For more information, please visit:

Martin Murray is a tenured full professor of the Taubman College urban planning faculty. He began his academic career as sociologist with a strong foundation in urban geography. His current research engages the fields of urban studies and planning, global urbanism, cultural geography, distressed urbanism, development, historical sociology, and African studies. In addition to six books and three co-edited volumes, he has produced close to seventy journal articles and book chapters that focus on diverse geographical areas of the world at different historical periods. Professor Murray has completed two books on city building and spatial politics in Johannesburg after apartheid. His current research focuses on two fields of inquiry: first, the trajectories of global urbanism at the start of the 21st century; and second, the turn toward master-planned, holistically-designed "private cities" built from scratch, especially those currently under construction or in the planning stages in urban

For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than not. It's therefore important that we critically examine the legacy of cities from the ancient world and ask what lessons we can learn about the successes, failures, and achievements of cities. In this lecture, we explore a number of categories of urban planning and the direction of modern urbanism and note that where it adheres to critical principles of the ancient world, it sees its greatest successes. Steven L. Tuck is Professor and Chair of Classics at Miami University. He has won eight teaching awards from the local to the national level, directed over sixteen study tours, excavated in three countries, written and presented four lecture series for the Teaching Company’s Great Courses series, and published in the areas of Greek and Roman architecture, sculpture, spectacle entertainment, harbors, and epigraphy. For more information, please visit:

For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC until just after 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, Trojans, and Canaanites all interacted. They created a cosmopolitan world-system, with flourishing cities such as Mycenae, Hazor, Troy, Ugarit, Hattusa, Babylon, and Thebes, such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. It may have been this very internationalism that contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age. When the end came just after 1200 BC, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia in the east. Cities and towns, large empires and small kingdoms, that had taken centuries to evolve,

Steven Garfinkle - Commerce, Communication, and State Formation: Daily Life in an Ancient Mesopotamian City from a Merchant’s Perspective Cities were the building blocks of civilization in early Mesopotamia. Literary texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh highlight the urban environment as the height of human development. The expansion of state power in these communities was often built around ensuring the productivity of commerce, both local and long distance, and protecting the accumulation of property. Much of this was an elite phenomenon, and these elites created the documentary record that we use to construct daily life. Commercial activity brought the communities of the ancient Near East together. This was true within communities as commerce supported the redistributive mechanisms within the early city-states and states of the region, and this was true across state boundaries as long distance trade networks arose to supply these communities with both staple and luxury goods unavailable

Roderick James McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University (New Haven, CT), Curator-in-Charge of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, New Haven, and Honorary Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). He received his Ph.D from the University of Cambridge. His major interests include African and Old World comparative prehistory, the origin of authority in complex society, urbanism, geomorphology and palaeoclimate. For the past thirty-five years he has looked comparatively at the urban landscapes of the great Niger and Senegal floodplains, including co-directorship of investigations at Jenne-jeno, sub-Saharan Africa's oldest city. For more information, please visit:

Kenneth Harl is Professor of Classical and Byzantine History at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he teaches courses in Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader history. He earned his B.A. from Trinity College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Recognized as an outstanding lecturer, Professor Harl has received numerous teaching awards at Tulane, including the coveted Sheldon H. Hackney Award. He has earned Tulane's annual Student Body Award for Excellence in Teaching nine times and is the recipient of Baylor University's nationwide Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers. An expert on classical Anatolia, he has taken students with him into the field on excursions and to assist in excavations of Hellenistic and Roman sites in Turkey. Professor Harl has also published a wide variety of articles and books, including his current work on coins unearthed in an excavation of Gordion, Turkey, and a new book on Rome and her Iranian foes. A fellow and trustee of the American N