Admission requirements
Basic knowledge of Sumerian grammar and the cuneiform script
Description
Sumerian was the primary written language of Southern Mesopotamia until about 1700 BC. It is known to us from more than 100,000 inscriptions and clay tablets that cover a wide range of topics. Apart from large numbers of administrative records, we have many thousands of texts with a historical, legal, religious, or literary content. Studying them gives access to arguably the best documented culture from the Third Millennium BC. During this course the student selects and studies under supervision a corpus of Sumerian texts and writes a paper on this corpus. The student also participates in the BA course Seminar Sumerian (“Sumerisch werkcollege”), where we will treat a selection of literary texts from the Old Babylonian period.
Course objectives
Students will be able to read, translate, and interpret Sumerian texts independently and put them into their historical and cultural context.
Mode of instruction
Seminar
Tutorials on the basis of the student’s needs and interests
Course Load
In total 280 hours, consisting of:
26 (13 × 2) hours for attending the seminars
48 hours preparing the seminars
26 hours preparing the written examination
180 hours studying the selected text corpus, attending the tutorials, and writing the essay
Research master students can take this course for 5 EC (= 140 hours). Please contact the teacher for more information about this option.
Assessment method
a written exam on the subject matter of the seminar (30% of the final grade);
a final paper on the selected text corpus (70% of the final grade).
The final grade for the course is established by determining the weighted average. Both the written exam and the final paper must have a grade above 5.49 and can be repeated if their grade is lower.
Blackboard
For more information see Blackboard
Reading list
To be provided at the beginning of the course.