Ancient Near Eastern Studies (B.A.) (2 Subjects)

Ancient Near Eastern Studies is a young science which, in exploring this early advanced civilisation, is currently making fundamental new discoveries in many areas, with its materials constantly growing through excavations and museum work. The course of studies in Göttingen concentrates in particular on Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria; it provides the basic philological knowledge required to work with the texts and covers topics of cultural science such as literature, religion and history, with the main focus on Sumerian and Babylonian mythology. Anyone who is interested and has the necessary talents can already contribute to research at an early stage or make ancient oriental themes fruitful for our time by journalistic or artistic means.

This course introduces students to the Sumerian and Babylonian-Assyrian languages and their texts. The acquisition of language skills involves from the very beginning an introduction to highly interesting texts which provide insights into the historical context, poetry and philosophy of a more-than-2000-year-old culture.

The subject Ancient Near Eastern Studies belongs to the Faculty of Humanities. The great diversity of subjects of this faculty provides numerous options for combination of subjects. But combinations with subjects from other faculties are also conceivable. The most important criterion for an individual combination of subjects is personal interest. A combination with related subjects in terms of content, geographical closeness and/or methodology, such as Egyptology, Classical Philology or Theology makes just as much sense as a combination with more methodology-oriented subjects such as Religious Studies, General Linguistics, Linguistics and Literary Studies (German Philology), Cultural Anthropology, or a combination with subjects exploring the medieval and modern Orient such as Arabic Studies or Iranian Studies. Finally, a combination with arts-oriented subjects may also open up interesting perspectives.

Journalism, publishing, libraries, tourism, museums, foundations, IT, knowledge management, sciences and various forms of art.