Gold
Silver[HIST W1002] Ancient History: Mesopotamia and Anatolia
Departments: History
Professors: Marc Van de Mieroop
I took Professor Van de Mieroop's Ancient Near East class in Spring 2010. He and his TA, Nathaneal Shelley were both excellent. Prof VdM's lectures were definitely interesting if you read the chapter in advance. The TA could not have been more helpful. He stayed after class to answer questions, answered questions via email in a relatively prompt fashion and held TWO review sessions before the final exam. Grading was more than fair in my opinion.
If you are in it for the grade: You must read the chapters and the text analysis (1-3 page primary sources translated into english) before class. This amounts to ~50 pages of reading per week. If you read these and attend class, you'd be hard pressed not to get an A. If you are in it for the grades and do not care about expanding your knowledge base or are crushed for time, you do not need to read the secondary readings to do well in the class. There's a short (ours was 7 pages) paper as well. Given the subject matter assigned for the paper, I found 7 pages to be a breeze.
If you are in it for the joy of scholarly pursuit: Besides doing all the stuff in the "for the grade" section, key in on Prof. VdM's focus on sources and how they are used to interpret the history. His big kick is looking at sources with a critical eye and being careful to differentiate facts from theories about what actually occurred in the Ancient Near East. As the class progressed, you get more attuned to looking at what items were found, when they were found, who created them and what can be certified as fact, what can be speculated on and what can't be known about these distant time periods. I found this level of critical thinking pretty cool once you got the hang of it.
Overall, I recommend this class and this professor. The workload is manageable, the professor is competent and effective in lecture and the grading is fair to slightly lenient.
The work load was average. Weekly: (2) ~20 page chapters, (2) 1-3 page 'text analyses' plus (2) ~20 page secondary readings. This amounts to ~50 pages of reading per week. Other than some choice readings that are stressed heavily in class, you don't have to read all of the secondary readings to score well on the exams.
The review below mine is completely inaccurate and was most likely written by a student who never attended class. If said student did attend class, he/she would have seen that Professor Van de Mieroop remained after his lectures ended to answer the lingering questions that students had. The TA was also extremely helpful--he held two (optional) review sessions before the final exam, and would listen to and critique paper ideas. In terms of not finding adequate English language source material for the paper, I did not seem to have that problem, and neither did any of the other people in the class who I spoke to. In fact, on the paper assignment page, the professor provided a list of sources (all in the english language) that we could use. Grading was also really, really fair, and probably more lenient than it should have been. As long as you went to class, you didn't even have to study to get in the 90s on the midterm or final exam (I literally read through my class notes an hour before the final). As far as not learning about how the wars were fought, if the student who wrote the post below me had gone to class, he/she would have learned 1) there is often not enough textual or archaeological evidence to provide details of every particular battle, and 2) when studying this period, it is more important to understand the overarching themes and causes and effects of events rather than get bogged down in detail. In sum, the poster below me gave the totally wrong impression of the class.
Assigned Readings (going to lecture and taking good notes is a complete substitute for this)
Midterm (map, source analysis, essay)
7 Page paper on figure from Ancient Near Eastern history
Final (source analysis, two essays)
Very boring class covering far too much time for anyone to really be tested adequately. The professor also skips over important pieces of information because the time-span is so long. For instance talking about wars, but never taking time to discuss how those wars were fought. The lecture offers nothing new that is not in the book, which is probably interesting to a fellow scholar, but not to a casual history student. The grading is very unfair. The paper, a biography on an ancient person, is very troubling, because unless you speak Sumerian and Akkadian, you will not be able to search for information on your topic. The TA was also useless and the professor was usually the first one out the door after class.
reading or lecture, midterm & final, 8 pg research paper
OK some of what has been said here has merit - but the man is brilliant, and his dry sense of humor is a great asest.
So well you might just hate the class - doesn't mean much about his ability to teach that class. He is an excllent, articulate lecturer and I was interested in every moment. Yes, it is a BIG field spanning many, many eons of time, but this is a BIG university in a BIG city, and we're all BIG kids now.
I cannot comment on his grading as I haven't taken the final yet, but the issues are his depth of knowledge - Deep, and his ability to convey that knowledge - that depends on You.
Great Class
Van de Mieroop seemed to be actually quite a nice guy. While he didn't know our names he did recognize me outside the classroom and bother to speak to me. That, however, does not make up for him being one of the most boring lecturers on the face of the earth. This is only made worse by two facts: 1. Very little is known about a good chunk of the time period he covers in class, leading to rambling lectures with no real content. 2. The course covers so long a time span that, once things do get interesting, it is impossible to study them in any depth. Whoever made the comment about only needing a 10-page notebook was right; he doesn't say enough concrete things for the first 10 weeks to even fill a single page a session. But this lack of content does not translate to easy exams. He said at the begninning of the semester that he didn't care about dates and thus rarely provided them in lectures. But this was a lie. Major sections of both the midterm and final were dependent on knowing the dates of certain dynasties, etc. In preparing for the final (having been screwed on the midterm), I found the textbook (though badly in need of some editing and written by Van de Mieroop) essential to figuring out when various things happened. The best part of the class, in terms of grading at least, was the paper. It involved the regurgitation of 10 pages of history on a particular city or civilization from the Oxford Ancient History and other books. It took some time, but involved basically zero thought. There are worse classes out there, but definitely better ones too. An A is certainly possible, but be prepared to go to class just so you know what sections of th
midterm, final, paper
Professor Van de Mieroop is blond. He is blond and tall. This observation, gleaned from my first class, may be the only interesting thing I learned all semester from Van de Mieroop. He rambles, he borders on incoherence, he routinely shows up ten minutes late. However, the class occurred in the early evening, and the gentle bobbing of his bushy blond eyebrows lulled me into a restful slumber. I was one of those people who sat in the back row and brought a crossword puzzle, described so aptly by a prior reviewer. However, it made no difference. I took no notes after the first half of the semester, did no reading, and still got an A. Others who worked hard did much worse. This is not because I am spectacularly intelligent. The grading in this class was beyond arbitrary. Highly recommended to anyone who feels lucky. If you want your grade to be based on any logical measure, or if you enjoy classes that actually teach, look elsewhere.
One page paper on object at the Metropolitan Museum of art (grades ranged from 50% to 100% based on shoe size, I think), midterm, and final.
The other person who reviewed Prof. Van de Mieroop was clearly one of the people who came into class and sat at the back of the room and talked during the lecture. Van de Mieroop is not only an extremely knowledgeable and famous scholar, but he has also acquired quite a following of students here at Columbia who will rearrange their schedules to be able to take a class with him... and rightfully so. Van de Mieroop's lecture style is very organized and he packs a lot of information into an hour and fifteen minutes. It is ALWAYS clear where he is going with what he is saying and it is always very interesting. The key to doing well is going to class; he does not test on the texts although reading the texts is always nice.
Midterm and final -- straightforward if you've attended every lecture. One 10-page research paper.
Van De Mieroop's lectures were inane and disorganized. His slow monotone either lulled you to sleep or to cut. If you do attend class, a crossword puzzle is a necessity and a ten page notebook will suffice. The course sapped me of my interest in ancient Egyptian history, leaving me with little more than a list of Pharaohs and the dates of their reigns. An easy class but not worth the frustration of such boredom.
A very short paper on an object in the Met, a midterm, and a final. Memorization a must, insight is useless.
Directory Data
| Dept/Subj | Directory Course | Professor | Year | Semester | Time | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HIST / HIST | HIST HIST W1002: Anc Hist-Mesopotamian/Anatolia: Anc Hist-Mesopotamia/Anatolia | Marc Van de Mieroop | 2002 | Spring | MW / 5:40- 6:55 PM | 1 |
| HIST / HIST | HIST HIST W1002: Anc Hist-Mesopotamian/Anatolia: Anc Hist-Mesopotamia/Anatolia | Marc Van de Mieroop | 2001 | Spring | MW / 11:00-12:15 PM | 1 |