Texts from over three millennia are one of our major sources for understanding the history and culture of the Ancient Near East and ancient Egypt. These texts were written in societies very different from our own, with limited literacy and different presuppositions about how the world operated. In this course, we will be reading ancient Egyptian texts and looking at ancient Egyptian representations and artifacts in context, learning different approaches to studying and understanding them, and how they can be used to reconstruct the ancient world. The course will focus on items illustrating Egypt’s relations with her northern and southern neighbours, such as royal inscriptions and battle reliefs,  diplomatic correspondence, literary texts about Egyptians’ experiences abroad, etc. These items are often produced within strict representative conventions, which must be properly understood in order to assess the information these items convey correctly.