This course is an interdisciplinary series of connected lectures delivered by eminent scholars from several colleges and universities. Each professor addresses an area of personal expertise and focuses not only on the matter at hand, but on the larger story-on the links between the works and the figures discussed. The lectures address-in chronological sequence-a series of major works that have shaped the ongoing development of Western thought both in their own right and in cultural dialogue with other traditions. In the process, the course engages many of the most perennial and far-reaching questions that we face in our daily lives.The lectures draw upon the resources of history, philosophy, literary study, art history, religious studies, political science, and the history of science and technology, in hopes of engaging the rich and profoundly interactive discussions that, over the course of forty centuries, have made Western culture what it is.
Lecture 1 From Sumer to Athens
Lecture 2 The Epic of Gilgamesh
Lecture 3 The Hebrew Bible: Historical Background and Genesis
Lecture 4 The Hebrew Bible: Exodus and the Covenant
Lecture 5 The Hebrew Bible: Psalms, Prophets, The Song of Songs, and Job
Lecture 6 Greece: From the Bronze Age to the Archaic Age
Lecture 7 The Iliad
Lecture 8 Homer: The Odyssey
Lecture 9 Hesiod and Lyric Poetry
Lecture 10 Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus
Lecture 11 Greek Tragedy: Sophocles
Lecture 12 Greek Tragedy: Euripides
Lecture 13 Herodotus of Halicarnassus
Lecture 14 Greek Art