Ancient Societies Workshop

This interdisciplinary workshop serves as a meeting ground for those who work on the ancient world at Yale, and is an important forum that allows sustained conversation about a common theme. The workshop meets once a month during the academic year, and is supplemented by the core graduate seminar in  Archaia: Yale Program for the Study of Ancient and Premodern Cultures and Societies. Presenters include Yale faculty and graduate students, as well as occasional visiting professors. The chronological scope of the seminar extends over the first millennium BCE and up through the premodern period; issues of reception are also considered.

The theme for 2024-2025 is “Law and Society in China and Rome, 200BCE - 750CE,” with a focus on ancient China and ancient Rome, organized by Professors Noel Lenski (History and Classics) and Valerie Hansen (History).

From our earliest written records, ancient societies have transmitted to us the customs, rules, and laws they establish for the regulation of society and government. By the later first millennium BCE, these came to be codified in increasingly elaborate forms, particularly in the Chinese and Roman Empires. By the ‘late antique’ period, both societies put forth what can truly be classed as law codes, with the ambition of encompassing the legal order comprehensively and thus constituting society around an imperially dictated set of norms. The 2024-5 Ancient Societies Workshop investigates this process and its ramifications at the level of social and political development – from the archaeological recovery of laws, to the process of codification, to their interactions with regionally variable normative systems, to their implementation at the level of trade, commerce, food supply, public welfare, and practices of enslavement. The eight speakers bring expertise in Chinese or Roman history, and some in both. Inspired by Marc Bloch’s rationale for comparative history, the workshop aims to develop new questions through the study of contemporaneous societies in differing parts of the globe and through the exploration of approaches that guide scholars from other fields so that these might become our own.

Below is our speaker lineup with dates.  We will announce each one a few weeks out from the talk dates and ask for signups then.  Each workshop with take place in-person in Phelps Hall 401 and we will provide lunch. 

Questions, concerns, or ideas, please email our Archaia administrator Keith at Keith.geriak@yale.edu.