Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Fall 2010 | Paper 3

Due Saturday, November 13, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Maximum Length 1500 words

Write an essay in response to one of the following prompts. Structure your essay around a strong, analytical claim, and provide specific, detailed evidence from the texts to support that claim.

  1. The Persian empire encompassed and interacted with societies of many different languages, religions, and cultures. Compare the Persians' portrayal of themselves and their interaction with non-Persian peoples in the sources included in Kuhrts The Persian
    Empire to the portrayals in EITHER the Books of Esther and Ezra, OR Aeschylus The Persians. Be sure to address the genres and media of the texts, and explain their relation to the portrayals.

  2. How do the Cyrus cylinder and the Bisitun monument legitimate the authority of the Persian emperor? Be sure to discuss the material nature of the works.

  3. Sapphos poetry has been read as lesbian love lyric. Defend or critique that interpretation, being sure to account for strong counter-arguments. Factors you may wish to consider are the use of the first person in the poems; changing understandings of the term lesbian; and/or the social context in which the poems were composed and performed.

  4. Examine the ideal of manliness put forth in an archaic Greek kouros and in the poetry of ONE of the following: Archilochus, Tyrtaeus, Theognis. Pay attention to genre and to the context in which the work would have been seen/heard.

  5. Discuss how EITHER the "Book of Esther" OR Book I of Herodotus Histories portrays heroic and/or powerful women. How do these portrayals conform to or challenge ideals of masculine heroism or power that we have encountered in other Hebrew or Greek texts?

  6. Focusing on only one or two lyrics or lyric fragments, discuss how the poet's use of diction, imagery, allusion, or other poetic devices construes love as either a public or a private phenomenon, in ONE of the following: the poetry of Anacreon, the Egyptian love lyrics, the poetry of Sappho.

  7. Through a close visual analysis of the Penthesilea Vase analyze how its visual features, such as the relative postures and pictorial details of the figures, define both the non-Greek subject and the ideal Greek viewer. Images of the vase are available at http://cdm-workspace.reed.edu/slideshow/1611.