Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Fall 2011 | Paper 2

Due Saturday, October 8th, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Suggested Length 1500-1800 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 primary texts to support that claim. You will want to focus on specific characters, episodes, relations, themes, or claims in the texts, rather than provide general summaries. If the paper deadline conflicts with a religious holiday that you observe, feel free to discuss alternate arrangements with your conference leader.

  1. Compare the understanding and evaluation of physical labor in The Teaching of Khety and Works and Days. What might the differences and/or similarities tell us about social hierarchy in the cultures that produced these texts?

  2. In what ways do Egyptian texts embody, express, or seek to defuse social tensions? Focus your analysis on a comparison of two of the following: The Book of the Dead (esp. The Declaration to the Forty-Two Gods, pp. 126-129), the Temple of Amun-Re at Karnak, The Teaching of King Merikare.

  3. Explore the notion of liminality in two of the following: The Temple of Amon-Re at Karnak, and either The Tale of Sinuhe, The Dialogue of a Man and His Soul, or Lyric Seven of Love Lyrics of Ancient Egypt (This is my sisters mansion …). How do these texts mediate between interiors and exteriors, between the sacred and the profane, or between permission and transgression?

  4. Compare the treatment or representation of female divinities in the Egyptian myth Horus and Seth and in Hesiods Theogony. What symbolic or actual roles to they seem to play in their respective mythologies? What larger claims about gender in Greek or Egyptian culture can one make from such comparisons?

  5. What conclusions can one draw from a comparison of the archaic Greek Dipylon Amphora (Robert Knapps Aesthetics of Urn Burial lecture, images http://cdm.reed.edu/u?/vrcwork,2018 and http://cdm.reed.edu/u?/vrcwork,2086) and the Painted Wall in Nameless Tomb (David Garretts Monuments, Time, and Power lecture, image http://cdm.reed.edu/u?/vrcwork,94195)? What can these visual texts tell us about Greek and Egyptian social worlds or about attitudes toward community? In what significant ways do they differ?

  6. Scholars have argued that Hesiod's account of the formation of the universe in Theogony sets the agenda for the Presocratic cosmologists. In respect of Hesiod, what aspects of the worlds formation need to be explained, and what explanations does Theogony offer? Contrast Hesiod's questions and explanations with those of one or two of the Presocratic philosophers.

  7. Compare the views of death expressed in two of the following: The Book of the Dead, The Dialogue of a Man with His Soul, The Harper's Song for Inherkhawy. How does context (social, political, literary, etc) aid our understanding of the differences between these texts?

  8. In consultation with your conference leader, write an essay on a topic of your own devising.