Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer: 

The culmination of the course is a paper of at least 15 pages that relies on primary ancient Egyptian source material – in the form of ancient texts, ancient art, and/or archaeological evidence like artifacts and features from an ancient site – to understand a problem from Egypt’s origins to the Middle Kingdom. Your paper might focus on aspects of interest to this class, including the reasons for state formation, social inequality, bureaucracy, systems of labor, systems of elite incentives, conspicuous consumption, pyramid building, the ideological underpinnings of power, the growing power of elites in relation to the king, the reasons for civil war, state collapse, economic growth, economic recession, etc. 

The main point of this paper is to allow you to do analysis with primary sources, including ancient Egyptian texts in translation, artifacts, buildings, and other archaeological data. We are interested in argument, not description. This is not meant to be a book report, but an examination of primary data to understand how a particular system may have worked in ancient Egypt. That system might be ideological, political, social, economic, and/or militarily oriented. 

If you are asking WHY? or HOW? in your paper, you are on the right track. If you are just asking WHAT happened?, then you will produce a descriptive paper with no real analysis. 

Please use at least 4 primary sources (Royal Tombs and artifacts and etc ) and at least 4 secondary sources for your paper. The Wendrich book may count as one of those secondary sources, if appropriate.