Alumni Winter Study: "Game of Thrones, ca. 850 BCE: Empire, Religion, and Palace Intrigue" with Alison Acker Gruseke '82

Return to the (virtual) classroom for one-hour versions of Williams Winter Study courses, designed and taught by fellow alums!

Learn from Alison Acker Gruseke '82 about how her Winter Study class uses a range of materials to examine one of Williamstown’s most mysterious objects: WCMA’s Assyrian reliefs and the contexts in which they were created, desired, collected, and assigned meaning. Alison's class explores the WCMA reliefs and small cuneiform collection and studies the palace of Assurnasirpal II in Nimrud (ancient Kalhu), the reliefs’ original site. They interrogate Assyria’s obsession with warfare—richly documented in text and art—alongside its religion, politics, and artistic tradition. In the College Archives, the class studied Nimrud’s 19th-century discovery and migration to the Berkshires, teasing important questions of the reliefs as Iraqi heritage versus their ongoing life in Western scholarship, including at WCMA. Learn about how the class used FLASH AKKADIAN to master the basics of Akkadian cuneiform and decipher 3,000-year-old ceremonial bricks in the WCMA collection.