Welcome to the Free Ancient Near East School main page. A place where you can get free ancient near east studies.
Make sure you visit the ENKI Academy before you continue to read.
If you've ever wondered what mankind is and how human society came to be, this is a very good place to get some answers. During the Ancient Near East, civilization was born along with its many sides: politics, economics, organized religion, arts and writing. Why did humans switch from a hunter/gatherer lifestyle to a complex and sometimes disappointing society? Is this in our genes? And if so, what woke the dormant zoon politikon after so many tens of thousands of years?
The study of Ancient Near East offers answers to such questions and gives a good idea regarding what we are today — civilized humans.
Argument. What is FANES?
This is an ambitious project aiming to provide a FREE online school for the history of the Ancient Near East at an academic level. I consider this topic to be very poor in resources on the Web and that people interested in it need a better place to start learning.
Anyone can join FANES from anywhere in the world. However there are some requirements (which are not enforced):
- Good skills with the English language (both reading and writing), but I close my eyes for mispelings or grammar bad since I myself am not a native English speaker.
- Finished high school or at least in progress. Although nobody is checking on FANES students, I think it's a requirement in order to be able to keep up with the courses and tasks.
- Strong Determination to complete the school. You should understand that I'm making an effort for every student and it's disappointing to see them abandoning after a while. However this is a free school and students are also free to leave it at any time.
No history knowledge is required to join FANES. The knowledge will come after starting the courses. Furthermore, every course has an introduction which is very helpful for novice students which need to start from scratch.
FANES is FREE and comes with the GNU Free Documentation License. This school will exists as a free school as long as it will be useful (doesn't become obsolete by some reason). Its main purpose is to share knowledge, not sell it. This originates from the strong belief of its author that knowledge should be shared by knowledge holders across the entire community/society/world and thus every one should have access to free knowledge on every discipline. This means that knowledge is not individual property but a feature of the entire community.
I am also planning to host this school at Wikiversity's School of History. This is good proof that I'm going to keep it FREE in the future. However the school is not ready yet for such a big step, as it needs at least one course to be created. Wikiversity is full of unfinished stubs and I don't intend to create more.
FANES is not an official academic structure. After completing the school, no official recognition will be provided. However an unofficial diploma will be issued to the graduate student (through email) and its name and final grade will be continuously listed on our site (as long as our site exists). But only students that graduate all courses and present an eligible Completion Paper will be graded and considered graduates. The Completion Paper is a final work the student presents that proves the knowledge gained during our school. This paper can be published on our site using the GNU Free Documentation License if the student agrees.
Affiliation. FANES is NOT affiliated with any institution, political or religious movement or anythings else for that matter. So we're not here to indoctrinate you, we're trying to be as neutral and objective as possible.
List of Courses
The courses (projects) that are or will be available here:
- Dawn of Civilization (work in progress)
- Sumer and Akkad (coming soon)
- Egypt (coming soon)
- Levant (coming soon)
- Anatolia (coming soon)
- The Achaemenid Empire (coming soon)
- The Hellenistic Period (coming soon)
- The Parthian Empire (coming soon)
- Synthesis. Preparation for Completion Paper (coming soon)
Sources
While I studied these topics in faculty I myself had a problem with the sources for learning. This is why I've come to think that the most important role of a school is to coordinate the students towards good reading resources.
The Internet really has very few sources, except probably for Wikipedia, but one can only get an idea about the topics in there, not enough depth (naturally for it is only an encyclopedia). Other sites provide even less detail, but there are some nice maps and photos that can be used.
Since this is an online school, when it comes to using a library, it also needs to be an online library. The only decent such library I think it's Questia. It also has a decent fee ($20/month or something like that) and accepts readers from all over the world. Unfortunately the books in there are not that great (at least not when it comes to the Ancient Near East) and this can't be the main repository for the studying resources. However it can become handy as a secondary studying source. Otherwise put, it doesn't have firsthand authors and books regarding our topic, but it does have some interesting works for extra reading or research.
I think the main source of learning is still the plain old fashioned paper books. But this source can be problematic since only some books are considered fitful for our topic and for our academic level. Also the availability of the books is an issue. As a general rule, recommended books will be in English and will be available from at least one major on line store (like Amazon). Paper books mean an extra cost for the student so this is also problematic for a main source of information since it is possible for some students not to afford them.
FANES will strive to be itself a major source of information for its students through the courses. However this is the essential source but not an exhaustive one. From the courses a Further reading section will recommend students towards reading in more depth of the taught subject using above described sources.
Learn More
- Learn how FANES works in Methodology.
