Undergraduate students have wide-ranging choices in courses including introductory language, history and archaeology as well as topical classes on subjects such as Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion, literature, and science. Many of our classes are open to all students at Brown and have no prerequisites. Concentrators in the department have the option of following tracks in either Egyptology or Assyriology. Both tracks provide students with a solid background in the field through exposure to the critical study of these ancient cultures using the tools of archaeology, epigraphy, and historical inquiry, and a variety of interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical approaches in order to explore these regions ancient languages and literatures, political and socio-economic modes of organization, art and architecture, religious traditions and other systems of knowledge, such as ancient exact sciences.