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The first empires of the ancient world emerged in an area encompassed today by the nation-states of Iraq and Iran. This course explores the architecture and visual record of three particularly large imperial powers of the first millennium B.C., Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. The central research question concerns the manner in which an ideology of empire is expressed in the built and visual environments of the great capital cities of these empires: in Assyria, Nimrud, Nineveh, and Khorsabad, in Babylonia, Babylon, and in Persia, Pasargadae, Persepolis, and Susa. These great capital cities were known far and wide across the ancient Mediterranean and western and central Asia and provided models for the architectural and visual expression of empire for millennia.