Intellectual Scavenger Hunt – Defining Ancient Science

 Each Weekly Response (WR) is designed to do achieve two general goals. One is to demonstrate your understanding of the content of the week’s course materials (lecture, readings and/or films). The second is to build a series of skills to support the research project and information literacy. For example, the first two WRs are ‘Intellectual Scavenger Hunts’, which are designed to enhance your research skills. Refer to the instructions in the rubric provided. Read the instructions very carefully and address each of the sections below. Intellectual Scavenger Hunt: Using the materials below, conduct a ‘Scavenger Hunt’ for scholarly readings to replace, challenge, or support the ones you have chosen. Here are the instructions: Part I – The Preparation: Please read: – Lindberg, ‘Science and it’s Origins,’ pp. 1-13, – Rochberg, Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts and the Classification of Mesopotamian Divination as Science. Part II – The Search: 1) Select three keywords from the above materials to search for your new scholarly source. To select the key words to search you might use topics such as “Oral Traditions” (Lindberg, 5) or “Symbolic Language” (Babylonian lecture); Emipiricism (Rochberg); the names of peoples Ninursag (Lindberg, 9); geographic locations, or objects such as “Cuneiform Tablets”(Lecture). Place quotation marks around multiple words search for them as a unit to help narrow your results. In other words, put keyword phrases such as “symbolic language” in quotes or you are searching for each term separately. 2) Search for three of these keywords or keyword phrases using the ‘Summon’ Drexel Library database: Summon: https://www.library.drexel.edu/ ***You are looking for a scholarly source–one written by a professional historian, so be careful what you choose. [You can determine if a scholar wrote it by doing a Google search on the person, or finding their institutional affiliation in the book or essay you have located.] Part III – The Report: a) Write your name and the date at the top of the essay, b) List the three keywords or keyword phrases and where you found them (Lindberg, Rochberg, Lecture) c) List the new source you found doing the intellectual scavenger hunt. d) Once you have a good scholarly essay or book, or a primary source (you can limit your reading to a chapter in this book), then address the question/prompts below. In a 300-500 word essay discss: 1) What challenges do we as historians encounter when trying to define “science” during the Ancient period? In-text citations: Cite your sources using in-text citations using footnotes in Chicago Manual Style (See below). Part IV – Bibliography: Include a Bibliography listing all the sources you have used.