This guide sets out the shape of the midterm and, week by week, what you need to be able to do with the material. The exam covers Lectures 1 to 8, the first part of the course, “The Emergence of Greece.” It covers the lectures and the eight discussion documents equally. Nothing from Week 9 onward is examined, although the Week 9 review document is a useful place to revise from because it draws the eight lectures together.
1 · The shape of the exam
The paper is worth 100 marks and lasts 50 minutes. The 50-minute limit is set so that students entitled to time and a half can finish within a single class session. There are two parts.
| Part | What it contains | Marks | Suggested time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part 1 Short questions | Fifteen questions, arranged in five sections of three. Answer all fifteen. One or two sentences is enough for each. | 2 marks each 30 total | About 15 minutes (roughly 1 minute each) |
| Part 2 Essay | Six essay questions. Choose one. Write a structured answer with an argument, supported by specific evidence. | 70 total | About 35 minutes |
| Total | 100 | 50 minutes | |
The five sections of Part 1 always cover the same ground, in this order:
| Section | Material | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| A | Lectures 1–2: food, landscape, seafaring, and the body as evidence | 3 |
| B | Lectures 3–4: palaces, Linear A and B, and the gods | 3 |
| C | Lectures 5–6: writing, the alphabet, and Homer | 3 |
| D | Lecture 7: the rise of the polis | 3 |
| E | Lecture 8: Herodotus, custom, and Greek identity | 3 |
The essay questions in Part 2 are not tied to a single week. Each one asks you to use material from at least two or three different lectures.
2 · How to revise
Short questions test precise recall. For each week you should be able to do four things without notes:
- Define the technical terms. If a term appears in italics in the lectures — ta-ra-si-ja, aretē, synoikismos, nomos — you should be able to give a one-sentence definition.
- Name the evidence. Each argument in this course rests on particular sites, objects, texts, or scientific studies. Know their names and what each one is: Shubayqa, Uluburun, the Room of the Chariot Tablets, the Chigi vase, the Himera mass graves.
- Say what a piece of evidence shows and what it does not show. This is the single most repeated demand in the course. An answer that says what a find proves, and then names the limit of that proof, is worth more than an answer that only describes the find.
- State both sides of a disagreement. Where scholars disagree — the date of the Thera eruption, the cause of the Bronze Age collapse, whether the alphabet was adapted for poetry, whether there was a hoplite revolution — you should be able to state each position and say what evidence supports it.
Essays test argument. A strong essay takes a clear position in its first paragraph, supports it with named evidence from more than one lecture, and deals honestly with the strongest objection to its own case. A weak essay lists facts without arguing anything, or asserts a position without evidence.
3 · Week by week
Lecture 1
Origins of the Mediterranean Diet
The Mediterranean Triad and Its Deep History · Beer, Wine, and the Feast · The Wild World · The Body as Evidence · Milk, Cheese, and the Unfinished Meal
Lecture 1 notes and slides; the discussion document Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Foodways, Flora, and Fauna, especially its eight eras and its closing section on scientific method; Week 9 review, Lecture 1 card.
- The Mediterranean triad — grain, vine, olive — and why the course treats it as a late and borrowed arrangement rather than a natural one.
- The “farming package”: emmer, einkorn, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, flax, with sheep, goat, cattle and pig.
- Lactase persistence, and why cheese-making mattered before it became common.
- Carbon and nitrogen isotopes (what a person ate) against strontium and oxygen isotopes (where a person grew up).
- Dental calculus, and what hardened plaque preserves.
- Shubayqa 1 (bread about 14,400 years ago, some four millennia before any cereal was domesticated) and Raqefet Cave (malting residues, about 13,000 years ago, in a burial ground).
- Göbekli Tepe from about 9,600 BC: carved limestone enclosures and stone vats holding up to 160 litres, with traces of cereal fermentation.
- Franchthi Cave: the domesticated crops and animals appear together around 7000 BC, which shows an arriving farming economy rather than local domestication.
- Dikili Tash, about 4300 BC: the earliest wine in Europe, identified from tartaric-acid biomarkers and pressed grape skins.
- The lion bones: more than a hundred from about forty sites, Neolithic to Iron Age, including three levels at Tiryns, many with butchery cut-marks.
- Lignite in the dental calculus of individuals at Tiryns and Chania — the earliest evidence for fossil-fuel use in Europe, with the coal carried about 150 km overland to Tiryns.
- Cheese as tu-ro in the Linear B tablets, and honey as me-ri.
Did farming produce bread and beer, or did the appetite for bread and beer help produce farming? And did agriculture improve human life? The skeletal evidence shows shorter stature, more dental caries, iron-deficiency anaemia, more infectious disease and the marks of heavy labour — but far more people. Be ready to say what “success” means in that comparison.
Lecture 2
Mountains and the Sea
Sailing the “Wine Dark Sea” · The End of the World · Myth of a Mega-drought · Gods of the Sea and Mountains · A New World Forged from Bronze
Lecture 2 notes and slides; the discussion document Mountains and the Sea (the geography timeline), including its palaeodiet section and its two student tasks, The Body as Evidence and The Uluburun Shipwreck: What One Hull Can and Cannot Prove; Week 9 review, Lecture 2 card.
- Melian obsidian, and why its distribution matters for the history of seafaring.
- Transhumance, and how moving flocks between altitudes spread agricultural risk.
- Micro-climate, and why two Peloponnesian caves 70 km apart can disagree about a drought.
- Arsenical bronze and tin bronze, and the roughly nine parts copper to one part tin that tin bronze requires.
- Oxhide ingot: a four-cornered copper slab of up to about 30 kg, carried on the shoulder.
- Synoikismos, named here for the later recombining of dispersed communities.
- Strofilas on Andros: at least thirty-seven boats carved into bedrock in a fortified village of the later fourth millennium.
- Keros: deliberately broken figurines carried from different islands, with almost no joins between the fragments.
- Lerna and the House of the Tiles: burned around 2200 BC, with more than 140 clay sealings baked hard by the fire that destroyed the building.
- The Asea valley record (no anomaly around 2200 BC) against the Alepotrypa Cave stalagmite at Diros (a sharp dry interval from about 2250 BC).
- Tenaghi Philippon: lead pollution from smelting rising above the natural background about 3200 BC.
- Uluburun: about ten tons of Cypriot copper and one ton of tin, plus terebinth resin, ebony, ivory, ostrich eggshells, cobalt-blue glass, Baltic amber, and a gold scarab naming Nefertiti.
- Cretan peak sanctuaries, and the offerings left there: figures with raised arms, miniature animals, and modelled human limbs.
- Star navigation: the Bear kept on the left hand at Odyssey 5, and Aratus on Greeks steering by Helice and Phoenicians by Kynosoura.
Was there a mega-drought around 2200 BC? Know the case for it (simultaneous change across Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and the Aegean; the Meghalayan age defined from a single Indian stalagmite in 2018) and the case against it (the two Peloponnesian records disagree; the 2024 study of 1,142 records finds local and regional episodes rather than one global event; the argument was circular, because falling empires were used to identify the drought and the drought was then used to explain the falling empires).
Lecture 3
Minoans and Mycenaeans
An Eastern Inheritance · Minoans · Linear A and Repainted Frescoes · Pax Minoica · Mycenaeans · Sandy Pylos
Lecture 3 notes, slides and lecture summary; the discussion document Trade (the parallel Near East and Greece timeline), including its Ugarit era, its Bronze Age collapse era, and the student task on the Pylos archive; Week 9 review, Lecture 3 card and its Thera dating anchor.
- Radiocarbon dating and calibration, and what a “flat” stretch of the calibration curve does to precision.
- Linear A and Linear B: which is older, which was deciphered, in what year, and what language Linear B records.
- Ta-ra-si-ja: the system by which the palace issued raw materials to producers and expected finished goods back.
- Wanax, lawagetas, e-qe-ta, telestai, temenos, damos.
- Do-e-ro and do-e-ra, and why “slave” is an imprecise translation.
- Megaron and tholos tomb.
- Ugarit as the probable loading point of the Uluburun ship, identified partly from a Syrian house mouse aboard; the Amarna letters and the king of Alashiya's apology about plague among his miners.
- Kaptara in the Mari archives and Keftiu in Egyptian tomb paintings, both names for Crete.
- Knossos: Kalokairinos's test pits in 1878, Evans's excavation from March 1900, and the naming of the civilisation after a mythical king.
- The bull-leaping fresco and the “Priest-King” relief, both largely reconstructed in the 1920s by the Gilliérons; the “Priest-King” is assembled from non-joining fragments.
- The Linear A wine amphora from the Temple Repositories at Knossos, recording part of a consignment of 117 units.
- Armenoi: four individuals whose strontium and sulphur isotopes indicate they grew up and lived off Crete until shortly before death.
- Inscribed stirrup jars: about 180 to 190 known, made between 1320 and 1200 BC, most produced in western Crete.
- Grave Circle A at Mycenae (about 1550–1500 BC) and the later fortification of the citadel (about 1350 BC, with the Cyclopean circuit about 1250 BC).
- Pylos: about 1,200 Linear B tablets preserved because the palace burned; 2,854 drinking cups stacked for a feast; Enkhelawon and the requisition for the feast of Poseidon (PY Un 718); the textile workers named by places such as Knidos, Miletus and Lemnos.
Two disagreements. First, the date of the Thera eruption: the old date of about 1500 BC, the discredited attribution of the 1628 BC ice-core signal (now assigned to Aniakchak II in Alaska), the disputed olive-branch dates, and the tsunami deposits at Çeşme-Bağlararası that place the eruption no earlier than 1612 BC. Second, the Pax Minoica: Evans's peaceful trading Crete against the fortifications at Gournia, the weapons, the injuries, and the dependent labour that the Linear B tablets reveal a generation later.
Lecture 4
Gods, Monsters, and the End of the World
Gods before Myth · Goddesses and Monsters · The Griffin Warrior · The Palaikastro Kouros · Poseidon and Zeus · The Succession Myth · The End of the World
Lecture 4 notes, slides and lecture summary; the discussion document Mythology (the cognate-comparison timeline), including its Near Eastern texts and its tasks on the Xeste 3 frescoes and on Poseidon and Zeus; Week 9 review, Lecture 4 card.
- Potnia, hiereia, and the damos as it appears in the Pylos tablets.
- The Minoan genius, and the Egyptian goddess Taweret from which it derives.
- Baetyl: a stone at which a god could be summoned.
- Chryselephantine, and why the Palaikastro Kouros matters as the earliest known example.
- Epiphany, as the term is used of Minoan ring scenes.
- PY Ep 704: the dispute between the priestess Eritha and the damos over temple land, the longest connected sentence in Mycenaean Greek.
- KN V 52: Athana Potnia, Enyalios, Paiawon and Poseidon — the earliest readable names of Greek gods.
- KN Gg 705 (honey for Eleuthia at Amnisos) and KN Gg 702 (honey for the Mistress of the Labyrinth).
- KN Fp 1: the earliest reference to Zeus Diktaios.
- The Griffin Warrior grave at Pylos, excavated in 2015: a man of about thirty-five buried around 1450 BC with four gold signet rings, more than fifty seal-stones, and the combat agate.
- The Palaikastro Kouros: broken deliberately, reassembled from about two hundred fragments recovered over three seasons of excavation.
- The burnt cattle bones at Pylos, and the parallel with the rite Nestor performs at Odyssey 3.
- Enuma Elish (Marduk and Tiamat), the Song of Emergence or Kumarbi cycle (Anu, Kumarbi, Teshub, Ullikummi), and the Ugaritic Baal cycle (Baal and Yam).
- Ugarit: the merchant Urtenu's private archive; four working languages; an alphabet of thirty cuneiform signs; wealth built on silver and slaves.
What caused the Late Bronze Age collapse, and why was there no recovery? Weigh drought (real in places, but the records vary in date and locality), grain shortage (which was also tribute, trade and diplomacy), the “Sea Peoples” (a modern collective name; the Egyptian inscriptions are royal victory claims and name different groups on different occasions), and earthquakes (plausible at single sites, hard to prove regionally). Be ready to explain why the course prefers the question “why could these states not adapt?” to the question “who destroyed them?”
Lecture 5
Writing and the Alphabet
Steep Wilusa · The Rise and Fall of Linear B · Sea Peoples and Philistines · The Phoenician Alphabet · The Cup of Nestor
Lecture 5 notes, slides and lecture summary; the discussion document Writing, including its two tasks, one on Piyamaradu and the Hittite letters and one on Powell against Waal; Week 9 review, Lecture 5 card and its anchor on Powell's thesis.
- The rebus principle, and the three things any genuine writing system must do.
- Abjad: a consonantal alphabet in which readers supply the vowels.
- Digamma: the letter for the /w/ sound, sixth in the early Greek alphabet, lost from Ionic before the poems were written down.
- Boustrophedon, and why variable writing direction is used as an argument about dating.
- Logogram and syllabary, and why a syllabary designed for another language fitted Greek badly.
- Wilusa, Ahhiyawa, and the Tawagalawa Letter: the only surviving Hittite statement that Hatti and Ahhiyawa had been in conflict over Wilusa, written when the matter was already settled.
- Piyamaradu, Atpa, Milawata (Miletus), Lazpa (Lesbos), and the defecting textile workers in the Manapa-Tarhunta letter.
- The Luwian song-line “When they came from steep Wilusa…”, and the reasons for treating it cautiously.
- The Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos, about 1400 BC: over 600 tablets, the earliest Greek writing we possess.
- The Uruk tablets of about 3300 BC, and why they are closer to notation than to writing.
- Cretan hieroglyphic, Linear A, Cypro-Minoan — all undeciphered.
- The Philistine evidence at Ashkelon: locally made pottery in Mycenaean IIIC forms, Aegean-style loom-weights, hearths and cooking vessels, rising pork consumption, and four infants with a new southern-European-related ancestry that is no longer detectable in later centuries.
- The Opheltas spit from Palaepaphos-Skales, about 1050 BC: the earliest Greek writing after the Linear B tablets.
- The Ahiram sarcophagus at Byblos, the Nora Stone, and the Phoenician bronze bowl from the Knossos north cemetery.
- The Cup of Nestor (Pithekoussai, about 735–720 BC), the Dipylon jug (about 740–730 BC), and the Methone finds.
- The vowel adaptation: aleph to alpha, he to epsilon, ayin to omicron, yod to iota, waw to digamma and upsilon.
Was the Greek alphabet adapted in order to record hexameter poetry? State Powell's case (the poetic character of the earliest surviving inscriptions, the value of written vowels for verse, and the Cup of Nestor) and the case against it (Methone's commercial graffiti are roughly contemporary, so the earliest visible uses were already varied; and the earliest surviving specimen need not be the date the script was first used, since writing on wood, leather and papyrus would not survive).
Lecture 6
Homer: Heroes, Warriors, and Wanderers
Many Troys · The Homeric Question · The Iliad · The Odyssey · After Homer
Lecture 6 notes, slides and lecture summary; the discussion document Homer, including its table of Troy's settlement phases, its section on Greek metre, its grid of the four heroic terms, and its two tasks, Archaeology of Troy and The Four Words; Week 9 review, Lecture 6 card.
- Aretē: functional excellence, being good at what you are made for, with no moral component.
- Timē: honour as public recognition, registered in tangible tokens such as a share of plunder or a seat at the feast.
- Kleos: the reputation that survives a man's death.
- Mētis: cunning intelligence, the organising value of the Odyssey.
- Xenia: the bond of obligation between host and guest.
- Dactyl, spondee, and dactylic hexameter; and what a formula is and why it exists.
- Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik, and the cost of Schliemann's trench.
- Troy VI, destroyed about 1300 BC and attributed principally to an earthquake; Troy VIIa, destroyed violently about 1200–1180 BC, at the same horizon as Miletus and the Mycenaean palaces.
- Alaksandu of Wilusa and Appaliuna, compared with Alexandros and Apollo.
- The Swadesh list and the phylogenetic dating that returned a date in the middle of the eighth century BC.
- The boar's-tusk helmet and the Catalogue of Ships, as the standard examples of long-range memory in the poems.
- The shield of Achilles and its two cities, one at peace with a dispute settled by public judgment, one at war.
- Gilgamesh and Enkidu beside Achilles and Patroclus; and the shade of Achilles in Odyssey 11.
- The recognitions on Ithaca: Argos by scent, the nurse by the scar, and Penelope by the test of the bed.
- Penelope's weaving and unweaving, and her decision to set the contest of the bow.
- Theoclymenus's vision, and the proposed eclipse date of 16 April 1178 BC.
What does the name “Homer” mean? One gifted singer may have shaped inherited stories into these two poems, or the poems may have taken shape gradually across generations of performance. Oral theory cannot decide between the two, but it does show that the tradition was older than any individual poet. Be ready to explain what the metre and the formula tell us about how the poems were composed.
Lecture 7
The Rise of the Polis
A Hoplite Revolution? · What is a polis? · Greeks in a Phoenician Sea · Greater Greece
Lecture 7 notes, slides and lecture summary; the discussion document The Polis, including its six eras from the Dark Age baseline to Aristotle's account, its two maps, and its two student tasks; Week 9 review, Lecture 7 card.
- Aspis, and what the double grip (a forearm band and a handgrip at the rim) allowed a soldier to do.
- Panoply, phalanx, and othismos.
- Zeugitai, and why the meaning of the name is disputed.
- Polis, acropolis, agora, synoikismos, ethnē.
- Apoikia, metropolis, oikistēs, klēroi, emporion, stenochōria.
- Homoioi, agōgē, helots, metics, deme registration.
- Zōon politikon, and what Aristotle meant by it.
- The Corinthian aryballos with identically armed warriors, and the strigil and the gymnasium it belongs to.
- The Chigi vase, about 650 BC: overlapping shields and a piper, and why a vase cannot establish the depth of a formation.
- Tyrtaeus, and why exhortation is not a record of practice.
- Olympia, and the captured arms dedicated there after victories.
- The Copenhagen Polis Centre inventory of 1,035 archaic and classical poleis.
- Draco, Solon and Cleisthenes, and what each did.
- The Phaleron mass graves: seventy-nine men, many shackled; the 2026 strontium study in which sixty-four of sixty-six had values consistent with the local Attic range.
- Cyrene: the two foundation accounts in Herodotus, Battos, Platea and Aziris, the guides who passed the best land at night, and the later founders' oath.
- Al Mina, Pithekoussai, Naukratis and the Hellenion, Massalia and the Vix burial, and the battle near Alalia about 540 BC.
- Syracuse and Naxos in Sicily (734 and 733 BC by the traditional chronology), Gela and Akragas, Sybaris and Croton.
- Himera in 480 BC: the isotope study of sixty-two soldiers, in which about two thirds of the 480 BC group had non-local childhood signatures against about a quarter of the 409 BC group; and the 2022 DNA study of fifty-four individuals.
- Gelon's ten thousand mercenary citizens at Syracuse, and the more than seven thousand later excluded from office.
- Motya, Panormus and Soluntum; Segesta and Eryx and the Elymians.
Was there a hoplite revolution? State the thesis as a causal sequence: new equipment produced a close formation, the formation made independent farmers militarily indispensable, and their service secured them political rights. Then state the complications: equipment was adopted gradually, fighting was not confined to the phalanx, horse-owners still fought on foot, the infantry was more socially mixed than the thesis allows, and many cities used mercenaries. Note also that a city with a broad hoplite army was not necessarily a democracy.
Lecture 8
Herodotus: Nature, Custom, and the Greek Thing
The Greek Thing · Nature, Custom, and Justice
Lecture 8 notes, slides and lecture summary; the discussion document Herodotus, including its genetics band and its consolidated task, What Does Herodotus Prove? A Position on the Course So Far; Week 9 review, Lecture 8 card and the synthesis bands.
- Barbaros, and how its meaning changed across Herodotus's lifetime.
- Historiē: inquiry or finding-out, with no special reference to the past.
- Opsis and thauma, and what each tells you about Herodotus's method.
- Physis and nomos, and the boundary between them.
- Dikē, hybris and nemesis.
- To Hellēnikon, and the four bonds: homaimon, homoglōsson, shared shrines and sacrifices, and ēthea homotropa.
- Herodotus VIII.144, and the situation in which the Athenians said it: the winter of 480 BC, with Persia trying to detach Athens from the alliance and Spartan envoys present.
- The ancient-DNA evidence: more than a hundred Aegean genomes, showing Neolithic Anatolian farming ancestry, a further eastern component related to the Caucasus and Iran, and steppe-related ancestry reaching the mainland by the middle Bronze Age.
- Croesus and Solon (I.29–33 and I.86–91), and the pattern the story sets out.
- Darius and the customs of the dead (III.38), and the exact conclusion Herodotus draws from it.
- Egypt as an inverted world (II.35–36) and Herodotus's claim that the Greeks took the names of their gods from Egypt (II.50–53).
- Aeschylus's Persians, produced in 472 BC by a man who had fought in the war it dramatises.
- Thucydides's opening dismissal of his predecessors, and his phrase “a possession for all time.”
- Thrasymachus on justice as the advantage of the stronger; the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places on climate and character.
How far does to Hellēnikon hold up? Each of the four bonds can be tested: the blood was mixed; the language was real but divided into dialects; the gods were shared but their shrines belonged to rival cities; the customs were alike mainly by comparison with a Persian's. Be ready to argue that an identity can be genuinely held and historically constructed at the same time, and to say why that is not a way of calling it false.
4 · Terms you should be able to define in one sentence
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Mediterranean triad (L1) | Grain, vine and olive: the three staples of classical Greek agriculture, each domesticated outside Greece and arriving late. |
| Lactase persistence (L1) | The genetic ability to digest lactose in adulthood, rare in Neolithic populations; cheese-making made milk usable before it spread. |
| Stable isotope analysis (L1–2) | Carbon and nitrogen ratios in bone collagen record diet; strontium and oxygen record the geology and water of a person's childhood, and so their origin. |
| Transhumance (L2) | The seasonal movement of flocks between lowland and upland pasture, which turns altitude into a second harvest and spreads risk. |
| Oxhide ingot (L2) | A four-cornered copper slab weighing up to about 30 kg, the standard form in which copper moved by sea. |
| Ta-ra-si-ja (L3) | The Mycenaean system by which the palace issued measured raw materials to specialist producers and expected finished goods in return. |
| Wanax (L3) | The king at the head of a Mycenaean palace kingdom, holding a larger estate than any other landholder. |
| Damos (L3–4) | The community as a corporate body with recognised rights over communal land; the ancestor of the classical demos. |
| Linear A (L3) | The older, undeciphered script of Minoan Crete; its sign values can be guessed from Linear B, but the language is unknown. |
| Linear B (L3) | The script adapted from Linear A to record Greek, deciphered in 1952; used for palace administration only. |
| Minoan genius (L4) | A winged attendant figure in Aegean art, derived from the Egyptian goddess Taweret. |
| Baetyl (L4) | A stone at which a god could be summoned; the polished serpentine block at Palaikastro is the course's example. |
| Chryselephantine (L4) | Made of gold and ivory; the Palaikastro Kouros is the earliest known example of the technique. |
| Rebus principle (L5) | Using a sign not for the thing it shows but for the sound of that thing's name; the basis of every genuine writing system. |
| Abjad (L5) | A consonantal alphabet, such as Phoenician's twenty-two signs, in which the reader supplies the vowels. |
| Digamma (L5) | The early Greek letter for /w/, sixth in the alphabet; lost from Ionic, but its former presence explains metrical irregularities in Homer. |
| Boustrophedon (L5) | Writing that runs alternately left to right and right to left, line by line. |
| Aretē (L6) | Functional excellence: being good at what one is made for. Not a moral quality. |
| Timē (L6) | Honour as public recognition, held in visible tokens such as a prize or a share of plunder. |
| Kleos (L6) | Glory understood as the reputation that outlives the man; the song still sung about him. |
| Mētis (L6) | Cunning intelligence; the excellence the Odyssey values, practised by both Odysseus and Penelope. |
| Xenia (L6) | The reciprocal obligation between host and guest, by which the Odyssey judges its characters. |
| Dactylic hexameter (L6) | Six metrical units per line, each a dactyl (long, short, short) or a spondee (long, long); the metre of both poems. |
| Formula (L6) | A fixed phrase shaped to fill a particular metrical slot, such as “swift-footed Achilles”; the working tool of oral composition. |
| Aspis (L7) | The round hoplite shield, about three feet across, with a forearm band and a rim grip, held on the left and partly covering the neighbour on that side. |
| Othismos (L7) | “Pushing”: the disputed term for what happened when two phalanxes met. |
| Polis (L7) | A political community of a town and its farmland, organising worship, law and external relations; not necessarily a democracy. |
| Synoikismos (L7) | “Dwelling together”: the union of separate settlements into one political community, which need not mean physical relocation. |
| Apoikia (L7) | A settlement overseas, usually an independent political community keeping religious ties to its mother-city. |
| Oikistēs (L7) | The founder appointed to lead a settling expedition and establish the new community. |
| Metic (L7) | A resident foreigner at Athens who worked, traded, paid taxes and could serve militarily without acquiring citizenship. |
| Historiē (L8) | Inquiry or finding-out; what Herodotus called his practice, with no special reference to the past. |
| Physis and nomos (L8) | Nature, the given; and law, custom or convention, the made order. |
| Dikē, hybris, nemesis (L8) | Justice as a right order; the overstepping of a limit; and the retribution that follows it. |
| To Hellēnikon (L8) | “The Greek thing”: the four bonds of Greekness named at Herodotus VIII.144. |
5 · Practice short questions
- What was found at Shubayqa 1, how old is it, and why does its date matter for the history of farming?
- Name two things that carbon and nitrogen isotopes can tell us about a person, and one thing they cannot.
- The Uluburun ship carried about ten tons of copper and one ton of tin. Explain why that ratio matters, and name one thing the cargo does not tell us about Bronze Age trade.
Revise from: Lectures 1–2; the Foodways and Geography discussion documents.
- What is ta-ra-si-ja, and what does it show about what the Pylos palace actually controlled?
- Why can we pronounce Linear A but not read it?
- What is the Minoan genius, and what does its origin show about Aegean religious imagery?
Revise from: Lectures 3–4; the Trade and Mythology discussion documents.
- What is the rebus principle, and why is it necessary for a script to become a writing system?
- What did Greek writers do to the Phoenician script that no earlier user of it had done, and why does it matter that all the regional Greek alphabets share this feature?
- Define aretē and timē, and explain how the two are related in the quarrel that opens the Iliad.
Revise from: Lectures 5–6; the Writing and Homer discussion documents.
- Describe the double grip of the aspis and explain why it gave soldiers a practical reason to keep the line.
- What does the Copenhagen Polis Centre inventory tell us, and why does the course use it as a corrective to Athens and Sparta?
- What is an apoikia, and why does the course prefer that term to “colony”?
Revise from: Lecture 7; the Polis discussion document.
- What does barbaros mean when Herodotus uses it, and how had the word's sense changed by the end of his lifetime?
- Name the four bonds of to Hellēnikon, and state the historical situation in which the Athenians named them.
- State the conclusion Herodotus draws from the story of Darius and the customs of the dead, and one conclusion he does not draw.
Revise from: Lecture 8; the Herodotus discussion document; Week 9 review.
6 · Practice essay questions
Choose three items that reached Greece from somewhere else — for example a crop, a script, a religious image, or a metal technology — and explain in each case what the Greeks changed in the process of receiving it.
A good answer names three specific cases from different lectures and, for each, states clearly what arrived and what was altered. Examples available to you include the farming package, the Phoenician consonantal alphabet given vowel letters, the Minoan genius adapted from Taweret, and tin bronze. Do not simply list borrowings; the question is about what changed on arrival.
Draws on Lectures 1, 2, 4 and 5.
“The most useful question about the Late Bronze Age collapse is not what caused it but why nothing recovered.” Explain what this claim means and assess whether it is a better question than the one it replaces.
A good answer explains why single-cause explanations are hard to sustain — drought records vary by locality, the “Sea Peoples” are a modern collective label built from Egyptian victory inscriptions, earthquake damage is difficult to distinguish from fire or decay — and then argues either for or against the reframing, using specific evidence. Compare the situation after 2200 BC if it helps your case.
Draws on Lectures 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Compare what the Homeric poems value in a man with what the polis required of a citizen. Explain where the two are incompatible, and whether the incompatibility mattered in practice.
A good answer uses the heroic vocabulary precisely and gives a specific Homeric episode, then sets against it the demands of the phalanx and of civic membership: deme registration at Athens, the Spartan mess, the exclusion of women, slaves and metics. The strongest answers note that the Greeks kept using Homeric language for collective courage even after the champion had been replaced by the line.
Draws on Lectures 6 and 7.
Scientific evidence has been used in this course to test claims that once rested on texts alone. Choose two cases from different lectures and explain, in each, what the ancient claim was and exactly what the science changed.
A good answer states the ancient claim first and the scientific result second, and is precise about what changed. Cases available to you include the ancient-DNA evidence against homaimon, the isotope evidence for who fought at Himera, the radiocarbon evidence for the date of the Thera eruption, and the lignite in the dental calculus at Tiryns and Chania. Say in each case what the science does not settle.
Draws on Lectures 1, 3, 7 and 8.
Herodotus both states the division between Greek and barbarian and undermines it. Explain how he does each, and assess which of the two is more characteristic of his work.
A good answer sets specific passages against each other: the four bonds at VIII.144 on one side; the customs of the dead at III.38, the treatment of Egypt, and the noble Persians and treacherous Greeks on the other. It should also say what Herodotus's conclusion at III.38 actually is, since it is narrower than “all customs are equally good.”
Draws on Lecture 8, with material from any earlier lecture.
7 · Writing the essay in thirty-five minutes
The essay is worth 70 of the 100 marks. Spend the first three or four minutes planning. Decide your position and write down, in note form, the three or four pieces of evidence you will use and which lecture each comes from. An essay with three well-used examples is stronger than one that mentions eight in passing.
Then write to this shape:
- Opening paragraph. State the position you are going to argue, in one or two sentences. Do not restate the question at length.
- Two or three body paragraphs. One main point each, supported by named evidence. Name the site, text, object or study; do not write “archaeologists have found” when you can write “the mass graves at Himera.”
- One paragraph on the strongest objection to your case. State it fairly, then explain why you still hold your position, or where you would qualify it.
- Short conclusion. Two or three sentences. Say what follows from your argument; do not introduce new evidence.
Three things gain marks reliably: naming evidence precisely, saying what a piece of evidence cannot show as well as what it can, and drawing on more than one lecture. Three things lose marks: listing facts without an argument, asserting a position without evidence, and spending so long on Part 2 that Part 1 is left unfinished.
A final point about the material as a whole, since the essays reward it. This part of the course has traced how Greek civilisation took shape, and at almost every stage the answer has been the same: what looks Greek arrived from somewhere else and was changed on arrival. The crops came from the Levant through Anatolia, the palace bureaucracy from a Near Eastern model, the succession myth from Anatolia and Syria, the alphabet from Phoenician traders, and the population itself from several migrations. Herodotus, at the end of the sequence, gives the Greeks their first definition of themselves and, in the same book, supplies the evidence that complicates it. Being able to hold those two things together — that an identity can be sincerely held and historically assembled — is the kind of two-sided point the essay questions are designed to reward.