Ancient History A2

Original post by LeaxMi

Hi,

is anyone else here doing Ancient History at A2?

Hi there, sorry for the late reply! I realise this may be a dead thread by now but there's almost nothing on TSR about this particular A level. I'm amazed I've found someone else studying it. Is this the OCR course? I am on a fast-track distance learning course and will be starting the A2 section soon (I've spent the last couple of months doing AS)

Reply 2

I'm doing OCR :smile:

Reply 3

Hi, nice to see someone else doing this course. What units do you study for A2?

Reply 4

I'm doing Greece in Conflict 460 BC - 403 BC (i.e. Peloponnesian War) and the Invention of Imperial Rome 31 BC - AD 96

Reply 5

Unfortunately I'm doing the culture of Athens 449-399 and Ruling the Roman Empire 14-117 AD, I was hoping to find someone doing the same units as me to share revision material with but no such luck. How are you finding the course anyway?

Reply 6

That's a shame, but I'm sure there are people doing those topics on here somewhere.

I'm quite enjoying the course, although there are sooo many quotes to remember! Do you prefer the Greek side or the Roman? I think I prefer Greek just because the sources are much more like historians than the sources for Romans as they basically just report gossip which is annoying.

Which topics did you do for AS? I did the Ancient History one on Roman Britain but the Classical Civilisation unit on Greek Historians (which I'm resitting).

Reply 7

I prefer the Roman side in general, mainly because of the choice of unit, if I did an Athens in conflict unit rather than a culture one, I'd probably prefer Greece.

I'm still doing them! I'm on a fast track course so I do AS and A2 in the same year. I do Athenian Democracy and Roman Britain for AS.

I'm struggling with A2 because there's no set sources like AS, it's a lot to remember as it is, but when you have to look through whole books rather than little extracts, it's even worse. I don't really know what the 50 mark essay questions are looking for, or even how long they're supposed to be or what they look like.

I don't suppose you have any high-scoring past paper answers for your A2 units do you? It would really benefit me just to see how you're supposed to structure the answers.

Reply 8

I do have some high marked A2 essays but I think that they would be more confusing than beneficial for you seeing as you wouldn't really understand what I was writing about.

I can help with the generic structure though:

Split your answer into a section which agrees with the question and a section which disagrees with the question. Within those sections, break it down into about two or three different ways that someone could agree/disagree. Make sure the examples you use spread across the whole time period rather than focusing on one or two emperors or periods otherwise it looks like you have limited knowledge of the unit.

Those paragraphs should then be structured like this:
- Sentence which answers the question
- A main piece of evidence from a source - ideally a quote but if you can't remember one a few para-phrasings should be okay
- Comment on how reliable this quote/source is (focus more on the individual quote rather than the source as a whole - e.g. would they actually be able to know this for sure or is it just a guess?)
- Cross-reference it with another source which either says the same thing or a different thing and comment on the reliability of that quote. If they say different things, which is more likely?
- Concluding sentence which answers the question

Make sure that pretty much everything you say is backed up by a reference to a source, don't just make statements of fact as if there is no doubt that what you are saying is true as this is ancient history so hardly anything is certain. My teachers always say that although there are 20 marks for evidence and 30 marks for analysis the evidence is more important as it's very difficult to do analysis if you have little evidence.

As for how long the essays are meant to be, basically just how much you can write in an hour. For me that's probably about 5 and a half sides handwritten but it varies (my handwriting is quite large). I definitely wouldn't go less than 4 sides though unless you have tiny handwriting or can write incredibly concisely.

Reply 9

Thanks. There is a fair amount of crossover between the Imperial Rome and the ruling the Roman Empire units, including some of the same literary sources (Tacitus, Seutonius ect.) I believe both our Rome units have the imperial cult as an area of study so I could make sense of an essay on that at least, I just want to see how other people approach the questions and source evaluations really, but that's up to you.

Only other question I had was about Inscriptionary evidence. I'm not sure how many archaeological sources your unit looks at, but I don't really think I could evaluate them in an exam in the same way that I could talk about Tacitus' bias for pages and pages. If you do use them, how do you tend to do it?

Reply 10

Original post by Geedawg

Thanks. There is a fair amount of crossover between the Imperial Rome and the ruling the Roman Empire units, including some of the same literary sources (Tacitus, Seutonius ect.) I believe both our Rome units have the imperial cult as an area of study so I could make sense of an essay on that at least, I just want to see how other people approach the questions and source evaluations really, but that's up to you.

Only other question I had was about Inscriptionary evidence. I'm not sure how many archaeological sources your unit looks at, but I don't really think I could evaluate them in an exam in the same way that I could talk about Tacitus' bias for pages and pages. If you do use them, how do you tend to do it?

Sorry, I don't have any Imperial Cult ones but I will send you a couple in a bit.

When you say you could write about Tacitus' bias for pages and pages, what would you write about specifically? Because we don't really do that much on it but I think we should (you'll see in my essay).

I don't think inscriptions need to be evaluated in the same way as writers do because they don't have the same issues. In my courses inscriptions would only ever be to corroborate what a source says so if anything is in doubt then you would use an inscription to say that it is correct.

Reply 11

Thanks very much for the essays, I think they'll be very useful.

With Tacitus, he often comes up as the primary source in my Rome A2 unit and his works, namely the Annals, are of varied reliability and accuracy. Like many, his accounts were written after the deaths of those he was writing about and so only Domitian onwards were contemporary. This is only the smallest problem; as the Annals is an incomplete work, we are missing years worth of information from the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero.

More importantly is his bias: Tacituslived in fear of Domitian's reign because of the feud between theemperor and the senatorial class, whom Tacitus was among. Thisinspired in Tacitus a tendency to exaggerate the negative in everypre-Trajan ruler, showing how their reigns were invariably andincurably corrupt. His writings reflect official policy in Trajan's time and treats him more favourably. Nonetheless; Tacitus definitely had a pro-senetorial/oligarchic bias and an anti-autocratic one, and you can infer a dislike of the imperial rule as a whole.

I've always used inscriptions in the same way, as supporting/contradictory evidence, as the case may be. I just wanted to see how other people tended to use them, as they can be a bit more difficult to work into an essay if you can't think of a literary source to compare them to.

Reply 12

Original post by CathyHeathcliff

I'm doing Greece in Conflict 460 BC - 403 BC (i.e. Peloponnesian War) and the Invention of Imperial Rome 31 BC - AD 96

that's the exact same course as me do you have anything interesting or particularly good on the senate??

Reply 13

I have just posted on the resources some notes i have typed up to do with Xenophon and Thucydides in our understanding of Greece. I would appreciate an feedback

Reply 14

Thanks for the resource. It's so detailed! :smile:

Are you doing any more?

Original post by dgj14944

that's the exact same course as me do you have anything interesting or particularly good on the senate??

What about the senate in particular? We haven't done about relations between the emperors and the senators yet if that's what you mean, but when we do then I'll send you some stuff if you want.

I have found these very useful though:

http://www.jact.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AH4-option-2-imperial-Rome.pdf

http://www.jact.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AH3-option-2-Conflict.pdf

There are also ones for @Geedawg's topics as well and for several other ancient history topics here:
http://www.jact.org/publications/ancient-history-teachers-notes/

Reply 15

Thanks I did mean as you guessed the relationship with the senate as that is apparently a potential question in our mock I will have a look now thanks 😀

Reply 16

Zara 98 :)

Original post by CathyHeathcliff

I'm doing Greece in Conflict 460 BC - 403 BC (i.e. Peloponnesian War) and the Invention of Imperial Rome 31 BC - AD 96

Hey I'm also doing the Invention of Imperial Rome :smile:

there do not seem to be any resources for it at all

Reply 17

Zara 98 :)

Original post by Geedawg

Unfortunately I'm doing the culture of Athens 449-399 and Ruling the Roman Empire 14-117 AD, I was hoping to find someone doing the same units as me to share revision material with but no such luck. How are you finding the course anyway?

i love it! I hope to study Ancient History at university too, what about you?

Reply 18

How would you answer a "To what extent do the sources agree with the view that..." question differently to a "To what extent do you agree with the view that..." question? What if more sources agree than disagree but it is only due to their bias that they agree?

Reply 19