Ancient History: Sources and Methods

Ancient History: Sources and Methods: This course offers an overview of the literary and archaeological evidence for ancient history, particularly for the writing of Greece’s past, and the methodologies of how to treat and analyze primary and secondary sources. We will focus on the writings and methods of a number of leading Greek historians in order to understand how they crafted their works and dealt with historical enquiry and will also examine the wider field of ancient historiography by investigating the writings of historians preserved only in fragments and looking at historical documents in papyri and inscriptions. We will then investigate how these ancient works have been used by historians from the Renaissance to the present in creating a picture of the ancient world, exploring their own methodologies and ideologies from Marxism to the Neocons.

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FACULTY