TASC Ancient History Level 3 flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Periodization of Antiquity

The conventional division of the ancient world into Prehistoric, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Classical Antiquity, and Late Antiquity, based on dominant technologies and political change rather than uniform global dates.

Primary vs. secondary source

A primary source originates in the period studied, such as an inscription, coin, or contemporary letter; a secondary source is a later interpretation, such as a modern history textbook or excavation report.

Cuneiform

A wedge-shaped script pressed into clay tablets, developed by the Sumerians around 3200 BCE and later used for Akkadian and other languages; deciphered largely through the trilingual Behistun inscription.

Rosetta Stone

A Ptolemaic decree inscribed in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek, found in 1799; its parallel texts allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.

Linear B

A syllabic script used by Mycenaean palace administrators, deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 as an early form of Greek; tablets record inventories, rations, and offerings, not literature.

Linear A

The script of Minoan Crete, written on clay tablets and sealings; it remains undeciphered, so Minoan language and administration are known only from archaeology and later Greek traditions.

Stratigraphy

A relative dating principle holding that in undisturbed deposits, lower layers are older than upper layers; archaeologists use it to order occupation phases at a site.

Radiocarbon dating

An absolute dating method measuring the decay of carbon-14 in organic remains such as bone, wood, and charcoal; useful for material up to roughly 50,000 years old and calibrated against tree rings.

Fertile Crescent

An arc of cultivable land from the Levant through Mesopotamia, where early domestication of wheat, barley, sheep, and goats supported the first farming villages and later cities.

Narmer Palette

An Egyptian ceremonial slate palette depicting a king smiting an enemy and wearing both crowns; it is a key iconographic source for the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE.

Code of Hammurabi

A Babylonian legal collection inscribed on a stele around 1750 BCE, presenting royal judgments in casuistic form; it reveals social ranking, property law, and the ideology of the king as guarantor of justice.

Satrapy system

The Achaemenid Persian administrative division of the empire into provinces ruled by satraps, who collected tribute and raised troops while local religious and legal traditions were generally tolerated.

Royal Road

A Persian highway network running roughly from Sardis to Susa, described by Herodotus, with relay stations that allowed royal couriers to move messages rapidly across the empire.

Polis

The Greek city-state, comprising an urban center and its surrounding territory, with its own laws, cults, army, and citizenship; Athens and Sparta are the most documented examples.

Delian League

An alliance of Greek states formed in 478 BCE under Athenian leadership against Persia; tribute and command were retained by Athens, converting the league into an instrument of Athenian empire.

Peloponnesian War

The conflict between Athens and Sparta and their allies from 431 to 404 BCE, recorded by Thucydides; it ended with Athens' defeat and a brief Spartan hegemony over Greece.

Hellenistic period

The era from Alexander's death in 323 BCE to the Roman annexation of Egypt in 30 BCE, marked by successor kingdoms, Greek koine culture, and fusion of Greek and Near Eastern traditions.

Roman Republic

Rome's political system from about 509 to 27 BCE, featuring annually elected consuls, a Senate, and popular assemblies, with conflict between patricians and plebeians shaping its institutions.

Punic Wars

Three wars between Rome and Carthage (264–146 BCE); Rome's victories, especially over Hannibal, gave it control of the western Mediterranean and ended Carthage as a power.

Pax Romana

A period of relative internal stability and prosperity across the Roman Empire from the reign of Augustus to the late second century CE, characterized by road building, trade, and standardized administration.

Twelve Tables

Rome's earliest published body of law, traditionally dated to about 450 BCE, which made legal rules publicly known and became a foundation for later Roman jurisprudence.

Res Gestae

Augustus' first-person account of his achievements and expenditures, inscribed after his death; it is a primary source shaped by political self-presentation rather than neutral record.

Crisis of the Third Century

A period of rapid imperial turnover, civil war, invasion, and currency debasement from 235 to 285 CE, ended by Diocletian's reforms of provincial administration, taxation, and the army.

Fall of Western Rome

The deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer in 476 CE, conventionally marking the end of the Western Roman Empire; historians also cite fiscal strain, migration, and civil conflict as causes.

Mandate of Heaven

A Zhou Chinese political concept holding that rulers govern with heavenly approval and lose it through misrule; it justified dynastic change and was invoked in later rebellions.

Qin unification

The conquest of rival Warring States by Qin in 221 BCE, creating China's first centralized empire under Qin Shi Huang, who standardized script, weights, measures, and coinage.

Maurya Empire

The first empire to unify most of the Indian subcontinent, founded around 322 BCE by Chandragupta; Ashoka's edicts on rock and pillar promote dhamma after his turn from conquest.

Indus Valley cities

Harappan urban centers such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, notable for grid streets, standardized baked bricks, and advanced drainage; their script remains undeciphered.

Epic of Gilgamesh

A Mesopotamian narrative poem about a legendary king of Uruk, surviving in Akkadian recensions; it explores mortality and friendship and is among the earliest surviving long literary works.

Herodotus

A fifth-century BCE Greek writer called the father of history, whose Histories investigate the Persian Wars using oral testimony and digressions, blending inquiry with anecdote.

Thucydides

An Athenian general and historian of the Peloponnesian War who emphasized eyewitness evidence, causation, and human nature, while composing speeches he could not have heard verbatim.

Troy and Schliemann

Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Hisarlik from the 1870s revealed a stratified Bronze Age citadel; his methods were destructive, and the identification of Homer's Troy remains debated.