Notes · Ancient HistoryUK · A-Levels

Working with ancient sources

Ancient History is a source-based discipline: every judgement you reach rests on evidence that survives by accident, was written for purposes other than informing you, and reaches you through a long chain of copying and selection. This chapter sets out the two great families of evidence - the literary sources (historiography, biography, oratory, drama) and the material and documentary record (archaeology, inscriptions, coins, sculpture) - the method for evaluating any one of them in its historical context, and the discipline of integrating them into a substantiated judgement. It is the skill that AO3 rewards in every Greek and Roman topic on the specification.

5 sections~29 min reading time4 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

T·0111 / 9

Exam profile

AO3 · Use, analyse and evaluate ancient sources within their historical context to reach conclusionsAO3 · Weigh authorship, purpose, date, genre and provenance when judging a source's valueAO2 · Analyse and evaluate historical events and issues to reach substantiated judgementsAO1 · Deploy knowledge of the period to test and interpret the evidence

Operators:assessevaluatehow faranalyseexplainto what extentwith reference to the sources

basic level

AS-Level expects you to comment on what a source says, who wrote it and why, and to use it alongside your own knowledge to support a point.

higher level

The full A-Level expects sustained evaluation: authorship, purpose, date, genre and context integrated into a judgement about what the source can and cannot establish, with literary and material evidence weighed against each other.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Working with ancient sources

A source-based discipline: why the evidence comes first#

FoundationOCR H407 - use and evaluation of ancient sources (AO3)DfE GCE Ancient History subject content

The two families of ancient evidence

Fig. 1Ancient evidence divides into a literary tradition, which reaches us through copying, and a material record, which reaches us through the ground - each with its own patterns of survival and distortion.

Ancient History differs from later history in one decisive respect: the evidence is scarce, fragmentary and mediated. For most of the Greek and Roman past there is no archive, no newspaper, no census return you can consult; there are a handful of literary works that happen to have survived, a scatter of inscriptions and coins, and whatever the ground has preserved. This is why the specification makes the use and evaluation of ancient sources an assessment objective in its own right (AO3) rather than a technique bolted onto essay writing. In Ancient History, knowing what happened and knowing how we know it are the same question.

Survival is the first thing to understand, because it shapes everything else. Ancient texts reached us through centuries of hand-copying: a work survived only if enough readers thought it worth copying, and only if a copy escaped fire, damp and neglect. Whole libraries of history were lost - the contemporary accounts of Alexander's campaigns, most of Livy, most of Tacitus' Histories, the Spartans' own view of themselves. What survives is therefore not a representative sample but a selection made by later tastes. Material evidence survives by a different and equally partial logic: stone lasts, wood and cloth do not; monumental inscriptions survive better than everyday documents; the rich are more visible archaeologically than the poor.

The second thing to understand is that no ancient source was written for you. Herodotus wrote to preserve great deeds from oblivion and to explain why Greeks and Persians fought; Thucydides wrote for those who wanted to understand how power behaves; Plutarch wrote moral biography, not history; Tacitus wrote a senator's indictment of autocracy; Suetonius wrote lives organised by theme and character. An inscription was carved to honour, to record a decision or to advertise a benefaction. A coin was struck to pay soldiers and, in passing, to broadcast a message. Every source has a purpose, and that purpose selects and shapes what it says.

None of this means the sources are useless - it means they must be read as evidence rather than as testimony to be believed or disbelieved. The mature approach never asks simply 'is this source reliable?' It asks: reliable for what? An account written to praise an emperor is weak evidence for what he actually did but strong evidence for how he wished to be seen. A hostile senatorial history is unsafe on motive but often precise on fact. A source's slant, once identified, becomes a piece of evidence about the world that produced it. The examiner rewards precisely this move: turning a limitation into information.

Practically, then, the whole subject rests on a single habit of mind. Whenever you meet a claim about the ancient world - the number who fought at Marathon, the character of Nero, what the agoge was for - ask where it comes from, who said it, when, and why. Sometimes several independent kinds of evidence agree and you can be confident. Sometimes one late, hostile writer is all there is, and the honest answer is that we cannot know. Being able to say clearly which situation you are in, and to argue from the evidence you have rather than the evidence you wish you had, is what distinguishes a strong Ancient History answer.

How ancient evidence reaches us

Fig. 2Every ancient source has passed through filters - the author's purpose, later copying, and the accidents of survival - before it reaches the historian.

Worked example

Turning a source's purpose into evidence

A student writes: 'Tacitus hated the emperors, so his account of the Julio-Claudians is biased and cannot be trusted.' Rewrite this as an A-Level evaluation.

Identify the purpose precisely
Tacitus wrote as a senator under later emperors, and his Annals are shaped by a concern with how autocracy corrupted the senatorial order and bred hypocrisy. That is a purpose, not simply a prejudice, and it directs what he selects: court intrigue, the debasement of the Senate, the moral character of the princeps.
Say what it makes the source good for
It makes Tacitus outstanding evidence for senatorial attitudes to the principate and for the political culture of the Senate - a perspective no other surviving source supplies at that length. His access to senatorial records and his precision on procedure also make him strong on the mechanics of politics.
Say where caution is needed
It makes him least safe where he ascribes motive - the insinuation, the reported rumour, the damning aside about what an emperor 'was believed' to intend. These are interpretations, and the reader should ask whether Tacitus could know them.
State the judgement
Conclude in the form the examiner wants: Tacitus is of high value for the political culture and senatorial experience of the principate, and must be corroborated where he assigns private motive - a statement of value in context, not a verdict of reliable or unreliable.

Result: The rewritten evaluation identifies the purpose, ties it to what the source can and cannot establish, and reaches a judgement of value rather than dismissing the source as biased.

Typical mistakes

Treating a literary source as a neutral report of fact because it is ancient and therefore 'closer to the events'.
Dismissing a source outright as biased instead of asking what its bias reveals about its author and audience.

Active revision

Take one ancient source you have studied and write two sentences: one naming an enquiry for which it is highly valuable, and one naming an enquiry for which it is of limited value. In each case say why.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

Literary sources and their genres#

StandardOCR H407 - prescribed literary sources (AO3)DfE GCE Ancient History subject content

The major literary sources by genre

Fig. 3Knowing an author's genre tells you the rules they were writing by - and therefore what their account can and cannot be expected to supply.

Genre is the single most useful key to a literary source, because genre sets the rules the author is playing by. Ancient historiography - the tradition of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus - aimed to explain and to instruct as much as to record. It expected the historian to compose speeches appropriate to the speaker and occasion, to shape material into a moral and political argument, and to write elegantly. None of that is dishonesty by ancient standards; it is the form. But it does mean that a speech in Thucydides or Tacitus is the historian's reconstruction of what the situation required, not a transcript, and you must handle it as such.

Herodotus and Thucydides define the two poles of Greek historiography. Herodotus, writing in the mid fifth century about the Persian Wars, is expansive, curious and inclusive: he records what he was told, often reports several versions, and preserves ethnography, oracles and marvels alongside campaign narrative. His habit of naming his informants and flagging his doubts is a genuine methodological strength, though he is often working from oral tradition a generation or two old, much of it from interested Greek families. Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian War in which he himself served as a general, is austere and analytical: he claims to have tested reports and to have written a possession for all time, and his account of causation - the growth of Athenian power and the fear it produced at Sparta - remains the framework in which the war is discussed. His restraint conceals its own selections: he omits much religious and economic material, and his admiration for Pericles shapes the portrait of Athenian leadership.

Biography follows different rules again, and Plutarch and Suetonius are the two names you will meet most. Plutarch, writing around AD 100, paired a Greek with a Roman life and stated openly that he was writing lives, not histories - his interest was moral character, revealed as much by a small saying as by a great battle. That makes him rich in anecdote and often the only surviving source for episodes centuries before his time, but it also means he selects for moral point and works from earlier writers he does not always name. Suetonius, an equestrian who held posts in the imperial administration, organised each emperor's life by rubrics - ancestry, career, public acts, private vices - rather than chronologically, which is why his Lives can place a fair account of administration next to a lurid catalogue of scandal without comment.

Beyond history and biography, three further genres carry weight in this subject. Oratory - Demosthenes attacking Philip of Macedon, Cicero attacking Catiline or Antony - is contemporary and detailed but composed to win a case before a specific audience; it exaggerates by design and often circulated in revised form. Drama, especially the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, gives an irreplaceable glimpse of what could be said in public at Athens, but its distortions are comic and deliberate - Socrates in the Clouds is a caricature assembled from several intellectual types. Universal history, notably Cassius Dio writing in Greek in the early third century AD, offers a continuous narrative across long periods but stands at a great distance from early events and survives in places only through later summaries.

The practical lesson is to date and place every author before you use them. Ask: was this writer contemporary with the events, a generation later, or centuries later? Did they have access to documents, to eyewitnesses, or only to earlier books? Were they an insider - a general, a senator, a courtier - with privileged knowledge and a stake in the outcome, or an outsider with detachment and less information? For Alexander the Great, for instance, every surviving narrative is centuries later than the events, so the question becomes which lost contemporary they were using; for the Peloponnesian War you have a participant writing within a generation. The gap between those two situations should visibly change how confidently you argue.

Worked example

Dating an author and drawing the consequence

You are asked how far Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus can be used as evidence for the Spartan system in the fifth century BC. Work through the evaluation.

Date and genre
Plutarch was writing around AD 100 - some five centuries after the classical Spartan system he describes, and far longer after the traditional lawgiver Lycurgus, whose very historicity Plutarch himself notes is disputed. The work is moral biography, designed to display character and to instruct.
Ask what he was working from
He is drawing on earlier writers, including admirers of Sparta, and on a well-developed tradition about Spartan austerity. He is therefore evidence at one remove: valuable for the tradition about Sparta, but not an eyewitness of it.
Separate what it is good for
It is rich detail for the shape of Spartan institutions as later antiquity understood them, and outstanding evidence for how Sparta was admired and idealised - what modern scholars call the 'Spartan mirage'. It is much weaker as proof that any particular practice worked exactly as described in the fifth century.
Reach the judgement
Conclude that Plutarch must be used with corroboration from earlier writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, and that where he stands alone his claims should be presented as the tradition reports rather than as established fact.

Result: The evaluation dates the author, identifies the genre, asks what he was working from, and converts distance into a precise statement of what the source can and cannot support.

Typical mistakes

Quoting a speech from a historian as though it were a transcript of what was actually said.
Treating Plutarch, writing around AD 100, as a contemporary witness for events of the fifth or first century BC.

Active revision

For three sources you use most often, write a one-line card for each giving the author, approximate date of writing, genre, and one strength and one limitation that follow from those.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Material and documentary evidence#

StandardOCR H407 - material and documentary sources (AO3)DfE GCE Ancient History subject content

What each kind of evidence is good for

Fig. 4Literary and material evidence answer different questions; the overlap - chronology, events and public claims - is where they can be made to test each other.

The material record is not simply an illustration of the literary sources; it is independent evidence, generated by different processes and answering different questions. Archaeology can establish that a city burned, roughly when, and how thoroughly; it can show the size of a settlement, the range of its trade, the diet and health of its population, and the difference between what a monument claimed and what people actually did. It rarely names names or explains motives. Its great advantage over literature is that it was not composed to persuade posterity: a rubbish pit has no rhetorical purpose. Its great limitation is that it is mute about intention and often hard to date closely.

Inscriptions - the field of epigraphy - are the closest the ancient world comes to documents. Greek cities inscribed decrees, treaties, tribute records and honours on stone; Roman communities inscribed laws, imperial pronouncements, building dedications, career summaries and epitaphs. Because inscriptions were usually cut at or near the time of the event and were meant to be publicly readable, they can fix chronology, name officials, record exact wording and reveal administrative practice in a way no narrative does. They are also, of course, public statements: a dedication records what a benefactor wished remembered, an epitaph what a family wanted said. And they survive unevenly and often broken, so restoring missing letters is itself an act of interpretation.

Coins are a state's most widely distributed message. Every coin carries an image and, usually, a legend, chosen by the issuing authority; because coins were struck continuously and travelled everywhere, they show what a regime wanted its soldiers, subjects and citizens to see - a victory, a virtue, a temple, a dynastic heir, a claim to restore something. Numismatic evidence therefore documents official ideology with unusual precision and can often be dated closely by titles and offices in the legend. What it cannot show is whether anyone believed the message. A coin proclaiming concord or liberty is evidence of a claim, and sometimes evidence that the claim needed making.

Sculpture, architecture and public art work in the same register as coinage but on a monumental scale, and the questions to ask are the same: who paid, who chose the imagery, who was meant to see it, and what did it assert? A temple programme, a triumphal arch, a portrait type disseminated across an empire - each is a deliberate statement of power, piety or identity, and each can be read against what the literary sources say was happening. Everyday material culture - pottery, tools, houses, graves - answers a different set of questions about who lived how, and is often the only evidence for people the literary sources ignore entirely: women, slaves, the poor, provincials.

The characteristic strength of material evidence is that it is contemporary and unliterary; its characteristic weakness is that it is silent about cause and intention, and that interpretation can slide into circularity if it is guided too closely by the literary account you are trying to test. The discipline is to state what the material shows on its own terms first, and only then to ask how that relates to the texts. When a burnt destruction layer in a town matches a literary account of that town's sack, the two kinds of evidence corroborate each other and the conclusion is strong. When they conflict, the conflict itself is the finding - and explaining it is exactly the kind of analysis the examination rewards.

The documentary record

Fig. 5Each material source type answers a characteristic question - which is why an argument built from several of them is stronger than one built from any single kind.

Worked example

Reading a coin as evidence

How should you analyse a coin issued by a Roman emperor showing a personification of a virtue such as peace or concord, with the emperor's titles in the legend?

Describe before interpreting
State what is actually there: the obverse portrait and titles, which identify the issuing authority and often allow close dating from the number of times a power such as the tribunician power has been held; and the reverse image and legend, which carry the message.
Ask who chose it and for whom
The imperial mint issued under the emperor's authority; the audience was everyone who handled money - soldiers above all, then traders and provincials. The message was therefore designed for mass, repeated, low-effort consumption: a single image and a single word.
State what it proves
It proves that the regime wished peace or concord to be associated with the emperor at that date. It does not prove that peace or concord existed - and where such claims are made insistently at a moment of known instability, the insistence is itself evidence of a problem being managed.
Set it against the literary account
Compare with what the narrative sources say about the same years. Agreement strengthens both; a gap between the coin's claim and the narrative's account of disorder is a finding worth analysing rather than a contradiction to be explained away.

Result: The coin is used as precise evidence of official ideology and of the regime's priorities at a datable moment, rather than as proof of the conditions it advertises.

Typical mistakes

Assuming an inscription or monument is objective because it is not literary - it too was commissioned for a purpose.
Interpreting an archaeological find only through the literary account it is supposed to confirm, which makes the argument circular.

Active revision

Choose one monument, inscription or coin type from a topic you are studying. Write a short paragraph stating what it shows on its own terms, and a second paragraph on how it supports or complicates the literary account.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

Evaluating an ancient source: the method#

StandardOCR H407 - analyse and evaluate ancient sources in context (AO3)DfE GCE Ancient History subject content

The source-evaluation method

Fig. 6Content, authorship, date and purpose are tested against contextual knowledge - which corroborates, challenges or explains - before any judgement of value is reached.

A reliable evaluation runs through five questions, and the order matters. First, what does the source actually say - the specific claims, not a vague summary? Second, who produced it, when, and in what form? Third, why - for whom, and to what end? Fourth, what does your own knowledge of the context tell you about those claims: does it corroborate them, challenge them, or explain why they were made? Fifth, and only then, what is this source worth for the particular question in front of you? Answers that stop after the second question produce provenance-spotting; answers that start at the fifth produce assertion.

Authorship carries more weight in ancient history than in most later periods, because so much depends on a single writer. Establish the author's position and access: were they present, were they a participant, did they interview participants, or are they working from books? Thucydides commanded a fleet in the war he describes and was exiled for failing to save Amphipolis - both an advantage and a possible motive for shaping certain episodes. Xenophon fought as a mercenary in Persia and lived for years under Spartan patronage, which gives him unmatched insight into Spartan practice and a clear reason to present it favourably. Josephus surrendered to the Romans in the Jewish revolt and wrote under Flavian patronage. In each case, position confers both authority and interest, and a strong answer names both.

Date and distance from the events determine how much of the account can be first-hand. Ask not only when the author wrote but what lay between them and the events: an eyewitness, an informant, an earlier historian, or an established tradition. This is the decisive question for topics such as the rise of Macedon, where no contemporary narrative of Alexander survives and the extant accounts, written centuries later, depend on lost writers of varying quality. It matters just as much in Roman history: Tacitus and Suetonius wrote about the Julio-Claudians a generation or more after the dynasty ended, using senatorial records, earlier histories and a hostile tradition already in circulation.

Purpose and audience explain the shape of a source, and identifying them lets you predict its distortions rather than merely noticing them. A funeral oration praises; a prosecution speech condemns; a panegyric flatters; a moral biography seeks the revealing anecdote; an official inscription commemorates. When you know the purpose you can say in advance which parts of a source are load-bearing and which are conventional. It also lets you use silence: what a source with a strong purpose leaves out - a defeat unmentioned, an unpopular measure passed over - can be as informative as what it includes.

Finally, context does three jobs, and naming them keeps the analysis disciplined. It corroborates, where other evidence supports the claim. It challenges, where other evidence contradicts or where the claim is implausible - conventional round numbers for enemy dead, for instance, or figures that would have been impossible to count. And it explains, by showing why an author in that position, at that date, writing for that audience, would say this. Every piece of contextual knowledge you deploy should be doing one of those three jobs on the source in front of you; knowledge introduced for its own sake earns nothing.

Worked example

A full evaluation in five moves

Evaluate the value of Xenophon's account of the Spartan system for an enquiry into how Spartan society actually worked in the fifth century BC.

Content
Xenophon describes the institutions of the Spartan upbringing, the common messes, the training and discipline of the citizen body, and attributes the whole system to the lawgiver Lycurgus, presenting it as a deliberate design that made Sparta strong.
Author and access
Xenophon was an Athenian who fought as a mercenary, was closely associated with the Spartan king Agesilaus, lived on an estate provided by Sparta and had his sons educated in the Spartan system. He therefore had exceptional first-hand access - and an unmistakable debt to his hosts.
Date and purpose
He was writing in the fourth century BC, within living memory of the fifth-century system but at a point when Spartan power was in decline; his treatment is admiring and partly prescriptive, holding Sparta up as an example, and even where it criticises, it criticises departures from the supposed original design.
Context test
Corroborate: Herodotus and Thucydides independently attest the discipline, the messes and the political weight of the ephors, so the outline is not invented. Challenge: the presentation of the system as a single legislator's coherent design is a simplification, and Xenophon says little about the helots whose labour made it possible. Explain: an admiring insider writing for an audience impressed by Spartan success would naturally present the system as designed and successful.
Judgement of value
Conclude: Xenophon is the most valuable single source for the practical workings of the Spartan system, because of his access, but he must be read as an advocate - strongest on institutional detail, weakest as evidence for the system's origins, its costs and the experience of those it subjected.

Result: A judgement that ties the source's exceptional access and its clear partisanship to specific parts of the enquiry, rather than declaring the whole account reliable or unreliable.

Typical mistakes

Stopping at provenance ('Suetonius was writing later, so he is unreliable') without testing any specific claim against context.
Accepting ancient numbers - army sizes, casualties, crowds - at face value when they are conventional, hostile or impossible to verify.

Active revision

Take a passage from a source you have studied and write four short paragraphs: what it says, who wrote it and when, why it was written, and what your contextual knowledge does to its claims. Finish with one sentence of judgement.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Integrating the evidence and the examination questions#

AdvancedOCR H407 Components 1 and 2 - source questions and extended essaysDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

Building a judgement from mixed evidence

Fig. 7The strongest answers converge literary testimony, material evidence and context on a single question - and treat any divergence as evidence in its own right.

Both papers combine source-based questions, which test AO3 most directly, with extended essays, which test AO1 and AO2 while still expecting the ancient evidence to be used. In the source questions you are given ancient material and asked how far it supports a proposition, or what its value is for a stated enquiry; the answer must engage with the material provided, bring in your own knowledge of context and of other sources, and reach a judgement. In the essays you are asked how far or to what extent something was the case; the answer must argue a line, support each stage with specific evidence, acknowledge the counter-case, and conclude decisively. In both, unsupported assertion is the commonest reason for a middling mark.

Integration means letting different kinds of evidence do different jobs in the same argument, and it is the clearest signal of a strong candidate. The pattern to aim for is: a literary source supplies the narrative claim; the material record supplies an independent check; contextual knowledge explains any gap between them. A destruction layer in a town supports a literary account of that town's sack; an inscription naming an official confirms or corrects a narrative's chronology; a coin type shows that a regime was making exactly the claim a hostile historian says it was making. Where the evidence converges, say so and press the point; where it diverges, make the divergence the object of analysis.

Cross-referencing between literary sources is equally important, and the questions to ask are simple. Are the two accounts independent, or is the later one using the earlier - in which case agreement proves nothing new? Do they differ on fact, on emphasis, or on interpretation? Where they differ on fact, which had better access? Where they differ on interpretation, what does each writer's purpose predict? Two accounts of a person's death that disagree on whether it was poison or illness, for example, tell you at once that neither writer knew, and that the disagreement itself is evidence about the traditions circulating afterwards.

Structure your writing so the evidence is visible. In a source-based answer, take the material in turn: state what it offers on the question, analyse its provenance and purpose, test its claims against context and against other evidence, and judge its value - then, in a short final paragraph, weigh the sources against one another and answer the question directly. In an essay, make each paragraph a supported step in the argument, opening with the point, supporting it with named evidence, evaluating that evidence briefly where it is contested, and linking back to the question. The conclusion should reach a judgement that follows from what came before rather than restating the introduction.

Three habits raise the level of any answer. Use ancient sources by name and with a reason - 'Thucydides, who fought in the war and wrote within a generation of it, argues that...' does far more work than 'sources say'. Distinguish what is established from what is contested, and say so plainly, since the ability to write 'the tradition reports X, though no contemporary evidence survives' is itself a mark of historical judgement. And keep the evidence proportionate to the claim: a single late anecdote will not carry a large generalisation, while a convergence of a contemporary historian, an inscription and the archaeology will carry a great deal. Argue from the evidence you have, at the strength it supports.

The shape of a source-based answer

Fig. 8A dependable structure for a source question: work through each source in the same four moves, then weigh them against each other and answer the question.

Worked example

Planning an evidence-led answer

Plan an answer to: 'How far can the ancient sources establish what really happened at a given moment of political violence?' Use a general structure you could apply to any of your topics.

Fix the question and the evidence available
State exactly what is being asked and inventory the evidence: which literary accounts survive, how close each is to the events, whether any is independent of the others, and what material or documentary evidence bears on it.
Build the paragraph on the strongest evidence
Open with what the best-placed source establishes and why it is best placed - contemporary, well-informed, or corroborated - and state the claim it supports at the strength the evidence allows.
Test with a second kind of evidence
Bring in the material or documentary record where it exists, or a genuinely independent second account, and say whether it corroborates, qualifies or contradicts. If it contradicts, explain the difference from the sources' purposes and positions.
Concede what cannot be known
Identify the parts of the episode that rest on a single late or hostile witness, or on reported motive that no one could have known, and say so explicitly rather than arguing past the gap.
Reach the judgement
Conclude by distinguishing what the evidence establishes securely, what it makes probable, and what remains beyond recovery - a graded conclusion rather than a flat verdict.

Result: A plan that puts the evidence first, grades the confidence of each claim, and produces the substantiated judgement the mark scheme rewards.

Typical mistakes

Writing about the sources in general terms without analysing the specific material set in the question.
Treating agreement between a later writer and an earlier one as independent corroboration when the later writer was simply using the earlier.

Active revision

Choose a contested episode from one of your period or depth studies. List the literary accounts, any material evidence, and one point of contextual knowledge, then write a single paragraph reaching a judgement that uses all three.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

References & sources

Sources

OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)

OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history

Working with ancient sources

5 sections~29 min reading time4 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

Working with ancient sources

Key points

Turning a source's purpose into evidence

Key points

Dating an author and drawing the consequence

Key points

Reading a coin as evidence

Key points

A full evaluation in five moves

Key points

Planning an evidence-led answer

Sources

Working with ancient sources

Key points

Turning a source's purpose into evidence

Key points

Dating an author and drawing the consequence

Key points

Reading a coin as evidence

Key points

A full evaluation in five moves

Key points

Planning an evidence-led answer

Sources