Hey guys your expertise and well-rounded educations generally far exceed any genius I can call my own. So I look to you guys for simply a topic to right my paper on. And along with these suggestions I would really like a few suggestive books to help enlighten the topic.
ANY help you guys/gals can provide will be greatly appreciated.
link deleted
[Edited by bibliophage on 09-19-2001 at 08:40 PM]
“Ancient History” is a very broad topic area and the word “analysis” covers a lot of territory as well. It might be helpful in giving useful answers if you could more precisely define the periods of ancient history you are covering in class and the nature of the analysis you are expected to undertake.
Pericles, the Democratic Dictator of Athens.
THanks for your interest…
We started with the agricultural revolution and moved through Sumer and Babylon, we ventured through the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and are currently studying the Old and middle kingdoms of Egypt
We will be studying the Phoenicians/Hebrews/Phrygians
Asyrians/Persians
From there we are going to move from Crete and Mycena, then through the Homeric Age into Athenian Democracies,
Societies, military, with a major emphasis on Thucydides. From here we are going from classical Greece through Hellenistic era and we should end up with Rome up to around Pompey to Caesar
That is pretty mush the course description
Hopefully this will “help you, help me”
Thanks
Good class, or at least it sounds like one. Unfortunately my mind works closer to myth than history. Maybe a discussion about the evolution of the tyrant: How was a warrior-king like Gilgamesh different from Pericles, and then Julius Caesar, accounting for the differences in time and location? Or how about a discussion of how real-world events became legends over the course of ages, growing and transforming as they went? How might a real Beowulf have become the Geatish hero we’re all familiar with?
Damn I miss college. Somebody give me a fellowship, huh?
There once was a man, Thucididyes,
Renown for his lucidities.
His stories of old,
And the way they are told
Are thought to be
Quite the epitome
And now for your topic. First of all, if war, history and politics interest you at all, you must embrace Thucididyes, the first and best Nixon sore loser type to write his memoirs. This is the fundamental text in all three subjects for Western Civilization. And it is really well written. And it is very wise.
And if you want to get an A on a college term paper, analyze the chapter about the Melian Dialogue, what the authors sources were and what lesson the author intended. Read Thucididyes and you will know more about politics than 90 percent of straight dopers.
Well, I’m off to the pit.
Athenian democracy is a topic that has a lot of source material available. You can do an analysis on what it really meant to be an Athenian democrat or possibly on the convergence of factors that allowed it to emerge.
Interesting topic and relatively easy to obtain lots of pre-existing analysis.
http://www.stoa.org/demos/
Welcome to Dêmos!
Our goal is to build a digital encyclopedia of Classical Athenian Democracy that will be useful to a wide audience.
http://jnl-journeys.com/democrac.html
ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY
http://149.152.105.38/Honors/EText/AncientGreece/Politics/TimeLineDem.html
Chronology of the Emergence of Athenian Democracy
etc etc
This isn’t really a general question. It might be an IMHO, but I think I’ll move it to MPSIMS.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
And maralinn, your link was not appropriate. We do not encourage fraud here.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
From your list, which matches the fourth grade history curriculum at my grade school, I have found the following link relevant:
I feel sure you will be delighted with all the information this site has to offer.
Alexander the Great’s conquest of (what is now) Afghanistan.
Topical…
Belgarath added:
Pericles, democratic Dictator of Athens.
Just the thing, both for current events ( 
) and for Thucydides. Pericles used the War to argue that Athens needed a dictator and to argue himself into the job.
On the other hand, there is the lovely and beguiling Roxane, the Afgani wife of the clever Alexander of Macedonia (“Why fight them when you can just make them in-laws?” 
).
iampunha, I am aghast. Fourth Grade!! I never saw any World History 'till high school. I assumed that Belgarath was talking about a COLLEGE course. :eek:
Oh, by the way, Belgarath, Pericles speach (found in Thucydides) is a gem of oratory, (–although I admit that I’ve never been able to get more than a couple of pages into it before falling asleep ).
The speach alone would be a good subject for an analytical paper. (That is: “How do you convince a population with a tradation of pure [rather than ‘representative’] democracy to move to a dictatorship?” How is such a thing even POSSIBLE? Yet Pericles did it and Thucydides carefully and faithfully recorded the whole thing.)
Hell, man, I had done a book report on “The Epic of Gilgamesh” before I turned ten. But the description of this class really, seriously, sounds like my fourth grade history class.
Except for the bit on Pericles and such.
A study on the effect of greek fire used in war
Economic effects of slavery as it affected egyptian society
Who really built the pyramids, and how?
Who were the biggest jerks in the ancient middle east, and why?
Wow, iampunha, I didn’t even know that there was “The Epic of Gilgamesh” until . . . :o . . I’m embarrassed to say when! How about “until well after I left college”? 
Of course, I went to an engineering college and we only had (to take) one history course (2nd year) so…
Fourth Grade! I think that I had to stand on a stool to even read the giant dictionary in fourth grade. Wow.