PART A: SHORT ANSWERS (putting events in chronological order, multiple choice, and matching author with quotation) (25 points)
The chronologies will be limited to the following events:
1. Darius’s Behistun Decree
(online);
2. End of the Persian Wars; Confucius’s and (approximately) Buddha’s deaths (from Craig)
3. Beginning of Peloponnesian War/Pericles' 'Funeral Oration'
4. Socrates's trial and death (Craig, posting, handout, Morgan)
5. Death of Alexander the Great (year before death of Aristotle)/beginning of Hellenistic era (Craig)
6. Asoka ascends Mauryan throne (Craig)
7. China united by king of Qin who takes title Shi Huangdi (First Emperor); around beginning of Second Punic War (Craig)
8. Han Wudi comes to the throne of
9. Milindapanha composed (online posting); Marius opens Roman army to poor volunteers (leads to professionalism and political instablility as
Roman generals become patrons to their client soldiers) (Craig; Abels online)
10. Caesar crosses Rubicon after
conquering
11. Julius Caesar killed/
12. Octavian/Augustus 'restores' Republic. Beginning of the Roman Empire/Principate (Craig)
13. Beginning of Jewish Revolt/ two
years after
Christianity)
14. Agricola serves as governor of
15. Pliny writes to Emperor Trajan about Christians/Epictetus teaches Stoicism/height of the Pax Romana/a decade after Tacitus wrote
Agricola (posting)
16. End of Han dynasty in
17. First general persecution of Christians under Emperor Decius in the midst of a period of political, military, economic, and social crisis in the
Roman Empire (Chronology);
highpoint of Sassanid dynasty in
18. Constantine the Great converts
to Christianity/year before
Roman persecution of Christians (Chronology)
19.
establishes
the Gupta dynasty in
20. Theodosius the Great prohibits celebration of pagan cults (same emperor who allowed Visigoths to settle within the empire after Roman
defeat
at
21. Alaric, a Visigothic chieftain
(and Roman general), sacks
22. Traditional date given for the
end of the
23. Law Code of Byzantine Emperor
Justinian / end of the “barbarian” Northern Wei state in
24. Hijirah: Mohammed's flight from
ending period of political chaos (Craig)
25. Murder of Ali (last of the “Four Rightly Guided Caliphs”) (Craig, handout)
26. Muslims take
27. Charlemagne;
Harun-al-Rashid’s Abbasid caliphate; about time of foundation of
28. Pope Gregory VII and the Investiture Controversy (Craig)
29. First Crusade (Craig, handout)
30. Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Third Crusade, ca. composition of Usama ibn Munqidh’s memoirs; ca. composition of Raoul of Cambrai
(Craig and online materials)
31. Chingis Khan defeats the Chin state in northern
materials)
32. First Mongol invasion of
death of Thomas Aquinas; about 15 years after Egyptian Mamlukes defeat Mongols at Ain Jalut (Craig)
33. Black Death; Orkhan rules as first Ottoman sultan
(Craig); Ashikaga era of ‘feudal’ bakufu (military government) in
34. First voyage of Chinese admiral Zheng He (or Cheng Ho); death of Timur the Lame;
34. Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror takes
Constantinople; end of Hundred Years War; Portuguese arrive in
35. Machiavelli writes The
Prince; four years before Luther posts 95 Theses; Michelangelo completes
Sistine Chapel in
before
Babur establishes Moghul empire in northern
36. Copernicus’ death and publication of his
heliocentric theory; Calvin in
religious
wars in
Magnificent) rules
37. Tokugawa Ieyasu recognized as Shogun by the emperor;
Will Adams first Englishman in
of
Religion; c. deaths of Elizabeth I of
practice traditional ceremonies honoring Confucius and ancestral services; neo-Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan enters service of
Tokugawa Ieyasu (Craig, handout)
38. Peace of Westphalia ends Thirty Years War; year before
King Charles I of
Hobbes
publishes Leviathan and Cromwell
becomes ‘Lord Protector’ of
Mahal as mausoleum for his wife;
decade after Tokugawa Iemitsu closed
slave trade; six years after death of Galileo (Craig)
39. Glorious Revolution in
five years
after last time Ottoman Turks besieged
40. Jesuit Chinese Rites Controversy (handout); death of
Louis XIV of
41. Adam Smith publishes Wealth of Nations; four years after final volume of Diderot’s Encyclopedia; fourteen years after Rousseau published
Social Contract; and two years before deaths of both Rousseau and Voltaire; twelve years after English East India Company became rulers of Bengal in India (Craig)
Sample questions:
All questions are worth one point unless otherwise indicated.
1. Place the following events in chronological order (2 points)_a,b,d,c_
|
a) Behistun Decree / |
b) End of the Persian Wars; Confucius’s and Buddha’s deaths |
|
c) Socrates's trial and death |
d) Beginning of Peloponnesian War/Pericles' 'Funeral Oration' |
[The best way to approach a question like this is to think
causally and create a historical narrative connecting the events. If you know
that the Behistun Decree was issued by the Persian king King Darius, the same
Darius who was defeated by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 to end the First
Persian War, and that Darius’s son Xerxes invaded
2. The reasons why Berner remained loyal to Raoul in the poem Raoul of Cambrai included all of the following EXCEPT: a) Raoul was Bernier’s lord, b) Raoul had given Bernier horses, arms, and rich robes, c) Raoul was Bernier’s older brother, d) Bernier was afraid of being condemned by other nobles for disloyalty.________
3. All the following is true of the Protestant Reformation EXCEPT: a) it occurred in Germany, b) it began with Martin Luther’s protest against indulgences, c) many Protestant Reformers, notably Luther and Calvin, preached that man is saved by God’s gift of faith and not by works; d) the Reformers rejected popes, monks, and priests; e) the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century preached a doctrine of complete religious toleration.______
4. Identify the authors of the following quotations (2 points):
a) Machiavelli, b) Locke, c) Abu 'l-Hasan al-Quduri, d) Bernard of Clairvaux, e) Hayashi Razan, f) Voltaire______________
|
___ When Muslim people enter the abode of war and besiege a city or a fortress, they invite the people to Islam. If they comply with them, the Muslim people refrain from killing them. If they refuse, the Muslim people invite them to produce tribute [jizyah]. If they give tribute generously, then they are entitled to that which Muslim people are entitled, and incumbent upon them is that which is incumbent upon Muslim people. |
__ But
now, O brave knight, now, O warlike hero, here is a battle you may fight
without danger, where it is glory to conquer and gain to die. If you are a
prudent merchant, if you are a desirer of this world, behold I show you some
great bargains; see that you lose them not. Take the sign of the cross and
you shall gain pardon for every sin that you confess with a contrite heart.
The material itself, being bought, is worth little; but if it be placed on a
devout shoulder, it is, without doubt, worth no less than the |
|
___ Man’s nature is originally good. In reply to the question, whence evil? One should reply that human nature is like
water. It is clear. . . . Material force is also comparable to water. Although originally calm, water becomes
wavy when windblown. Depending on an
area’s topography, water can bring floods. While it originally tends to flow downward,
water can be lifted upwards by water carts.
Though originally clear, when it flows into mud and mire, it becomes
dirty. And, while water is able to
support boats, it can also sink them.
Despite all of that, when it returns to its original state,
water’s fundamental nature is to be clean and calm. |
___classical religion only deified men who had already been heaped with worldly glories, men such as general of armies and rulers of states. Our religion, by contrast, glorifies men who are humble and contemplative, rather than those who do great deeds. In fact, it regards humility, self-abasemnet, and contempt for worldly good as the supreme virtues, while classical religion valorized boldness of spirit, strength of body, and all the other qualities that make men redoubtable. … The upbringing we get, and these false interpretations of our religion, have the consequences that there are not so many republics to be found in the world as there were in classical times. |
PART B: GEOGRAPHICAL
KNOWLEDGE (10 points): You
will be required to identify five places of historical importance and
place them on a map. E.g. Recapturing this "holy
city" was the object of the Crusades _________ (answer:
NOTE. You will only get credit if you can both name the place and locate it on a map.
PART C: ESSAY (70 points). Read the following carefully:
You will see at least TWO of the following topics on the final exam. Read the essay questions to the end. Each essay question requires you to make a final comparison of the distinctive world views of four historical eras as reflected by the authors you discussed. Note also that you MUST place each author into HISTORICAL CONTEXT. This means that you must explain how the author's thought was shaped by the culture of the society in which he lived and by historical events he witnessed or experienced. The VERY BEST grade you will receive on an essay that fails to place authors within historical context is a B- 80%.
HISTORICAL SOCIETIES AND REPRESENTATIVES:
a) Early
*b) Classical
Republican/early Imperial Rome:
Cicero (recommended), Tacitus’s representation of Agricola, or Epictetus
(Roman Stoic);
c)
Early Christianity OR Medieval Christianity OR Protestant Reformation:
for Christianity in the Roman Empire: St. Augustine;
for Medieval Christianity: St. Francis of Assisi and Pope
Innocent III (as a duo);
for Protestant Reformation: Luther or Calvin’s Geneva;
d) High Middle Ages (kingship and aristocracy): Raoul of Cambrai-poet
e) Early OR Medieval Islam: Muhammed OR Usama ibn Munquidh. (If you do Usama, you need to know about the Muslim religion and Islamic politics and society in the twelfth century and the Crusades.)
f) Moghul India
(Akbar) or Tokugawa
*g) Renaissance OR Enlightenment
Renaissance
Seventeenth-Century
Eighteenth-Century French Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Voltaire
N.B. Star means that each of the essay questions requires
you to discuss this society
N.B. Regardless of essay topic, at least one of the historical societies you choose to discuss must be NON-Western (i.e. either e or f). You may choose to write about two non-Western societies in your essay if you wish.
ESSAY TOPICS
1. Placing each within his HISTORICAL CONTEXT, analyze how
human excellence and its relationship to good citizenship and religious duty
were conceived by 1) a representative Classical Greek or Roman author or
statesman, 2) a representative Renaissance or Enlightenment philosopher, and 3
& 4) representatives of TWO other
historical societies studied this semester, at least one of which must be
“non-Western.” In doing so, consider explicitly the assumptions
made by each about the nature of
man and society.
Based on these analyses, what do you perceive to be the distinctive
characteristics and fundamental differences between the ethical and civic
worldviews or the four periods
you chose? Do your comparisons support or undermine the idea that there
is a single and unique “Western Civilization”?
2. “The aim of all political association is the
preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are
liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. ...
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable
rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that
to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government
because destructive of these ends, it the right of the people to alter or
abolish it .....” (Declaration of
"Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State" ( Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to the Danbury Baptists, 1802").
The essay topic:
Write an essay explaining how 1) a representative
thinker from Classical Greece OR
Based on these analyses, what do you perceive to be
the characteristic assumptions held about human nature and society in the four
periods you chose? Do your comparisons
support or undermine the idea that there is a single and unique “Western
Civilization”?
3. Many of the writers and historical figures that we
have studied this semester wrote or acted to restore order and/or morality
within their societies in times of political crisis and spiritual/moral
confusion. What were the "crises" to which Plato (OR Cicero or
Augustus), Hobbes (OR Rousseau), and representatives of TWO other historical
societies that we studied this semester (at least one of which must be
NON-Western) responded and what remedies did they offer for these crises? In
what ways did their responses support or draw upon tradition? In what ways,
were their responses radical?
Based on these analyses, has there
been fundamental changes in Western conceptions
of order and freedom from the time of the Classical Greeks to the Early
Modern period? Do your comparisons
support or undermine the idea that there is a single and unique “Western
Civilization”?
4. In what ways
were the political and moral philosophies of 1) a representative Classical
Greek or Roman studied this semester, 2) Machiavelli, Hobbes OR Rousseau, and 3 & 4) representatives of TWO other
historical societies studied this semester, at least one of which must be
NON-Western, shaped by economic, social, and political conditions of the times
in which they lived? In what ways did they use and reshape past thought to fit
new socio-economic and political conditions?
Based on these analyses, did Western civilization develop differently from non-Western civilizations because of distinctive European economic, social, and political conditions?