Ancient History flashcards

1,002 HSC Ancient History cards across 4 modules (372 definitions, 448 key facts, 182 fill-the-gap, 0 formulas). Each session gives you 20 cards, due cards first. Swipe right for easy, left for hard, down for again. Keyboard: Space to flip, 1 to 4 to rate.

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What this deck covers

Section II (Ancient Societies): Spartan Society to the Battle of Leuctra 371 BC (294 cards, 65 dot points)
Section I (Core Study): Cities of Vesuvius - Pompeii and Herculaneum (46 cards, 10 dot points)
Section IV (Historical Periods): The Augustan Age 44 BC to AD 14 (381 cards, 84 dot points)
Section III (Personalities): Xerxes (281 cards, 65 dot points)

Sample cards from this deck

Definition
Spartan art, architecture, technology, and economy: HSC Ancient History
Define Bronze
Laconian bronzeworkers produced sophisticated vessels and statuettes. The Vix Krater (around 530 BC), a 1.64 metre tall bronze mixing vessel found in a Celtic burial in central France, is widely attributed to Laconian workshops. The "Charioteer of Delphi" (around 470 BC), one of the great surviving Greek bronzes, was found at the temple of Apollo at Delphi and is plausibly Laconian.
Definition
Economy, trade, and occupations in Pompeii and Herculaneum: HSC Ancient History
Define Garum production
Pompeii was a major Mediterranean centre for garum, the fermented fish sauce used in nearly every Roman dish. The workshop of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus produced four named grades (highest "flos floris," second, third, fourth). Urceus jars labelled "G(ari) F(los) Scauri" have been found across the empire. Robert Curtis (Garum and Salsamenta, 1991) catalogued 30 garum producers in Pompeii. The House of Umbricius Scaurus, near the Porta Marina, advertises the family business in its atrium: a floor mosaic depicts four labelled urceus jars carrying the firm's product lines.
Definition
The Augustan Settlement: HSC Ancient History
Define The provincia
A 10-year command over the major frontier provinces: Spain, Gaul, Syria, and Egypt. These provinces contained the bulk of the Roman legions (around 20 of 28 legions). The senate retained the unarmed provinces (Africa, Asia, Macedonia, etc.), reinforcing the impression that the "dangerous" work of defending Rome, not the exercise of naked power, justified his command.
Definition
Agrippina the Younger's death and aftermath: HSC Ancient History
Define Britannicus poisoned
Claudius's natural son, a rival focus of loyalty whom Agrippina had reportedly threatened to promote against Nero, was poisoned at a palace dinner in AD 55.
Definition
The economic activities of Periclean Athens: HSC Ancient History
Define Food security
Peter Garnsey (Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World, 1988) frames Athens' Black Sea grain dependence as a structural vulnerability common to large Greek cities, one that shaped foreign policy and naval strategy as much as it reflected simple commercial convenience.
Definition
The eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum: HSC Ancient History
Define Body casts at Pompeii
In 1863, director Giuseppe Fiorelli developed the plaster cast technique. The bodies of victims had decomposed in the hardened ash, leaving cavities. By pouring liquid plaster into these voids, Fiorelli produced detailed casts including facial features, clothing, and the moment of death.
Definition
Augustus and the principate: HSC Ancient History
Define Auctoritas versus potestas
In Res Gestae 34, Augustus drew this distinction himself: after 27 BC he held no more potestas (formal legal power) than his colleagues in each magistracy, but he excelled all in auctoritas (informal prestige, moral weight, influence). In reality his potestas was extraordinary: tribunicia potestas for life from 23 BC (a tribune's sacrosanctity, veto and right to convene the senate and assemblies, without holding the office) and imperium maius (command authority overriding any proconsul, including in the senatorial provinces). The formula in Res Gestae 34 is a carefully chosen understatement.
Definition
Agrippina the Younger's historical context and family background: HSC Ancient History
Define Augustus (27 BC to AD 14)
Established the Principate. Granted his wife Livia the title Augusta in his will. His daughter Julia the Elder (by his second wife Scribonia) was Agrippina the Younger's great-grandmother.
Definition
Athens' empire, Sparta and historiographical evaluation: HSC Ancient History
Define Thucydides
Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War), a contemporary and largely admiring source for Pericles, supplies the "truest cause" analysis of the war and the funeral oration as Athens' self-image. Plutarch (Life of Pericles, c. AD 100) is the fullest ancient biography, drawing on earlier, now-lost writers including the hostile Stesimbrotus and the favourable Ion of Chios. Pseudo-Xenophon, the "Old Oligarch", supplies a rare, if hostile, contemporary analysis of how democracy and empire reinforced each other. Aristotle's school produced the Athenaion Politeia, a calmer institutional account written a century later. Among modern historians, G.E.M. de Ste Croix argued for "popular imperialism", Russell Meiggs built the standard administrative history of the empire from the tribute lists, Mogens Herman Hansen and Josiah Ober defend the radicalism of Athenian democracy as a participatory system, and Sarah Pomeroy reframed the same democracy around the majority it excluded, women, metics and the enslaved.
Definition
Ethics, display and ownership of Pompeii and Herculaneum: HSC Ancient History
Define Consent
The AD 79 victims could not consent to being cast in plaster, scanned, isotope-tested or exhibited. This is a structural ethical problem shared with other archaeological human-remains debates (Egyptian mummies, Indigenous Australian ancestral remains), even though, unlike those cases, no living descendant community can be consulted on behalf of the Pompeian and Herculanean dead.