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Western Civilization I / Unit 6   WC1 0525 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds

Reading a Map of Republican Expansion and the Punic Wars

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The idea

The exam's Republican map shades Roman territory at a date and asks what it shows, or marks a place and asks what happened there. The method is four rings: Italy by two sixty-three, the western islands and Spain after the Punic Wars, Greece and Macedon after one forty-six, and the East after Pompey by sixty-three. Read the ring, and the date follows.

In practice

Four questions. A map shading only the Italian peninsula south of the Po: before two sixty-four, since Sicily is missing. A map shading Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica but not Spain: between two forty-one and two oh two, the gap between the first two Punic Wars. A map shading Greece and Macedon: after one forty-six. A map shading Anatolia and Syria to the Euphrates: after Pompey, sixty-three or later. And a place question: a marked site in southern Italy where a smaller army enveloped a larger one in two sixteen is Cannae, and a marked site in North Africa near Carthage where that general finally lost is Zama.

Where people slip

Egypt stays unshaded until thirty B.C.E. on any correct map, and Gaul appears only after Caesar, fifty-eight to fifty. A map with Gaul but without Egypt is dated between fifty and thirty, the years of the civil wars.

Your place on the trail

Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.

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