Western Civilization I / Unit 7 WC1 0625 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Map of the Empire in 117 and Its Frontiers
The idea
The exam's imperial map is usually dated one seventeen, the greatest extent, and asks what a frontier line marks, which province lies where, or what lay beyond. The method is three edges: the river edge, the Rhine and Danube against Germania; the wall edge, Hadrian's Wall in Britain; and the desert edge, the Euphrates against Parthia with Armenia as buffer. Everything inside the three edges and the Sahara is Rome.
In practice
Four questions. A line across northern Britain: Hadrian's Wall, the wall edge. Two rivers running from the North Sea to the Black Sea: the Rhine and Danube, the river edge, held since Teutoburg in nine. A shaded region east of the Euphrates marked as briefly Roman: Trajan's Mesopotamia, taken and abandoned by Hadrian. An unshaded power beyond the Euphrates: Parthia, the enemy of Carrhae. A fifth, the trade question: the route by which silk entered, either overland through Parthia or by sea from India on the monsoon to Egypt's Red Sea ports.
Where people slip
A map dated after one seventeen shows Mesopotamia gone and, after two twenty-four, the Sasanians in Parthia's place. Check the date before naming the eastern neighbor, and never draw the limes as a wall except in Britain.
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