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History
History
History is ever-changing (we learnt that in class!). Luckily for us, we can learn about it in school. During History, we learn about how to analyse artefacts and make educated assumptions (inferences) about the past. In Term one, we learnt about the basics of History, what it is and how it is documented. One of the activities we did in Term one was looking at artefacts and drawing them. After drawing them, we made inferences about those artefacts. For our Term one project, we had to do a write-up about an ancient civilisation and create our own artefact. We had to write an analysis of our artefact and talk about what we could infer about the ancient civilisation.
There are two types of questions, Source-based questions and Structured questions. In Source-based questions, we are required to use a source to answer the question. For structured questions, we need to memorise certain things, like the century in which the Anglo-Dutch Treaty was signed and many more. However, the content which we had to memorise was minimal, making History simple and fun.
Term 2 was conducted via HBL and we received lessons through videos made by Mr Kang, our History teacher. He would make 20-minute videos and go through new topics. He also added videos he found on the internet to help enhance our learning. We learnt about the rise of Temasek, why the British chose Singapore as a port and the importance of Singapore during the early 1800s-1900s.
In Term 3, we learnt about the slave trade, mass migration, the industrial revolution and push and pull factors which led to mass migration in Singapore during the early 1900s. We learnt how the industrial revolution and abolishment of the slave trade led to mass migration across the world. We learnt how to compare sources and find similarities in them. We spent the end of Term 3 practising questions and preparing for End of Year Examinations.
Below are three photographs/posters that Leanna and Shu Myin have created, summarising a few sub-topics.
Historical Investigation
Historical Investigation
Furthermore, like most of the other subjects, we also had a project, our Historical Investigation. Our task was to study a civilisation of our choice, create an artefact and produce a write-up about the civilisation. As this was our first project in SOTA, there was much that could be improved. To the left is an image of one of the artefacts created by a group in R3.
Making things was fun, but we also had to analyse and write it out. Hence, we have two write-ups below written by two groups of students in our class.
Write-Up by Sara Cheai
Write-Up by Sara Cheai
The Political Aspect
“The Romans established a form of government - a republic - that was copied by countries for centuries. In fact, the government of the United States is based partly on Rome's model.”
As seen from this paragraph from https://www.ushistory.org/civ/index.as, the Romans were republicans, at least until Augustus Caesar became Rome's first emperor, which ended the republican of Rome, and started the Roman empire.
This sculpture is of a Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. From this sculpture, I can conclude that he was an important person, and that the influential people in Rome were likely to get their own sculptures.
Many important faces were also put on coins. This face belongs to Augustus Caesar. Other important faces on coins belonged to the past rulers of Ancient Rome, like Julius Caesar.
(https://www.ancient.eu/article/629/slavery-in-the-roman-world/)
This tapestry shows that slaves were common in the Roman empire. The slaves in the artefact are shown carrying crops and pouring out liquids for their masters, who were either patricians or rich plebeians.
The slaves were in the lowest class of society, and they had even less rights than freed criminals, according to the article above. Slaves were usually bought by the patricians to show off how rich they were. Basically, slaves were just property.
Economical Aspects
The existence of coins means that there was a clear currency in the Roman Empire.
“For all of the glory and grandeur of Ancient Rome, the Roman economy never developed into anything terribly complex compared to modern economies”.
This sentence from https://www.unrv.com/economy.php shows that even though Rome had a currency, it was not too complicated as Rome was rural and focused more on agriculture and slavery, meaning that the money made rarely came from industrial production. I arrived at this point from this sentence, “Ancient Rome was an agrarian and slave based economy whose main concern was feeding the vast number of citizens and legionaries who populated the Mediterranean region. Agriculture and trade dominated Roman economic fortunes, only supplemented by small scale industrial production.”
The bull on the back of the coin could also represent how farming made up a big part of Rome’s economy and contributed to a large majority of it.
“While the production and transportation of foods dominated the trading industry, there was also a vast exchange of other goods from all parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.”
This sentence not only backs up the fact that Rome’s agricultural domain was its main strength and brought it the most wealth, but it also tells us that trading was a thing that occurred between Rome and many other places that had valuable resources, like Europe, Asia and Africa.
The rich and noble Romans wanted to use silk that was imported from China in their garments like togas, as seen in the picture above. The Romans mainly used the crops that they had harvested like grapes, olive oil or wines. Sometimes, they would trade non food-related items, such as pottery or papyrus as according to this sentence, “Since farming was a large part of the Roman economy, many of the exports were food or products made from crops. Grapes, oil, and grain were a few of the major exports. From these crops, items such as olive oil, wine, and cereals were also made and exported. Other exports included pottery and papyrus (paper).”
https://historylearning.com/a-history-of-ancient-rome/the-roman-empire-and-trade/
This artefact shows a man riding a wagon being pulled by two horses. From this, I can conclude that this was most likely their means of travel to trade with other countries. Besides China, the Romans also traded with the Middle East for their spices to add flavour to their food and also Britain, for silver, to make jewellery and coins. Other than crops like wheat or grapes, Rome also had an abundance of marble as seen from multiple statues, like a statue of a toga, which uses marble as its medium and other artefacts, such as the marble statuette of a seated man, which, as the name states, is also made of marble.
Besides using marble for just sculpting, the Romans also used marble to construct museums, government buildings and monuments.
Social aspect
The lives of the rich and the poor were significantly different. The richest Romans would build large lavish houses, while the poor Romans would stay in the dirtiest and noisiest places in the city, according to this sentence “The poor lived in the dirtiest, noisiest, most crowded parts of the city. Their houses were poorly constructed”.
(from https://online.kidsdiscover.com/unit/roman-empire/topic/life-of-the-poor)
Snippets of Write-Up 2
Snippets of Write-Up 2
Political:
These fragments can be divided into two categories, first was a logbook depicting daily activities for several months. Another was called the “Journal of Merer” and shows the transportation of the massive blocks of limestone from the quarries of Tura to the Pyramid at Giza plateau.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed as a tomb for King Khufu, thus there was a ruling system. The papyrus explains how they transported the building materials on boats via the Nile River. They tallied food and supplies like sheep, showing that Egyptians had livestock and used them as food and supplies. The papyrus also show that they had a way of storing water and was most likely where the Government (Administrative) was.
Source 1:
A papyrus Tallet found at Wadi al-Jarf from 2,600 B.C.E., the world’s oldest, refers to the “horizon of Khufu,” or the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Source Credit: https://curiosmos.com/translation-of-the-oldest-ancient-egyptian-papyrus-offers-clues-about-great-pyramid/
Source 2: One Deben
Ancient Egyptian form of determining value, one Deben.
Source credits: https://www.ancient.eu/article/1079/trade-in-ancient-egypt/
Economical:
The Egyptians of this period had coins for trading goods and services were valued on a unit known as a Deben. Hence, in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, there already was currency. According to historian James C. Thompson, the Deben "functioned much as the dollar currency today to let customers know the price of things, except that there was no deben coin". A Deben was "approximately 90 grams of copper; very expensive items could also be priced in Debens of silver or gold with proportionate changes in value". If a scroll of papyrus cost one Deben, and a pair of sandals were also worth one deben, the pair of sandals could be traded fairly for the papyrus scroll. In this same way, if six jugs of water cost a Deben and a day's work was worth a Deben then one would fairly be paid six jugs of water for one's daily labour.
Having Deben (money) spurred trade between Upper and Lower Egypt, and between the different districts of those regions. The overland trade route through the Wadi Hammamat went from the Nile to the Red Sea, the goods packed and tied to the backs of donkeys. Hence, Egyptians used donkeys to transport goods.
Social:
This shows that Egyptians had formed a kind of religion. Nekhbet was frequently portrayed as a vulture, spreading her wings over the pharaoh while grasping in her claw the cartouche symbol or other emblems. Nekhbet was the Egyptian white vulture goddess and protector of Egypt and the Pharaohs. She was referred to as "Mother of Mothers, who hath existed from the Beginning". She was the patron goddess of the Upper Egypt city of Nekheb (modern day El Kab), from which her name derives. She also appeared as a woman, often with a vulture’s head, wearing a white crown, and was sometimes depicted protecting the pharaoh. She was the goddess of Hierakonpolis (or Nekhen), the ancient town opposite El-Kāb, on the west bank of the Nile River.
One of Egypt's earliest temples was the shrine of Nekhbet at Nekheb (also referred to as El Kab). It was the companion city to Nekhen, the religious and political capital of Upper Egypt.
Nekhbet was the guardian deity of Upper Egypt. Nekhbet and her Lower Egyptian counterpart Wadjet often appeared together as the "Two Ladies".
Conclusion:
They had a hierarchy, religion that they followed, a government and there was trade. While merchants and slaves had no recognitions, friends or acquaintances of the royalty and the royalty themselves got statues and widespread recognition. They also had gods and goddesses that they believed in, one being Nehkbet, a deity who protects the pharaohs. They also had a government, one that was strong and respected by society. They also had a type of determining value, thus trading went smoothly between services and goods.
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