Grade 6 · printable course

The Ancient World: Peoples, Power, and Place

Grade 6 · 474 pages · 80 lessons · PDF, print at home

This is a year-long tour of the ancient world: early farmers, then Mesopotamia, Egypt and Kush, India, China, Greece, and Rome, ending with Rome's fall. Your child learns why cities and kings and laws showed up where and when they did, not just names and dates. Along the way they practice reading old documents skeptically (who wrote this, and why should I believe them?), reading maps and timelines, and writing short arguments backed by evidence. Every religion or belief system in the course is studied the way a historian studies it, what people believed and how it shaped their laws and daily life, never as something to practice or adopt.

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Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

The Ancient World: Peoples, Power, and Place

80 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: What Makes a Civilization?10 lessons
  1. 1.The causal chain from agricultural surplus to occupational specialization
  2. 2.Features distinguishing hunter-gatherer from farming (Neolithic) societies
  3. 3.The seven-criteria checklist for civilization
  4. 4.The evidentiary limits of artifact-based versus text-based primary sources
  5. 5.Authorial motive as a source of bias in historical records
  6. 6.BCE/CE dating and elapsed-time calculation across the BCE/CE boundary
  7. 7.The relationship between physical geography (rivers, soil, climate) and settlement location
  8. 8.The contested boundary of the category 'civilization' applied to an unfamiliar case
  9. 9.The value-laden nature of the term 'civilization' as a historical category
  10. 10.Core Unit 1 vocabulary (surplus, specialization, hierarchy, the seven criteria)
Unit 2: Mesopotamia: The First Cities10 lessons
  1. 11.The relationship between river-valley geography and the location of Sumerian cities
  2. 12.The relationship between agricultural surplus and job specialization in Sumer
  3. 13.The connection between surplus, priesthood, and organized religion in Sumer
  4. 14.The original administrative purpose of cuneiform writing versus a modern analog
  5. 15.The social hierarchy embedded in specific laws of Hammurabi's Code
  6. 16.Whose interests a written rule protects, as a transferable pattern of reasoning
  7. 17.The fairness of Hammurabi's Code judged against its own historical context
  8. 18.The general conditions under which a city-state expands into an empire
  9. 19.Origin, purpose, and audience of a Mesopotamian primary source
  10. 20.Named Sumerian inventions and structures
Unit 3: Egypt and Kush: Two Nile Civilizations10 lessons
  1. 21.The causal link between the Nile's predictable flood cycle and Egyptian agricultural/political planning
  2. 22.The sequence of Egyptian kingdom periods and intermediate periods
  3. 23.Hieroglyphics and cuneiform as two ancient writing systems with different materials, original functions, and decipherment histories
  4. 24.The pharaoh's claimed divine status and its link to the concept of ma'at as cosmic order
  5. 25.The procedural sequence of Egyptian mummification and the afterlife beliefs each step serves
  6. 26.The relationship between the resources devoted to death rituals/monuments and underlying Egyptian values about the afterlife and social hierarchy
  7. 27.The shifting power relationship between Kush and Egypt, including trade, conquest, and the 25th Dynasty
  8. 28.Point of view and omission in a primary source describing Kush written by an outsider
  9. 29.The geographic and resource-based causes of Meroe's rise as an ironworking center
  10. 30.A specific, causally-explained difference between Egyptian and Mesopotamian geography, writing, or power-justification
Unit 4: Ancient India: Caste, Belief, and Empire9 lessons
  1. 31.Indus Valley river geography and city locations
  2. 32.The relationship between undeciphered writing and limits of historical evidence
  3. 33.The four varna categories and their defining features
  4. 34.Hindu and Buddhist explanations of suffering (dharma/karma/reincarnation vs. Four Noble Truths)
  5. 35.The structural features of the caste system that restrict social mobility
  6. 36.Ashoka's edicts as a persuasive primary source about imperial rule
  7. 37.Transfer of the Hinduism/Buddhism self-and-suffering comparison structure to new texts
  8. 38.The Unit 1 civilization checklist (surplus, specialization, hierarchy, government, writing) applied to Maurya India
  9. 39.The chronological sequence from Aryan migration to caste formation
Unit 5: Ancient China: Mandate, Order, and Empire10 lessons
  1. 40.Huang He (Yellow River) flooding pattern and its effect on settlement location and agricultural risk
  2. 41.Oracle bones and their use by priests to communicate with ancestors and record questions
  3. 42.The Mandate of Heaven and its causal link between disaster/defeat and legitimacy
  4. 43.The dynastic cycle as a repeating pattern of rise, strength, decline, and collapse
  5. 44.Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism as competing philosophies of rule
  6. 45.Qin Shi Huang's standardization policies as an application of Legalist philosophy
  7. 46.Primary-source excerpts from Han Feizi, Confucius (Analects), or an imperial edict
  8. 47.Han Dynasty bureaucracy and its Confucian basis
  9. 48.The criteria used to evaluate a philosophy of order (Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism), transferred to a non-governmental context
  10. 49.The origins of the Silk Road under the Han Dynasty and indirect long-distance connection
Unit 6: Ancient Greece: Citizens, City-States, and Ideas11 lessons
  1. 50.The relationship between Greek terrain (mountains, islands) and the political fragmentation into independent poleis
  2. 51.Athenian citizenship criteria and their exclusions
  3. 52.The distribution of political power in Athens versus Sparta
  4. 53.The chronological sequence of Persian War battles and outcomes
  5. 54.The causal link between the Persian War outcome and Athens's political and cultural confidence
  6. 55.The social function of a given Greek myth
  7. 56.The comparative structure of Greek polytheism versus a prior belief system studied
  8. 57.Authorial perspective and omission in a Greek primary source about Athenian society
  9. 58.The central claim and questioning method of a named Greek philosopher
  10. 59.The relationship between citizenship status and political voice in Athenian democracy
  11. 60.The mechanism by which Hellenistic culture spread through Alexander's empire
Unit 7: Rome: From Republic to Empire11 lessons
  1. 61.Roman geography and its relationship to expansion and trade
  2. 62.The founding legend versus archaeological evidence for early Rome
  3. 63.Roman social groups and their political rights under the Republic
  4. 64.The consul-Senate-veto system of checks in the Roman Republic
  5. 65.The political causes of the Senate's failure to stop Caesar
  6. 66.The effect of expanding Roman citizenship on the stability of the republic/empire
  7. 67.A primary source excerpt describing daily life under Pax Romana
  8. 68.Roman engineering achievements and their role in governing a large empire
  9. 69.Roman adoption and adaptation of Greek gods and myths
  10. 70.Multiple causes of the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire
  11. 71.Key Roman government vocabulary (republic, citizen, patrician, plebeian, consul)
Unit 8: Legacies: What the Ancient World Left Behind9 lessons
  1. 72.The seven studied civilizations' distinguishing legacies in law, writing, government, and belief
  2. 73.The specific legacy term paired with its civilization and category, in the taught grid format
  3. 74.The practical origin versus later application of a legacy (e.g., cuneiform as accounting, Hammurabi's Code as dispute resolution)
  4. 75.A cause-and-effect chain connecting a specific ancient legacy to a specific modern institution
  5. 76.Two civilizations' versions of the same legacy category, compared for function and reach
  6. 77.A self-authored primary source's reliability regarding a ruler's own legacy claims
  7. 78.An argumentative claim about the widest-reaching legacy, supported by cross-unit evidence
  8. 79.The logical strength of a specific 'most important legacy' claim about the alphabet
  9. 80.The final argumentative essay on widest-reaching ancient legacy

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