OCR Ancient History sources and interpretation skills: a complete overview

OCR Ancient History is, above all, a course in reading ancient evidence. Every topic is built on prescribed ancient sources, and the exam rewards not just knowing them but evaluating them and weighing the interpretations of modern scholars. This overview ties together the skills pages that every Greek and Roman topic needs.

The four assessment objectives

• AO1. Knowledge and understanding of the periods, rewarded in every answer.
• AO2. Analysis using second-order concepts (cause, consequence, change, significance), the engine of the essays.
• AO3. The use and evaluation of the primary ancient sources as evidence, the focus of the 12-mark question and the depth essay.
• AO4. The evaluation of the differing interpretations of modern scholars.

Evaluating ancient sources (AO3)

The core source skill is to judge a source's utility for a specific enquiry, using its content, its provenance (nature, origin and purpose) and your contextual knowledge, and reaching a judgement on usefulness. Utility is not the same as reliability: a hostile or propagandist source is often the best evidence of an attitude or an ideology, precisely because of its purpose.

Analysing interpretations (AO4)

The interpretation skill is to weigh the differing views of modern scholars and to explain why they disagree: incomplete and biased evidence, different methods, different emphases, and the assumptions of their own time. A strong AO4 answer tests interpretations against the ancient evidence rather than reporting them.

The prescribed historians

• Greek: Herodotus (range, but moralising and inflated), Thucydides (rigorous, but selective and involved), Xenophon (close to Sparta, but admiring).
• Roman: Tacitus (analytical, but senatorial and hostile), Suetonius (anecdotal, scandal-loving), Cicero (contemporary and candid, but partisan), plus the Res Gestae, coins and inscriptions as official sources.