The following is a midterm exam that I gave to my Early Western Civilization students several years ago. How would you have performed on it?
1. What date does Susan Wise Bauer give as the approximate date for the origin of written history?
a. 300 AD
b. 300 BC
c. 3000 BC
d. 3300 BC
e. 8,000 BC
2. True or False: According to Bauer, when the Sumerian flood story was first translated, most historians assumed that the Genesis account was derived from it, but further study of the differences between the two stories suggests that they are far more likely to have arisen separately from the same source event.
3. True or False: Mesopotamia means the land “between the rivers.”
4. True or False: Mesopotamia is the cradle of western civilization.
5. True or False: Ionia is the cradle of western philosophy.
6. Which of the following was NOT an Egyptian king?
A. Scorpion King
b. Raging Catfish
c. Noche
7. The Rosetta Stone played a role in (select one)
a. David slaying Goliath
b. Proving the large extent of the Hittite kingdom
c. God inscribing the Ten Commandments
d. Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs
e. Preservation of the Epic of Gilgamesh
8. Place the following empires in the correct order
a. Greek
b. Medes & Persians
c. Babylon
d. Roman
9. Match the following with the most appropriate location of origin. Each answer will be used only once.
a. Epic of Gilgamesh
b. Code of Hammurabi
c. Homeric Poems
[possible answers: Babylon, Ionia, Sumer]
10. Match the definitions with the best choice of terms from the list below
a. The practice of a king assuming the identity of his predecessor
b. Refers to the name which God gives to himself
c. Using names familiar to contemporary readers rather than names in use during the historical past.
d. A human figure with the face of a bull and imprisoned in the Labyrinth
e. A foot soldier
f. Philosophy of the “living stuff”
[List of possible answers: 1. Positional succession, 2. Hoplite, 3. Anachronism, 4. Minotaur, 5. Hylozoism, 6. Tetragrammaton]
11. True of False: It would have been impossible for the Egyptians to have built the pyramids given their technological abilities. The only reasonable answer is that aliens came through a Stargate and used an energy coil called the “Caduceus Coil” to tap into the planetary energy grid in order to levitate the blocks into place.
12. Place the following in correct order, earliest to latest.
a. David
b. Sargon
c. Nebuchadnezzar
13. The birth story of which of the following is very similar to that of Moses’?
a. Sargon
b. Khufu
c. Herodotus
d. Horus
e. Terah
14. Place the following in the correct order
a. Adam
b. Eve
c. Seth
d. Noah
e. Tower of Babylon
f. Abraham
g. Period of the Judges
h. David
i. Divided Kingdom
j. Babylonian captivity
15. True of False: The Hyksos once ruled in Persia.
16. True or False: The legend of the Minotaur is an example of one of the Greek myths which has been proven to be a very precise description of an actual event.
17. True of False: The exodus of the Hebrews shows up nowhere in the Egyptian records.
18. True or false: The Egyptians did not write.
19. True or false: The Philistines kept the Israelites in a position of military inferiority by forbidding them to manufacture any sort of iron tools.
20. True or False: There was no country called Phoenicia.
21. True or False: Jeroboam was Solomon’s son.
22. True or False: Around 721 BC Sargon II wiped the political state of Israel off the map, and removed large numbers of Israelites from their homeland all the way over to the territory of the Medes. This resulted in the despised mix of peoples that the Jews later called Samaritans.
23. Match the following leaders with the location of their rule.
a. Sennacherib
b. Sheshonq
c. Rehoboam
d. Nebuchadnezzar
e. Cyrus the Great
[Possible answers: Babylon, Medes & Persians, Judah, Egypt, Assyria]
24. Match the following gods (God) with their followers.
a. Marduk
b. Horus
c. YHWH
[Possible answers: Egypt, Babylon, Hebrews]
25. True or False: The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are two of the Seven Wonders of the World.
26. True or False: The war between the Greeks and Persians was central to the life of the Greeks, but receives barely a mention in Persian histories.
27. True or False: The Delian League and the Peloponnesian League were manifestations of the rivalry between Athens and Sparta.
28. Which of the following are historians upon which Bauer relies for material. (Select all that apply)
a. Thucydides
b. Herodotus
c. Plutarch
29. True or false: One characteristic of Orphism is that by ritual purifications and an ascetic life they hoped to win release from the body and return to the company of the gods.
30. The logic of which philosopher was the starting-point for both Platonic dialectic and Aristotelian logic.
a. Parmenides
b. Heraclitus
c. Anaximander
d. Thales
e. Tyrannosaurus Rex
31. The Logos is most often associated with which of the following philosophers?
a. Parmenides
b. Heraclitus
c. Anaximander
d. Thales
e. Latissimus Dorsi
32. Complete the sentences by filling in the blank spaces with the correct answer from the list provided below.
a. __________ influenced Plato more than any other philosopher. Important elements passed into Plato’s thought from his predecessors which through him have influenced the later development of European philosophy.
b. From the __________ Plato derives much of his conception of the matter of the physical universe.
c. From the __________ comes the essence of Plato’s doctrine of the nature and destiny of the soul, his insistence on eternal form and order as the supremely important reality and proper object of the intellect, and the emphasis in his though on mathematics and astronomy.
d. From __________ he gits his vision of the transitorinesss of all sensible things and the flux of the material world.
e. __________ and the Eleatics leave him a clear though inadequate vision of eternal being, the beginnings of logical reasoning, and a logical problem to solve.
[Possible answers: 1. Heraclitus, 2. Parmenides, 3. Pythagoreans, 4. Milesians, 5. Socrates]
33. Match the following statements about “pleasure” with the school it most accurately depicts.
a. “As a humanist agnostic I enjoy pleasure when it is practical as part of a successful civilized human life.”
b. “I can’t really know if pleasure is good or bad, but I have an opinion about it.
c. “I enjoy my pleasure in public and could care less what you think about it.”
d. “It is our feelings of pain and pleasure which are the test by which we determine what is bad and good for us.”
e. “Pleasure? I am utterly indifferent to all external things. I am free from all passion, emotion, and affections.”
[Possible answers: 1. Stoicism, 2. Cynicism, 3. Sophism, 4. Skepticism, 5. Hedonism]
34. True or False: Socrates believed that the first and foremost business of man was care of the soul.
35. True or False: Plato was not very systematic and it is often difficult to find out his solution to the problem he raises.
36. True or False: Plato founded the Lyceum.
37. True or False: Aristotle believed that there exists a world of eternal realities, “Forms” or “Ideas” that are entirely separate from the world our senses perceive, and knowable only by pure intellect.
38. True or False: Plato did not believe in the soul’s pre-existence, but did believe that it could not be extinguished.
39. Place the following in chronological order;
a. John the Baptist
b. Socrates
c. David, son of Jesse
d. Aristotle
e. Alexander the Great
f. Thales
g. Plato
40. True or False: Aristotle rejected Plato’s Theory of Forms.
41. True or False: Aristotle denied the existence of universals.
42. True or False: Socrates wrote no philosophic treatise himself.
44. Which of the following had a more family-friendly political philosophy.
a. Aristotle
b. Plato
