HIS 332: Ancient Mediterranean Empires

Welcome

This research guide is for the history course, Ancient Mediterranean Empires. Here, you should be able to find primary and secondary resources, sorted by the region(s) to which they are relevant. You may not be able to traipse through Rome and touch every material like Mary Beard, or take them out of their habitat and install them in your local museum, but you will be able to find resources to interact with in order to absorb their information, grapple with the context and information, and produce a meaningful research project.

Ancient Mediterranean

British Museum

The British Museum has several artifacts that were taken from the ancient world. 

  © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Fordham Internet History Sourcebook

Fordham University has a collection of ancient sources in their Internet Sourcebook.

JSTOR

JSTOR contains both primary and secondary sources that can help with your research projects.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met has several collections of ancient art to select artifacts from to use as primary sources.

Vessel, Ceramic, Iran

Photographic Archive of Papyri in the Cairo Museum

The Cairo Museum's photographic archive contains a collection of papyrus texts.

Looking Further...

If you want to look outside of the resources provided for you, continue to examine the collections of museums and archives which are based in the areas of your study. Good luck!

Thrift Catalog

From the Thrift Library homepage, navigate to the "Catalog" button and search your topic through this helpful resource!

This can help you search through Thrift Library's physical catalog, where you can find the material books upstairs in the library, or journal articles and e-books available online. 

Databases

Also on the Thrift Library homepage, the "Databases A-Z" button will help you navigate through academic papers. The "Group By" selection allows users to group by category, where there is a subject section for History resources. 

Some of the most helpful for this course include:

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Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide

Use the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide as an online resource to develop notes and bibliography for your research.

Turabian Quick Guide

The Turabian Quick Guide provides an online resource as a guide for using Chicago/Turabian style.

Reference Management

Thrift Library recommends using Zotero for reference management.

Once you save an article, book, webpage, etc. to Zotero it will generate citations in the style guide of your choice. It also does so much more! With Zotero, you can...

  • Save PDFs and Snapshots of your sources to folders in your library
  • Annotate PDFs (when you copy and paste text from an annotated file it will automatically add quotation marks and the author, date, and page number in a parenthetical citation.) 
  • Search your entire library
  • Generate bibliographies 

Zotero is a desktop app that also has a web library for when you need to access your library away from your primary computer. 

Zotero also offers browser connectors that enables users to save sources with a single click. 

More information about reference management as well as other available tools can be found in LibraryDIY under Citation Tools.

Using Zotero

Zotero is a citation guide which you can use to map your research project resources.  Below is a step-by-step photo guide to using Zotero to create a bibliographical citation. However, you can also use the Zotero Connector browser extension, and Zotero will automatically generate the citation for you! Just be sure to check for any errors. 

Daily Life in Ancient Rome

Women in Ancient Rome

MacLachlan, Bonnie. Women in Ancient Rome: A Sourcebook. Bloomsbury Sources in Ancient History. London, England: Bloomsbury, 2013.

This title is only available as a physical copy at Thrift Library, using the LOC Call Number HQ1136 .M34 2013