A251: TMA-3

Another TMA coming down the road.

This time there is only a single question, but with a degree of latitude. Compare and old world empire with a new world empire. The course has been focusing on empires and has been through most of the ancient empires by now. This has meant a lot of reading, lots and lots.

The first generally recognised empire was the Akkadian empire of which there aren't too many remains of, but lots of echoes. We then go through more empires in the middle east, China, Egypt, middle and south America. Then back to the more commonly known ones like Greek and Roman. It is all quite interesting, but the amount of reading makes it quite a lot of work, and it seems from the forums that I'm not the only one who is skipping lightly through some of the sections that they don't intend to write about in the TMA.

Anyway, on to the TMA. Quite a lot of people seem to be picking the Romans as the old world empire - which is fair enough. There is a lot of material on that empire and plenty of reference material too. I decide to pick the Persians though, partly because I wanted to learn a bit more about them, and als partly just to be a bit different.

Of the new world empires there is much less choice. Aztecs or Incas is really the main choices, with a possible argument over whether the Olmec was an empire or not. The consensus is that the Mayan civilisation wasn't an empire.

Anyway, whichever you pick 1500 words of comparative text is required, together with references.

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