Mythology in Ancient History Curriculum

[alisha]

Hello, my upcoming 9th grader has requested Ancient History. So, we are doing the first half of World History: Our Human Story (O'Connell) to cover the Ancient civilizations. However, I am in the planning stages and know I will be adding lots of things to make it a full high school history credit. 

My question is this: He has always loved mythology, so I was thinking about adding that as some extra content, but everything I can find puts Mythology studies into the literature subject instead of history. Can anyone suggest a way to add Mythology as history? Either for a week or a month, unit study or just extra materials? Or should I just focus on other resources for Ancient History stuff? Thanks for your ideas!

[HomeAgain]

So, we did this for middle school this year.  We did two things:

1. we studied myths and oral tales from different regions, grouping them together by their region, while also going through the trade/political/military connections to each other.  Not only did we look at overall myths, like Egyptian gods, Sumerian heroes..., but we looked at writings to see how religion influenced daily life (bone readings in China, invoking the gods' protection in personal letters along the Euphrates) and evidence of religion in politics and social hierarchy.

2. We looked for cross-cultural connections and outliers.  With the trade routes, it was easy to see how stories and beliefs migrated and changed to fit the needs of a different community.  Same with what happened when a community was dominated by another. And it was interesting to pick out the outliers, like the single-deity concept, or ancestral personal gods, and and compare them to more widespread community-polytheistic traditions.

DS had studied the hero's journey before, and is really enthusiastic about Greek mythology, so I didn't feel the need to cover it as much in depth since he could make those connections more easily.  But I did want him to look at how the oral traditions of religious literature worked across communities and influenced belief systems.

[Farrar]

Obviously you can read mythology as part of an ancient history course and it could enrich the course, just like how reading literature can help enrich a study of history... but if this is something he's really into, I'd do an elective about it instead.