Classics and the Ancient World
The ancient world is not simply a starting point for the modern one: it is a set of societies, texts, and ideas that remain genuinely alive in the questions they raise and the ways they have been understood and misunderstood across the centuries. Classics and the ancient world at King's College London invites you to use the burning questions of today to engage with the celebrated and debated cultures of ancient Europe, Asia, and North Africa, from Athenian democracy and Roman imperialism to the civilisations of the Near East and Egypt that preceded and surrounded them.
This three-year full-time programme at King's develops skills in close reading and textual analysis, in historical argument, and in the critical evaluation of material and visual evidence. You will engage with ancient literature, history, philosophy, art, and archaeology, often in translation but with the option of developing knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek. The programme does not treat the ancient world as a finished object of study but as a set of living questions about power, justice, gender, race, and cultural exchange that continue to shape how ancient civilisations are understood and used in the present.
King's location in London gives the programme access to exceptional museum collections, including those at the British Museum, and to a rich academic community engaged with the ancient world.
A typical entry tariff of 152 points reflects a strong but not excessively narrow entry standard. Graduates of classics and ancient world programmes work across a remarkable range of fields: law, the civil service, journalism, publishing, education, heritage and museum work, finance, and politics. The discipline's combination of analytical precision, knowledge of complex texts, and capacity for synthetic thinking across multiple types of evidence is genuinely transferable.
Postgraduate study in classics, ancient history, archaeology, or classical reception is a well-trodden route for those who wish to develop specialist expertise.