History Flashcards
of, pertaining to, or existing in the time prior to the recording of human events, knowledge of which is gained mainly through archaeological discoveries, study, and research.
Prehistoric
The earliest know period of human culture, preceding the bronze age and the iron age and characterized by the use of stone implements and weapons.
Stone Age
of or relating to the last phase of the stone age, characterized by the cultivation of grain crops, domestication of animals, settlement of villages, manufacture of pottery and textiles, and use of polished stone implements; thought to have begun c. 9000-8000 BCE
Neolithic
A periodof human history tht began c. 4000-3000 BCE, folowing the stone age and preceding the iron age, characterized by the use of bronze implements.
Bronze Age
A bronze age culture that flourished in the Indus valley c. 2300-1500 BCE.
Harappa
A neolithic culture in China centered around the fertile plains of the yellow River, characterized by pit dwellings and fine pottery painted in geometric designs.
Yang-shao
A legendary dynasty in China, 2205-1766 BCE.
Xia
Hsia
An ancient region in western Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, comprising the lands of Sumer and Akkad and occupied successively by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians; now part of Iraq.
Mesopotamia
An agriculture region arching from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea in the west to Iraq in the east, the location of humankind’s earliest cultures.
Fertile Crescent
An advanced state of human society marked by a relatively high level of culture, technical, and political development.
Civilization
An ancient region in southern Mesopotamia, where a number of independent cities and and city-states were established as early as 5000 BCE. A number of its cities, such as Eridu, Uruk, and Ur, are major archaeological sites.
Sumer
The architecture of the ancient civilization that flourished along the Nile river in northwest Africa from before 3000 BCE to its annexation by Romein 30 BCE.
Egyptian Architecture
The architecture of the Bronze Age civilization that flourished on Crete from about 3000 to 1100 BCE, named after the legendary king Minos of knossos.
Minoan Architecture
The architecture of the Aegean civilization that spread its influence from Mycenae in southern Greece to many parts of the Mediterranean region from about 1600 to 1100 BCE
Mycenaean architecture
The architecture of the civilization that flourished on the Greek peninsula, in Asia Minor, on the north coast of Africa, and in the western Mediterranean until the establishment of Roman dominion in 146 BCE.
Greek architecture
The mesopotamian architecture that developed after the decline of the Assyrian Empire, deriving much from Assyrian architecture and enhanced by figured designs of heraldic animals in glazed brickwork.
Neo-Babylonian architecture
The architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, on which the Italian Renaissance and subsequent styles, such as the Baroque and the Classic Revival, based their development.
Classical architecture
The architecture of the ancient Roman people, characterized by massive brick and concrete construction employing such features as the semicircular arch, the barrels and groin vaults,and the dome .
Roman architecture
The final phase of Roman architecture, following the adoption of Christianity as the state religion by Constantine in 313 CE.
Early Christian architecture
The architecture of the European Middle Ages, comprising the architecture of the Byzantine, pre-Romanesque, and Gothic periods.
Medieval architecture
The time in Europe history between classical antiquity and the Renaissance, often dated from 476 CE, when Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed to about 1500.
Middle Ages
The early part of the middle Ages, from 476 CE to C. 1100.
Dark Ages
A style of architecture emerging in the Italy and western Europe in the 9th century and lasting until the advent of Gothic architecture in the 12th century, comprising a variety of related regional styles and characterized by heavy, articulated masonry construction with narrow openings.
Romanesques architecture
The architecture of the eastern sphere of the later Roman Empire, developing from late Roman and early Christian antecedents in the 5th century CE and influencing church building in Greece, Italy and elsewhere for more than a thousand years.
Byzantine Architecture
The style of architecture characterized by masonry construction, round arches, shallow domes carried on pendentives, and the extensive use of rich frescoes, colored glass mosaics, and marble revetments to cover whole interiors.
Byzantine Architecture
The Romanesque architecture introduced from Normandy into England before the Norman Conquest and flourishing until the rise of Gothic architecture C. 1200.
Norman Architecture
The architecture of the Muslim peoples from the 7th century on.
Islamic Architecture
The architecture of the civilization that emerged on the Japanese archipelago off the east coast of Asia.
Japanese Architecture
The style of architecture originating in France in the 12th century and existing in the western half of Europe through the middle of the 16th century.
Gothic Architecture
The style of architecture characterized by the building of great cathedrals, a progressive lightening and heightening of structure, and the use of the pointed arch, ribbed vault, and a system of richly decorated fenestration.
Gothic Architecture
The first of the three phases of french Gothic architecture fro the 12th through the end of the 13th centuries, characterized by the pointed arch and geometric tracery.
Early French style
The middle phase of french Gothic architecture from the end 13th through the late 14th centuries, characterized by circular windows with radiating lines of tracery.
Rayonnant style
The activity, spirit, or time of the humanistic revival of classical art, literature, and learning originating in Italy in the 14th century and extending to 17th century, marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world.
Renaissance
The various adaptations of Italian Renaissance architecture that occurred throughout Europe until the advent of Mannerism and the Baroque in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Renaissance architecture
Architecture characterized by the use of Italian Renaissance forms and motifs in more or less traditional buildings.
Renaissance architecture
A style of Italian Renaissance art and architecture developed in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, characterized by an emphasis on draftsmanship, the illusion of sculptural volume in painting, and in building, by the imitative use of whole orders and compositional arrangement.
High Renaissance
The Islamic architecture of the Ottoman Empire from the 14th century on, much influenced by the Byzantine architecture.
Ottoman architecture
A style of architecture originating in Italy in the early 17th century and variously prevalent n Europe and the New World for a century and a half, characterized by free and sculpture use of the classical orders and ornament, dynamic opposition and interpentration of spaces, and dramatic combined effects of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts.
Baroque architecture
Art and architecture in the style of the ancient Greeks and romans, as that of the Italian Renaissance and the neoclassical movements in England and the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Classical Revival
A style of decorative art that evolved from the Baroque, originating in France about 1720 and distinguished by fanciful, curved spatial forms and elaborate, profuse designs of shellwork and foliage intended for a delicate overall effect.
Rococo
The style of architecture, decoration, and furnishing of the Bristish colonies in America in the 17th and 18th centuries, mainly adapted to local materials and demands from prevailing English styles.
Colonial architecture
The Classic Revival styles of the decorative arts and architecture current in the U.S. from c. 1780 to c. 1830.
Federal style
A movement aimed at reviving the spirit and forms of Gothic architecture, originating in the late 18th century but flourishing mainly in the 19th century in France, Germany, England, and to a lesser extent in the U.S. Gothic remained the accepted style for churches well into the 20th century.
Gothic Revival
A style of architecture favored by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in late 19th-century France and adopted in the U.S. and elsewhere c. 1900, characterized by symmetrical plans and the eclectic use of architecture features combined so as to give a massive, elaborate, and often ostentatious effect. The term is sometimes used in a pejorative sense to designate excessive formalism disregarding considerations of structural truth, advanced aesthetic theory, rational planning, or economy.
Beaux-Arts architecture
A school of design established in Weimer, Germany, in 1919 by Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1926, and closed in 1933 as result of Nazi hostility. The concepts and ideas developed at the Bauhaus were characterized chiefly by the synthesis of technology, craft, and design aesthetic, with an emphasis on functional design in architecture and the applied arts.
Bauhaus
A deliberate philosophical and practical estrangement from the past in the arts and literature occurring in the course of the 20th century and taking form in any of various innovative movements and styles.
Modernism
A movement in architecture in the 1950s, emphasizing the aesthetic use of basic building processes, esp. of cast-in-place concrete, with no apparent concern for visual amenity.
Brutalism
A style of decorative art developed originally in the 1920s with a revival in the 1960s marked chiefly by geometric motifs, streamlined and curvilinear forms, sharly defined outlines, often bold colors, and the use of such synthetic material as plastic.
Art Deco
A style of architecture exemplifying the commonest building techniques based on the forms and materials of a particular historical period, region, or group of people.
Vernacular architecture
A movement that originated in Moscow after 1917, primarily in sculpture but with broad application to architecture. The expression construction was to be the basis for all building design, with emphasis on functional machine parts.
Constructivism
A style of design incorporating industrial, commercial, and institutional fixtures, equipment, materials, or other elements having the utilitarian appearance characteristics of industrial design.
High-tech
A philosophical and critical movement that started in the 1960s esp. in the study of literature, questioning traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizing that a text has no stable reference because words essentially refer only to other words.
Deconstruction
An edifice or place dedicated to the worship or presence of a deity.
Temple
Of or pertaining to religious objects, rites, or practices, as opposed to the secular or profane.
Sacred
Of or pertaining to the temporal or worldly rather than the sacred or spiritual.
Secular
A prehistoric monument consisting of an upright megalith, usually standing alone but sometimes aligned with others.
Menhir
A very large stone used as found or roughly dressed, esp. in ancient construction work.
Megalith
A single block of stone of considerable size, often in the form of an obelisk or column.
Monolith
A heap of stones piled up as a monument, tombstone, or landmark.
Cairn
A temple-tower in Sumerian and Assyrian architecture, built, in diminishing stages of mud brick with buttressed walls faced with burnt brick, culminating in a summit shrine or temple reached by a series of ramps.
Ziggurat
A temple-tower presumed to be great zigurrat t Babylon, which no longer survives, though it was seen and described by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century.
Tower of Babel
The Monumental stone sculptures of human-headed, winged bulls or lions that guarded the entrances to Mesopotamian palaces and temples.
Lamassu
A prehistoric monument consisting of two or more large upright stones supporting a horizontal stone slab, found esp. in Britain and France and usually regarded as a tomb.
Dolmen
An artificial mound of earth or stone, esp. over an ancient grave.
Tumulus
Two upright megaliths supporting a horizontal stone.
Trilithon
A circular arrangement of megaliths enclosing a dolmen or burial mound.
Cromlech
A circular arrangement of vertically oriented wooden posts or stones.
Henge
A megalithic monument erected in the early bronze age, on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, consisting of four concentric rings of trilithons and menhirs centered around an altar stone.
Stonehenge
A long deep passageway into an ancient subterranean tomb.
Dromos
A tomb of the Aegean civilizations consisting of a deep rectangular cut into sloping rock and a roof of timber or stone.
Shaft grave
An ancient Egyptian tomb made of mud brick, rectangular in plan with a flat roof and sloping sides, from which a shaft leads to underground burial and offering chambers.
Mastaba
A small chamber inside a mastaba containing a statue of the deceased.
Serdab
The figure of the sacred asp, depicted on the headdress of ancient Egyptian rulers and deities as an emblem of supreme power.
Uraeus
A massive Masonry structures having a rectangular base and four smooth, steeply sloping sides facing the cardinal points and meeting at an apex, used in ancient Egypt as a tomb to contain the burial chamber and the mummy of the pharaoh.
Pyramid
Usually part of a complex of buildings within a walled enclosure, including mastabas for members of the royal family, an offering chapel and a mortuary temple.
Pyramid
A raised causeway led from the enclosure down to a valley temple on the Nile. where purification rites and mummification were performed.
Pyramid
A narrow rock- cut corridor in an ancient Egyptian tomb.
Syrinx
A raised passageway ceremonially connecting the valley temple with an ancient Egyptian pyramid.
Causeway
Any of the rulers of ancients Egyptian who were believed to be divine and had absolute power.
Pharaoh
A figure of an imaginary creature having the body of a lion and the head of a man, ram, or hawk, commonly placed along avenues leading to ancient Egyptian temples or tombs.
Sphinx
An ancient Egyptian temple for the worships of a deity, as distinguished from a mortuary temple.
Cult Temple
A tomb hewn out of native rock, presenting only an architectural front with dark interior chambers, of which the sections are supported by masses of stone left in the form of solid pillars.
Rock-Cut tomb
A tall, four-sided shaft of stone that tapers as it rises to a pyramidal point, originating in ancient Egypt as a sacred symbol of the sun-god Ra and usually standing in pairs astride temple entrances.
Obelisk
A monument gateway to an ancient Egyptian temple, consisting either of a pair of tall truncated pyramids and a doorway between them or of one such masonry mass pierced with a doorway, often decorated with painted reliefs.
Pylon
A freestanding gateway having the form of a pylon and preceding the main gateway to an ancient Egyptian temple or sacred enclosure.
Propylon
A defensive military work construction for the purpose of strengthening a position.
Fortification
A prjecting part of a rampart or other fortification, typically forming an irregular pentagon attached at the base to the main work.
Bastion
Surrounded by or as if by a rampart.
Circumvallate
A small tower forming part of a larger structure, frequently beginning some distance above the ground.
Turret
A small overhanging turret on a wall or tower, often at a corner or near a gateway.
Bartizan
A lady’s private chamber in a medieval castle.
Bower
A small rear door or gate to a fort or castle.
Postern
The privy of a medieval castle or monastery.
Necessarium
The innermost and strongest structure or tower of a medieval castle, used as a place of residence, esp. in times of siege.
Keep
The upper member of a classical entablature, consisting typically of a cymatium, corona, and bed molding.
Cornice
The horizontal part of a classical entablature between the cornice and architrave, often decorated with sculpture in low relief.
Frieze
The lowermost division of a classical entablature, resting directly on the column capitals and supporting he frieze.
Achitrave
The distinctively treated upper end of a column, pillar, or pier, crowning the shaft and taking the weight of the entablature or architrave.
Capital
The central part of a column or pier between the capital and the base.
Shaft
The lowermost portion of a wall, column, pier, or other structure, usually distinctively treated and considered as an architectural unit.
Base
The horizontal section of a classical order that rests on the columns, usually composed of a cornice, frieze, and architrave.
Entablature
A cylindrical support in classical architecture, consisting of a capital, shaft and usually base, either monolithic or built up of drums the full diameter of the shaft.
Column
A construction upon which a column, statue, memorial shaft, or the like, is elevated, usually consisting of a base, a dado, and a cornice or cap.
Pedestal
The part of a pedestal between the base and the cornice or cap.
Dado
Any of five styles of classical architecture - Doric, ionic, corinthian, tuscan, and composite - characterized by the type and arrangement of columns and entablatures employed.
Order
The oldest and simplest of the five classical orders, developed in Greence in the 7th century BCE and later imitated by the Romans.
Doric order
One of the vertical blocks separating the metopes in a Doric frieze, typically having two vertical grooves or glyphs on its face, and two chambers or hemiglyphs at the sides.
Triglyph
Any of the panels, either plain or decorated, between triglyphs in the Doric frieze.
Metope
A raised band or fillet separating the frieze from the architrave on a Doric entablature.
Taenia
The flat slab forming the top of a column capital, plain in the Doric style, but molded or otherwise enriched in other styles.
Abacus
A decorative motif consisting of a series of long, rounded, parallel grooves, as on the shaft of a classical column.
Fluting
The underside of an architectural element, as that of an arch, beam, cornice, or staircase.
Soffit
One of a series of small, droplike ornaments, attached to the undersides of the mutules and regulae of a Doric entablature.
Gutta
A projecting flat block under the corona of a Doric cornice, corresponding to the modillion of other orders.
Mutule
A frieze bearing carved figures of people or animals.
Zophorus
That part of the necking between the hypotrachelium and the capital of a classical column.
Trachelium
Any member between the capital and the shaft of a classical column.
Hypotrachelium
A slight convexity given to a column to correct an optical illusion of concavity if the sides were straight.
Entasis
Any of several cylindrical stones laid one above the other to form a column or pier.
Drum
A classical order of Roman origin, basically a simplified Roman Doric characterized by an unfluted column and a plain base, capital, and entablature having no decoration other than moldings.
Tuscan Order
An ornamental motif for enriching an ovolo or enchinus, consisting of a closely set, alternating series of oval and pointed forms.
Egg and Dart
Any of series of closely spaced, small, rectangular blocks forming a molding or projecting beneath the coronas of ionic, Corinthian, and Composite cornice.
Dentil
One of the three horizontal bands making up the architrave in the ionic order.
Fascia
A base to a classical column, consisting of an upper and a lower torus separated by a scotia between two fillets.
Attic base
A deep concave molding between two fillets
Scotia
A large convex, semicircular molding, commonly found directly above the plinth of the base of a classical column.
Torus
The underlying part of a foliated capital, between the abacus and neck molding.
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