Mesopotamia Flashcards
What does Mesopotamia mean?
Land between the rivers
What two rivers border Mesopotamia?
Tigris & Euphrates
What is the modern day city where Mesopotamia is located?
Iraq
What is a dirt wall to stop an area from flooding?
Levee
What does Sumer mean?
An area in southern Mesopotamia where the first cities appeared
What is a city-state?
An early city that was a small independent country with its own land and laws and government.
What was geography/climate in southern Mesopotamia?
Low plains/flat land
Strong sun
Little rain
Dry hard soil
Rivers brought water during flood season
What was geography/climate of northern Mesopotamia?
Hilly
Received more rain
What is silt?
Fine particles of rock
Was the Euphrates River on the right side or left side?
Left
When the did earliest cities start in this area?
3500 BC
What did the earliest cities look like?
Each had own ruler
Own farmland which provided food-farms were on the outside of city walls
They would have a walled settlement surrounded by moats to keep attackers out
What are are the two largest rivers in Southwest Asia and where to the flow?
Tigris & Euphrates and they flow from Turkey to Persian Gulf
What did the Mesopotamians do for work?
Farmers
What were four major problems for Mesopotamians?
- Food shortages in hills
- Uncontrolled water supply on plains
- Difficulty building and maintaining systems to provide water across village boundaries
- Attacks from neighboring communities
Which mountains were a good area to farm in Mesopotamia?
Zagros mountains/foothills in the north
Why were the foothills a good area to farm?
The wooded hills provided timber for buildings shelters.
There were lots of stones to build tools.
Why did the farmers start to have problems in 5000 BC?
The farmers in Zagros foothills were running out of land to grown food for the larger population and there were food shortages.
How did the region Sumer become populated?
When people moved out of the foothills from food shortages and moved to the plains- an area called Sumer.
Why was it hard to farm in Sumer?
For much of the year the soil was dry and hard and then floods would come was stuff away.
How did the Sumerians fix the water supply problem?
Created irrigation systems with levees along side the river to stop flooding. When the land was dry they poked holes in the dry hard levees to let water out the holes into the thirsty fields.
Later they also built canals to control where water went and dam to collect water.
What did the canals become clogged with?
Silt clogged them so the farmers had to clean them frequently.
What was a problem with irrigation systems? How do they fix?
How to maintain them between different village boundaries.
They began working together to build and maintain which created larger communities.
As the villages increased to towns in Sumer and then became cities, how many people were there?
Several thousand.
As Sumerian cities grew why did they start fighting?
The fought over right to use more water. The upstream cities built new canals or blocked other cities canals so they would keep more water.
What did the fighting between Sumerian cities lead to?
They created city states which were like independent countries and had their own laws and government.
What was a stele?
Upright slab of stone inscribed with letters and pictures to depict important events.
What is irrigation?
Means of supplying land with water
