New Civilizations pt.2 Flashcards
A group of ancient city-states in southern Mesopotamia; the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia.
Sumer
first civilization located between the Tigris & Eurphrates Rivers in present day Iraq; term means “land between the rivers”
Mesopotamia
A massive pyramidal stepped tower made of mud bricks. The center of society for Mesopotamians, and the focal point of religion, social welfare, etc.
Ziggurat
Belief in many gods`
Polytheism
Belief in one god
Monotheism
A smaller early civilization whose development of a monotheistic faith that provided the foundation of modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam assured them a significant place in world history.
Hebrews
A maritime civilization of the Mediterranean that developed extensive trade and communication networks as well as an early phonetic alphabetical script (1500 B.C.E)
Phoenicians
A group pf semi-nomadic peoples who migrated from central Asia to India, Europe, and the Middle East. Their language base is the basis of most European languages.
Indo-Europeans
An Indo-European people from central Anatolia who established an empire in Anatolia and Syria in the Late Bronze Age. They had wealth from the trade in metals and military power based on chariot forces.
Hittites
embalmment and drying a dead body and wrapping it as a mummy.
Mummification
A geographical area of fertile land in the Middle East stretching in a broad semicircle from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates.
Fertile Crescent
Known as a warrior people who ruthlessly conquered neighboring countries; their empire stretched from east to north of the Tigris River all the way to central Egypt. They used ladders, weapons like iron-tipped spears, daggers and swords, tunnels, and fearful military tactics to gain strength in their empire.
Assyrians
A legal code developed by King Hammurabi of Mesopotamia. The code specified crimes and punishments to help judges impose penalties. It was based on social class as well.
Hammurabi’s Code
A system of writing in which wedge-shaped symbols represented words or syllables. It originated in Mesopotamia and was used initially for Sumerian and Akkadian but later was adapted to represent other languages of western Asia. Because so many symbols had to be learned, literacy was confined to a relatively small group of administrators and scribes.
Cuneiform
People trained to write using the earliest forms of writing before literacy was widespread.
Scribes
Characters that stand for objects.
Pictographs
An alphabet of characters intended to represent specific sounds of speech
Phonetic Alphabet
Ancient Egyptian writing system using picture symbols for ideas or sounds.
Hieroglyphics
form of hieroglyphic, more popular for everyday types of writing bc it was less illustrative and characters were highly abstract and symbolic.
Demotic Script
A religion with a belief in one god. It originated with Abraham and the Hebrew people. Yahweh was responsible for the world and everything within it. They preserved their early history in the Old Testament.
Judaism
“political geography” - analyzes the geography impacts political decisions. For example, how Mesopotamia was conquered and turned into an empire based on its desert landscape.
Geopolitics
An ancient city of Mesopotamia known for its wealth, luxury, and vice. It was known for cultural innovation like the calendar and its mathematics system.
Babylon
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Ziggurat
Egyptians built these structures to protect the bodies of dead pharaohs. These structures also contained items the pharaohs might need in the afterlife.
Pyramids
Large building projects that go way beyond the Neolithic Era, they are a hallmark of the move toward civilization because of the clear indication of specialized labor and wealth accumulation by a central power.
Monumental Architecture
Egypt became too large to be governed alone, so the Pharaohs started a bureaucracy, taxation, etc. to manage various lands during this time. Also, the most iconic monuments of Egypt were built during the Old Kingdom.
Old Kingdom Egypt