Transcript Ancient Civilizations:

Ancient Civilizations:
Mesopotamia & Egypt
Sedentary v. Nomadic?
Agriculturalists
• Sedentary lifestyle
• Cities
• Walled
• Kings
• Surplus
• Protected by military
• Specialized Labor
• Wealth and property
Pastoralists
• Nomadic lifestyle
• Tribal government
• Traded with cities
• Animal products
• Technology
• Mobility
• Warrior culture
Mesopotamia
• “land between the rivers”
• T&E very unpredictable flooding
• 3500 BCE: Sumerians
• Cuneiform-first writing
• Pressed stylus into clay
• Art: statues, frescoes
• Advances in agriculture
• Astronomy
• Base 60
• Wheeled carts
• Fertilizer and irrigation
Sumer
• Organized into city-states
• Ruled by divine king
• Polytheistic: natural gods
• Ziggurats
• Divine punishment from
floods: inspired Old
Testament
• Wrote first epic in world
history: Epic of
Gilgamesh
Sumer Social Organization
Shamash, the sun god, rising in the morning from
the eastern mountains between (left) Inanna, the
goddess of the morning star, and (far left) Ninurta,
the god of thunderstorms, with his bow and lion,
and (right) Enki, the god of fresh water, with (far
right) his vizier, the two-faced Usmu.
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Hereditary kings
Priests and Priestesses (often relatives of kings)
Free clients: peasants, builders, craftsmen, etc…*
Dependant clients: owned no land, worked for others*
Slaves
*paid taxes of surplus or labor
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Family life:
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Patriarchal
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Men could sell wife and children into slavery
Women
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Women veiled in public
Influence in courts
Priestesses and scribes
Decline of Sumer
• Its location as a crossroads made it
prone to invasion
• Also frequent fighting among citystates
• Taken over by the Akkadians then
the Babylonians
• King Hammurabi
• Code of Hammurabi;
• early written law code,
• “eye for an eye”
• different punishments for upper
and lower classes and men and
women
• Taken over by Assyrians then
Persians
Hammurabi receiving symbols of office
Egypt
• United by Narmer 3100
BCE
• Nile River, 3000 BCE
• Very predictable,
overflowed once a year
• Irrigation
• Single, unified state under
a divine Pharaoh
• Religion
• polytheistic, nature gods
• Tombs: Pyramids (2700
BCE)
• Mummification to preserve
body for afterlife
Egyptian Gods
God of
Name
Appearance
Sun
Ra
head of falcon and sun disk
Music
Hathor
horns of cow and sun disk
Destruction
Sekhmet
head of lion
Sky
Nut
blue with golden stars
Earth
Geb
colour of plants and Nile mud
Dead
Osiris
dressed in white with crook and flail
Desert
Seth
animal head with long curved snout
Pharaoh
Horus
head of hawk and crown of Egypt
Magic
Isis
throne on head or holding baby
Wisdom
Thoth
head of ibis
Embalming
Anubis
head of jackal
Justice
Ma'at
feather in her hair
Creation
Amun
crowned with feathers
Cats
Bastet
head of cat
Egyptian Numbers
1
The symbol for one may come from a finger.
10
The symbols get more complicated as the numbers get bigger.
The symbol for ten is a piece of rope.
100
The symbol for a hundred is a coil of rope.
1,000
The symbol for a thousand is the lotus or water lily.
10,000
The symbol for ten thousand is a single, large finger.
100,000
The symbol for a hundred thousand is a tadpole. It seems to
be nearly turning into a frog.
1,000,000
The symbol for a million is a god called Heh. It also means just
a very large number, like ‘drillion'.
The Egyptians even had this symbol for infinity, which is bigger than any number that's ever
been written. It is a circle, so you go round forever without finding an end. In the picture of Ra
on the right, you can see the falcon holding this symbol in each talon.
Egyptian Life
• Society:
• Patriarchal
• Women
• Royalty: women could be regent or priestess
• Educated women could be scribes
• Interacted with Mesopotamia, Kush and Ethiopia
• Advances:
• Alphabet: Hieroglyphics (not as complex as
Cuneiform)
• More advanced in math than Sumer
• Day- 24hrs
• Colorful & Cheerful paintings
Rosetta
Stone
• How we
translated
Hieroglyphics
• Had same text in
Hieroglyphics,
Demotic, and
classical Greek
• We could read
Greek, so we
were able to
figure out the
Hieroglyphs.
Woot!
Dailies:
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What is a cataract?
Why is Upper Egypt “upper”?
Describe the flow of the Nile and the winds.
Tell one interesting fact about yourself.
How do you represent a million in ancient
Egypt?