There is very little rainfall in Lower Mesopotamia. However, snow, melting in the mountains at the source of these two rivers, created an annual flooding. The flooding deposited silt, which is fertile , rich, soil, on the banks of the rivers every year. This is why Mesopotamia is part of the fertile crescent, an area of land in the Middle East that is rich in fertile soil and crescent-shaped.
The Sumerians were the first people to migrate to Mesopotamia, they created a great civilization. Beginning around 5, years ago, the Sumerians built cities along the rivers in Lower Mesopotamia, specialized, cooperated, and made many advances in technology. The wheel, plow, and writing a system which we call cuneiform are examples of their achievements. The farmers in Sumer created levees to hold back the floods from their fields and cut canals to channel river water to the fields.
The use of levees and canals is called irrigation, another Sumerian invention. You can play an irrigation simulation game at the British Museum Mesopotamia website by opening the link at the bottom of this page. A typical Sumerian city-state, notice the ziggurat, the tallest building in the city. The Sumerians had a common language and believed in the same gods and goddesses.
The belief in more than one god is called polytheism. There were seven great city-states, each with its own king and a building called a ziggurat, a large pyramid-shaped building with a temple at the top, dedicated to a Sumerian deity. Although the Sumerian city-states had much in common, they fought for control of the river water, a valuable resource. Each city-state needed an army to protect itself from its neighbors. Watch the video clip below from Discovery Education, as Nissaba, a young Sumerian girl, talks about her people's accomplishments.
This clip is no longer available. By clicking on any links the user is leaving the Penfield School District website, the district is not responsible for any information associated with these links. In , English archaeologist, C. Woolley learned archaeology from some of the best of his day, and now he was ready to strike off on his own.
Many people felt that Ur was only a myth, but Woolley, the son of a clergyman , was fascinated by the stories his father told about Ur, which, according to the Bible, was the birth place of Abraham. Abraham is a central figure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, three monotheistic religions. See footnote 13 at the end of the selection.
Could you explain in the Epic of Gilgamesh why 6 days 7 nights? The point is, can you stay awake for a week 7 nights? Can you provide more explanation about the Code of Hammurabi, specifically, laws ? Note that the death penalty can be waived by the aggrieved husband or the owner of an adulterous slave. As in the Bible and in Islam, witnesses of the adulterous act are required to impose punishment. These restrictions have often been ignored, however, and women condemned on mere reputation.
Different parts applied to different citizens, as the reader notes. It was recopied for centuries after his time, so it was probably used over a long period. Or so they thought. Could women have any businesses besides just wine-selling? Did Hammurabi make up the laws himself, or did someone help him? Of course he claimed Shamash gave him the laws; but in fact they probably evolved over centuries and he just approved the code. How did the Sumerians get the connection between human sexuality and the prosperity of crops?
Agricultural peoples even before civilization were making this connection. They noted their own reproductive activity as analogous to that of their animals and plants and thought one could encourage the other. Did the Sumerians believe in an afterlife or not?
Like many ancient peoples, including most ancient Greeks, they believed a vague sort of after-death state—a miserable existence surrounded by demons.
They had no Heaven or Hell for humans. What exactly is the Code of Hammurabi? The law code promulgated by the Babylonian king Hammurabi.
At the same time that they were connected internally, they were also mostly protected externally, by barriers that almost completely stopped nomad invasion, and greatly limited the possibility of organized armies intruding.
In this situation Egypt's rulers more easily built and kept central power over the whole area, and Egypt's religion generally was more optimistic in its view of nature and the gods see below for more on both of these topics. Egyptian and Mesopotamian Geography compared: At this point you should have a clear idea of how to answer the Study Topic first posed in the Mesopotamia part of this essay.
Egyptian Historic Eras: A few words on them. Chapter 2 covers the story of developing Egyptian civilization through what is known as the Middle Kingdom era, that is, from about to about the s BCE. Your text chooses to look at the later era New Kingdom developments in Chapter 3, so we will do the same looking at them in the Chapter 3 Essay. This makes sense, since Chapter 2 is basically about the development of the full pattern of earliest civilization, and by the Middle Kingdom all crucial aspects of Egyptian rule and society were quite well established.
A note on terms: Old, Middle, and New Kingdom are traditional, long-established period names that historians just keep on using. They basically apply to the three great, long periods of Egyptian stability and prosperity, which were separated by two much shorter periods of breakdown and between the Middle and New Kingdoms invasion. In contrast to Mesopotamia, in which new peoples took over and amended somewhat the culture and style of rule struggling to move from city-state to empire rule , in all three great periods Egypt was ruled by Egyptians who continued the most basic patterns of Pharaoh rule, religion, and patterns of life although expanding them in many ways, as we will see.
Pharaoh Rule in Egypt: Centralized Civilization under a "living god". Here keep in mind the following study topic:. In theory, and often pretty much in fact, the Pharaoh was the all-powerful ruler of Egypt. Where Sumer was divided among many independent city-states, and centralized rule represented a challenge even to even the most successful later Mesopotamian imperial conquerors, almost from the beginning civilized Egypt was unified by tradition, in about BCE by Menes - or Narmer under the authority of god-king Pharaohs.
Basically geography made it fairly easy for a line of men to call themselves rulers of all Egypt, where in Sumer they would have had to settle for "just" being kings of one of a number of city-states. Probably the greatness of this achievement, plus the fact that they didn't face kingly competitors, let the early rulers actually call themselves gods, not just chief godly servants.
The basic belief said that, one the moment of becoming Pharaoh, a man became a living god, the son of the sun god originally Re representing Egyptians to the gods, and keeping Egypt in tune with the forces of nature and those gods. The Pharaoh did this by maintaining Ma'at Truth; universal order. Especially at first, in the Old Kingdom era the Pharaoh's government really did dominate everything major. In good part this was thanks to Egypt's geography of rapid river travel communication and sheltering natural barriers against intrusion.
Again in theory, the Pharaohs owned all the land, and in fact, thanks to relatively quick travel time on the Nile, they could appoint mid-level representatives to administer temples and fields, and require all major elites' regular attendence at the royal court, thus keeping dominance over them.
In some senses early Egypt was like one very long, thin, large city-state, with one ruler who personally dominated all the top elite priests and warriors. In good part because Egypt lacked very few natural resources, so traded mostly for desired as opposed to absolutely needed goods, trade and traders were never as important in Egypt as they became in Mesopotamia.
It was in the formative Old Kingdom period of greatest Pharaoh domination that Egypt built what remains its best known form of monumental architecture, the pyramids. Go see a photograph the first really monumental pyramid, the famous Step Pyramid of Zoser. In it, the basic stepped foundation of the pyramid shape is still clearly visible. Then go look at of two of the most famous pyramids of all, which are part of the Great Pyramids at Giza , note the Sphynx is also visible.
Note the basic shape stays the same, but is refined not only by becoming bigger, but also with smoother sides.
The basic shape is the same as that of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, but not its function. Mesopotamia's ziggurats were topped by busy temples serving the living interests of the whole city ie, keeping the gods from being any more destructive than was inevitable ; inside they usually stored surpluses, could be places of refuge, and housed temple priests and administrative offices.
In contrast, Egypt's pyramids were tombs to keep safe the bodies of dead pharaohs, in order that their spirits, in the first crucial years after their death, would have a safe place to return, as they negotiated the journey to the afterlife, where they were expected to continue to look out for Egypt's interests.
Like the ziggurats, the pyramids show that the ruling elites of their eras controlled massive resources labor and goods. As your book explains, the technology of the pyramids was really quite simple; what is most impressive is the massive amount of human labor that went to built what were in fact immense tombs for a few dead kings.
They were many scholars believe literally jumping off points for the dead ruler's soul, plus safe repositories for his body during period of its journey through the afterlife.
Rulers and their priests justified these great construction jobs with the theory that the dead pharaohs could continue to help living Egyptians only if they safely travelled through the underworld to the realms of afterlife.
During this period Egyptians seem to have believed that an afterlife was possible for only the pharaohs plus perhaps a few favored companions also buried in their or neighboring smaller pyramids. The work was done during Innundation, when no work in the fields was possible, and most peasants were probably delighted to have a job that earned them food and maybe a little pay. During this time the stones needed for construction could be floated over flood waters to get relatively close to the pyramids' construction grounds But such construction was still only possible during the few centuries c.
Probably the custom also ended because the pyramids were so visible, and tomb robbers kept breaking into them, stealing the goods left to accompany the royal corpses in the afterlife, and often trampling even those corpses. For whatever combination of reasons, later pharaohs therefore started instead building hidden tombs, in the usually forlorn hope of their own bodies avoiding similar fates.
Middle Kingdom Changes: limited but important. The immense pharaoh's government power that built the pyramids continued, in an only somewhat more limited form, for well more than another thousand years of Egyptian greatness. Probably this power continued in part because so many more people shared in its exercise and benefits.
By the end of the Old Kingdom era, subordinate elites were growing more powerful, with far-flung regional landholdings and status that later O. By the time the land fragmented, the elites had already established regional courts in which they continued the essence of Egyptian civilization despite the fall of the royal center. Priests and temples also survived by building temples that served more and more Egyptians, and by re-interpreting ideas of the afterlife to say that it might be possible for all Egyptians - if they managed to carry out lesser versions of the early royal death rituals more on this later.
About one hundred and fifty years after Old Kingdom Egyptian centralized rule fragmented, a new unifying dynasty put all of Egypt back together, restoring the whole structure of god-king central rule. But now the priests and temples served all Egyptians in, of course, lesser and greater ways , and elite families served at court with at least some regional stability and roots of their own behind them.
Yet this was not just a time in which the old warrior and priestly elites shared some more of the pharaoh's power. It was also a time of greater social mobility, in which the best ordinary man might rise to become a great scribe, priest, warrior, or member of the royal bureaucracy, and in which merchants and lesser regional elites lived better and had something of a middle status. The result for Middle Kingdom Egypt was a vibrant society of many elites, some active at the royal court and others of importance in their own region.
These elites came from land owning families however much the land was theoretically the pharaoh's, but the M. Most Egyptians were of course not elites, but rather ordinary farmers working their own land and landless peasants, with rights to live on elite-controlled land, but obligations to the land's masters. While slavery existed, most were free. Women, while not fully equal, overall remained better off in Egypt than in evolving Mesopotamia, where their rights were already significantly limited by the time of Hammurabi, and would become much more limited later.
As with almost all civilizations, Egypt's public sphere of royal rule, the battlefield, long-distance trade belonged almost completely to men - and it was in those places that new power developed, and new ideas brewed. But especially as compared to other early civilizations, Egyptian women did very well, losing relatively few absolute legal rights, and maintaining that position throughout the period while most early civilizations saw women's rights increasingly limited as time went on.
Egyptian women kept most of their legal rights even in marriage: they could craft special marriage contracts guaranteeing almost any special rights as vs. Hammurabi's Code's "one size fits all" limitations on married women. Generally married, like single, women could not only own but actively control property, as well as leaving to heirs of their own choice. There were also relatively more paid occupations still open to them in the public sphere, including as priestesses and even occasionally as scribes.
Royal women definitely had real status within the royal family; a number were important when young boys inherited the throne, and about five actually ruled, one as a female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Women of all levels continued to appear in public, rather than being increasingly expected - if elite - to stay within the private sphere of their own men's household.
Scholars have a number of guesses about why Egyptian women lost less power, status and autonomy. Some suggest that the greater power of the pharaoh meant less absolute elite family control of property and status, and thus less motive to control the women of their families.
Others emphasize Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt's relative lack of warfare and standing armies; military dominance usually sparks increased emphasis on things male. Egyptian Knowledge, Beliefs and Culture. Writing : Like the Sumerians, the Egyptians invented their own system of writing called hieroglyphics. They , too, started with pictures which became more and more standardized as symbols, and then added other symbols for sounds and concepts.
It is quite likely that they were did so having heard that the Sumerians had already done something of the sort, but since all of their symbols are different, it is fairly clear that they at most borrowed the idea that it was possible, rather than the system of writing itself.
The priests of the era taught that this writing was literally a gift of the gods, intended to allow communication with them. As with Sumer, almost certainly priests were the first users of writing, but scribes soon also served rulers, merchants, and eventually increasing although always small numbers of literate Egyptians.
Egyptians used ink on papyrus for their permanent records, which certainly were therefore lighter and more easily stored than Mesopotamia's clay tablets of course, they were also more easily destroyed. In general, hieroglyphic writing worked almost exactly the same way in Egyptian civilization as did cuneiform in Mesopotamia.
Some scholars point out that we have less epic literature from Egypt than was produced in Mesopotamia with Gilgamesh being an outstanding example , but there is no real agreement on what this means. Perhaps literature was lost, perhaps life in a kinder land meant more enjoyment of the here-and-now and less poetry about human misery.
Just for fun: The above hieroglyphics are somewhat bogus, but fun. The are the course instructor's name Sara Tucker created by an online computer program that assigned an hieroglyph symbol to each letter of our modern alphabet. While the website that generated this image no longer exists, another one has appeared. Knowledge: Like Mesopotamians, Egyptians also developed a numbering system, and reliable calendar, the basics of engineering and metal-smithing, etc.
Beliefs: Like Mesopotamians, Egyptians believed in many gods. Unlike Mesopotamians, Egyptians seem to have worshipped fairly kindly gods, and - by the Middle Kingdom - believed in the possibility of a good afterlife. Rebirth and life after death is a central part of the Osiris story, as is the pattern of Egyptian god-kingship. Your book tells you that, according to ancient Egyptian belief, Osiris was a god who once ruled Egypt. He was killed by his jealous brother Seth or Set , who eventually cut up his body and scattered the pieces across the land.
These pieces were each discovered and brought together by Osiris's loving sister and wife Isis. The pieces were mummified, and then Isis turned into a kite-bird, and with her wings fanned life back into Osiris. Later Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, got vengence on Seth. Osiris was made god of the Underworld we'll go into this more below, when we get to the Book of the Dead. There he judged the souls of the dead by Old Kingdom Egyptian beliefs, perhaps only dead pharaohs made it to his judgement, and thus the chance for a good afterlife.
Some legends say Horus then ruled Egypt for quite a while, before becoming a god of the sky. Pharaohs were seen as playing the Horus role, as living-god sons of the more senior gods. A good many different things of significance can be seen in this story. Pretty clearly all of this is a death and rebirth story, reflecting the earthly cycles of the seasons and of harvest, flood, and new harvest.
In its later versions, with Osiris judging the souls of all sorts of Egyptians, it definitely offers a more optimistic vision of the afterlife than does the Sumerian Gilgamesh story. While having male gods at its center, it also shows a female, Isis, playing a crucial, active role - it is she who both gathers the fragments of Osiris and fans life back into them.
Finally it also gives one mythical basis for the great Egyptian belief in mummification. In essence, Egyptians believed that after death the body had to be preserved, in order to give a safe refuge for the dead person's soul, which might be floating around for quite a while after death. As mentioned above, originally the idea may have been that only pharaohs and a few friends could achieve an afterlife among the gods, but by the Middle Kingdom priests and temples assured ordinary Egyptians that, with proper mummification, rituals, and attention from descendants, all could hope to achieve survival after death.
There therefore grew up a huge business, centered around the priests and the temples, for preserving bodies correctly. Your text describes the process in some limited detail. It has been suggested that Egyptian medicine was probably better than that of most early civilizations, thanks to the anatomical knowledge priests gained while preparing so many bodies for mummification. While poor Egyptians could hope for only the cheapest mummification, if that, still the expansion of the practice is one clear example of how Egyptian tradition did change significantly underneath the surface of its great continuing patterns.
Kings, priests and commoners were now all united within one great belief system from which all could hope to benefit - and of course priests had also assured themselves permanent importance and employment by whoever could afford their services to the dead.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is without doubt the most famous window we have onto Egypt's fully-developed religious beliefs. There actually was no one "book," rather that is the name given to the collection of many papyrus scrolls found in sarcophagi something like coffins and tombs. Most seem to have been created perhaps toward the end of the Middle Kingdom or during the subsequent New Kingdom era of c.
They have been called "cheat sheets" and "AAA trip guides" for the dead in their journey through the underground and to the afterlife. These were provided by priests for a fee to accompany the dead as they voyaged through the complex and dangerous world of many gods.
Some of the problems the dead were believed to face had to do with Egyptian "childish gods. But eventually successful souls reached another sort of test, one that no "cheat sheet" could help. If they got that far, all had to appear before Osiris, as Judge of the Underworld, and have their hearts weighed for good and bad deeds. If the heart weighed more than a feather, the dead were fed to crocodiles, and perished for all eternity.
From this part of the Book , we see that Egyptian gods were no longer believed to be entirely childish or uninterested in humankind. The nature of what counted for good and bad deeds is especially interesting. Certainly they included showing due respect to gods and their priests , but mostly they had to do with good human behavior towards each other.
Thus good deeds included refraining from harming or cheating other persons, and also in carrying out ones obligations to family and friends. Egyptian religious beliefs and practices clearly changed from the early days when only pharaohs could hope for eternal life, and all of Egypt's resources went toward the tombs of a very few men.
Indus River Valley Civilization, c. This segment is much shorter than that for either Egypt or Mesopotamia, because we know much less about the vanished - and for a while "lost" in terms of our knowledge of it - earliest civilization of India. Yet it appeared almost as early as the two great Middle Eastern civilizations, and for a while perhaps reached about the same heights.
Thus your study topic says:. The question is put this way because what we do now know about the Indus or Harappan civilization is almost completely based on archeological excavations of the area. Specific memory that the civilization ever existed was lost until 19th-century re-discoveries, and although writing from that era has been discovered, scholars are not yet able to decipher it.
Geographic Context. Indus River civilization formed, not surprisingly given its name, along the seven rivers in the area of what is now the Indus River system. As your text explains, all the rivers involved have since shifted course at least some, and several have dried up completely, including the once-very important Hakra River. As in Egypt, probably advanced neolithic farming and herding peoples had contacts with Mesopotamian seaborne traders, and so learned something about the advantages of more complex ways of life from the earliest Sumerians.
Increasingly scholars date the Indus civilization's appearance from about BCE it was once put a good deal later; some scholars would put it somewhatt earlier, although almost all would put its emergence just slightly later than Egypt's.. Two great city excavation sites are the source of much of our present knowledge of this civilization.
The larger of the two is Mohenjo-daro, located on the Indus itself, somewhat north of the area of river plain known as Sind. Note that Sind is shown on the above map - it is not shown on the Chapter 3 map in your text.
The smaller of the two great city sites is Harappa, located about miles upstream, on a major tributary river.
The entire river system is at the western edge of the Indian sub-continent. Although open to outside contact, especially by sea, the Indian subcontinent is also significantly separated from the Middle East and the rest of Asia by a whole range of physical barriers. These include several very high mountain ranges to the north and west, patches of desert to the west, jungle to the east, and a great extent of seacoast.
The greatest of the mountain barriers is the Himalaya Mountains, which across the top of whole length of the Ganges River, and across the northern end of the Indus River system. To the northwest, the Hindu Kush is the greatest of the other mountains that block entrance to India along all but a few western routes. This left India mostly open to travellers coming either by sea, through a few western mountain passes, or from the west across the southern reaches of the Indus the area of Sind.
Today scholars believe that the Indus peoples came to form their civilization in much the same way that first the Mesopotamian and then the Egyptian peoples did. Local Indus-area communities organized to build large irrigation works, and from these came the surpluses, the specialists, the hierarchies, etc that supported the city populations while they concentrated full-time on new specialized occupations that produced the complexity that we call civilization.
What we know of them comes first from their cities that scholars have excavated. We know that they built using bricks - sun-dried for above-ground work, but longer lasting, more expensive kiln-dried ones for foundation work. Their two great cities were laid out on very similar, very orderly grid patterns, and contained covered drainpipes it is believed to carry away sewage.
Significant numbers of their residential houses were several stories high, with individual drainage systems connecting to the city sewers. At the center of Mohenjo-daro there was a large building containing a large tank or pools, with waterproof linings and pipes capable of filling them with water.
Go see a good a photograph of this Great Bath archeological site. Clearly water was not only important for Indus farming, but also in some way for life within its cities. The cities also had walls, presumably for defense against possible attacks by some kind of outsiders. Most scholars point out that there must have been some strong organizing leadership to produce such uniform, labor-intensive city-wide brick construction, but they do not know under what kind of authority or elites, or whether they persuaded or compelled obedience.
We do know that the bronze spearpoints found were very fragile and likely to crumble after one use. We also know that the Indus peoples were very good metalworkers, had access to quite good amounts of metal ore, and were able to vary their exact proportions of bronze alloy to fit specific needs, Thus some scholars speculate that spearpoints may have been seen as not needing to be used again and again. This would suggest a society not dominated by warriors engaged in frequent, serious combat.
If this was so, it seems natural to wonder if perhaps Indus area priests retained a greater share of power than those in city-state Mesopotatmia. So far, we simply don't know. This reality is accurately reflected in the Priest-King name usually given to the statue, found at Mohenjo-daro, of what certainly seems to be an elite man of some sort. So what else do we know, at least a little more dependably? From objects found in excavations at not only Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, but also many other smaller sites, scholars have found definite evidence of an advanced level of civilization.
Numbers of seals and tablets show that Indus peoples had writing, although so far it has not been deciphered. These seals were probably used to produce individual "signatures," for whatever business a person might do. Excavations also turn up excellent pottery and many pieces of decorative metalwork.
Goods from Mesopotamia also show that the Indus people engaged in trade with peoples to their west. At their height, the Indus peoples' irrigated fields were clearly able to produce surpluses that supported large numbers of skilled specialist craftsmen and traders. One interesting characteristic, in which they differed from Egypt and Mesopotamia, is that people living in outlying towns and even villages seem to have had about the same high level of possessions as those available to people in the central cities.
This included even objects made of valuable bronze. While in most other early civilizations bronze was used only for elite peoples' weapons and religious vessels, fairly ordinary Indus peoples seem to have had access to bronze tools.
Thus, the benefits of civilization seem to have been more evenly and broadly distributed in the Indus area. Clearly, then, there are a great many kinds of things we do know - somewhat - about Egypt and Mesopotamia that we don't know about the Indus peoples.
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