cuneiform
earliest form of writing, developed in mesopotamia around 3k BCE, utilized clay tablets, taught us how life was like in mesopotamia, taught us about other smaller surrounder civilizationsm originally used for accounting
river basin
an area drained by a river including all of its tributaries, most early civilizations settled on one, they were appealing to humans because of the rich fertile soil, early civilizations utilized them for a steady source of agriculture (plants and animals), some major river basins were on the nile and yellow/yangtzee and tigris/euphrates
ziggurat
developed in mesopotamia, they developed from smaller religious shrines, stepped platform that served as the base of the sumerian temple, they served as a dwelling place for the god of whatever city it was located in, show us how mesopotamia really valued religion
scribes
first people to master writing, they were at the top of the social ladder from the beginning, they were the people who made important documents or religious texts or trade receipts, they created all the forms of writing like cuneiform or hieroglyphs or hieratic, without scribes we wouldn’t know close to the amount of info we know about ancient civilizations
Burial Sites
archaeologists have discovered burial sites from ancient civilizations like the Longshan, they are sites in cities where most people were buried, some sites have very crazy tombs for important people or normal ones for working class, learned how village walls in longshan culture were important because of how attackers filled water with skeletons and scalped the dead, we also learned how shamans performed rituals to the dead using jade axes (show technical sophistication)
Enheduanna
history’s first known author, father was king sargon the great (united the city states of mesopotamia), she unified religion/culture for sargon’s kingdom, was high priestess for 40 years, managed resources and helped design temples, her writing provides views into life in mesopotamia and women’s roles in life
Sargon the Great
unified the city states of mesopotamia, was the king of akkadia, lived from 2334-2279 BCE, was the father of Enheduanna, important because his unification represents the first multiethnic unification of urban centers
hieroglyphic/hieratic writing
first writing systems used/created in egypt hieroglyphs was a system of symbols, used for more sacred and monumental reasons, hieratic was used for more simpler reasons in everyday life and administrative tasks, these are important because it allows to learn more about egyptian life and religion
Nile
river in northern Africa in modern-day egypt, predictability as the source of human life and abundance shaped the egyptian people’s culture, it was gentle and bountiful, main source of life for ancient egypt, it shows us how the egyptian culture shaped to the predictability of the river and why they settled there
pharoah
a ruler in ancient egypt, first rulers emerged around 3k BCE, they were at the center of egyptian life, their main jobs were keep the ma’at and protect the city from invader, ma’at is the balance between universal order and disorder
harappan culture and society
Harrapia was in the indus river valley located in south asia, they were an abundant in agriculture due to a steady flow of water from melting himalayan snows, their cities were very strategically built with a citadel housing public facilities alongside residential areas, they had a logographic writing system which was unable to decipher, we dont know much from their culture as we only have information from broken buried architecture and design
longshan culture
second culture in china after Yangshao, located on the yellow/yangtzee rivers in east asia, learned a lot about them from their cemeteries, they never had major political organizations but only short lived ones, not yet city states but small settlements and agriculture started to really flourish
