Review Week 1
Review:
Image: Sumerian Musical Instrument
The Sumerian civilization was the first high society; they contributed many technologies we use today like the wheel, smelting metals, the base 60 clock, the 12 month calendar, and writing and schooling. Sumerian society was organized into city states and a social hierarchy. Their religion was centralized and polytheistic, but most importantly it was anthropomorphic. Their gods looked and acted like humans, and had human needs. We looked at the evolution of their writing from pictographic record-keeping to truly symbolic characters used to record stories and events. We watched a video about the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that has many of the narrative elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The Standard of Ur, a two sided, highly decorated piece shows Sumerian civilization in war and peace. It also demonstrates the extensive trade network of the time, as many of the precious metals used to illustrate the piece are from outside of Mesopotamia, the location of Sumer. The following class period, we looked at the rise of the Akkadian empire, that conquered the Sumerian city-states. The Akkadian Empire, established by Sargon of Agade, preserved the technological advances of Sumer, spreading writing and the wheel across Mesopotamia. After the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, the Babylonian Empire came to power. We focused on the Code of Hammurabi, a list of transgressions and punishments inscribed in steles and posted in major cities. The stele has an illustration of Hammurabi, a ruler. receiving the laws from Shamash, a god, at the top. This concept shows the people that the laws were not set by men but were an extension of their god’s power, so to disobey them was to defy God. However the Code was deeply sexist and unfair to the lower classes. Where men would be whipped as a punishment, women would be killed. Where the poor would be branded, the wealthy could escape punishment by paying a fine.
From the Babylonians we turned to the Indo-Europeans. A group originally from between the Black and Caspian Seas, they borrowed the wheel from the Sumerians, and with their horses, spread across Europe and Asia. They mixed with the local people and created the Indo-European langue tree. They were originally referred to as Aryans, but after the Nazis, that word could no longer be used. The Hittites were an Indo-European people who destroyed the Babylonian Empire and brought about the Iron Age, taking technology from Mesopotamia and transforming it into more efficient chariots. We then looked south to the Egyptians, who saw the earth as dived into the land of the living and the land of the dead. Their civilization appeared on the banks of the Nile, an area with very fertile soil and reliable irrigation. Their written language was hieroglyphics, similar to cuneiform, but more pictorial. Egyptian society was isolated from others by deserts and oceans, creating a stable environment for developments like pyramid building, and improvement on the ritual of burying their dead in mastabas. The pyramids were built by farmers, not slaves, showing the loyalty and belief of the people that their kings were divine and to obey them was to win favor with a future god.
Resources:
Make sure you have watched the videos, and explored the interactive maps found in the content page.
Looking Ahead:
Next Week we will take a look at the Egyptians, and the Iron Age empires of the first milenium BCE