sunday monday Flashcards
what where the 2 rivers called
Tigris and the Euphrates
what place was in between the 2 rivers
Mesopotamia
what dose Mesopotamia mean
Greek for the land ‘between the rivers
what language is the word Mesopotamia in
Greek for the land ‘between the rivers
where is Mesopotamia located
Mesopotamia is not in Africa, but in Asia
though still not so very far from our part of the world, in a region called
the Middle East
The Tigris and the Euphrates join together and then flow out into the
Persian Gulf.
One such mound, standing in the desert, is all that remains of ______, once the greatest city on earth
Babylon
what was the greatest city on earth
Babylon
what place would everyone go to trade
Babylon
Upstream, at the foot of the mountains, sits another. This was ______, the second greatest city in the land.
Nineveh
what is the second greatest city of all time
Nineveh
Babylon was the capital of the
Babylonians
that’s easy enough to remember—Nineveh was that of the
Assyrians
Many tribes and many kings held power at different times. The most important of these were the
Sumerians
The Babylonians, and the Assyrians. For a long time it was thought that the ______ were the first people to have everything that goes to make up what we call a culture:
Egyptians
what makes up culter
towns and tradesmen, noblemen and kings, temples and priests, administrators and artists, writing and technical skills.
Yet we now know that, in some respects, the Sumerians were ahead of the ______.
Egyptians
Excavations of rubble mounds on plains near the Persian Gulf have revealed that the people living there had already learnt how to shape bricks from clay and build houses and temples by _____ BC
3100
Deep inside one of the largest of these mounds were found the ruins of the city of Ur where, so the Bible tells us, ______ was born.
Abraham
A great number of tombs were also found that appeared to date from the same time as ______ Great Pyramid in Egypt
Cheops’s
But while the pyramid was empty, these tombs were packed with the most astonishing treasures
Dazzling golden headdresses and gold vessels for sacrifices, gold helmets and gold daggers set with semi-precious stones. Magnificent harps decorated with bulls’ heads, and—would you believe it—a gameboard, beautifully crafted and patterned like a chessboard. The explorer who found these treasures took many of them to England
Magnificent harps decorated with bulls’ heads, and—would you believe it—a gameboard, beautifully crafted and patterned like a chessboard. The explorer who found these treasures took many of them to _____
England
where you can see them in the British Museum. Others are in the University of Pennsylvania and the Museum of _______
Baghdad in Iraq.
They also found round seals and inscribed clay tablets in those tombs. However, the inscriptions were not in hieroglyphs, but in a totally different script that was, if anything, even harder to decipher. This was because these pictures had been replaced by neatly incised single strokes ending in a small triangle, or wedge. The script is called ______
cuneiform
what dose cuneiform mean
meaning wedge-shaped
Books made of ____ were unknown to Mesopotamians. They inscribed these signs into tablets of soft clay, which they then baked hard in ovens
papyrus
Huge numbers of these ancient tablets have been found, some recounting long and wonderful stories, such as that of the _______ and his battles with monsters and dragons.
hero Gilgamesh
in the story hero Gilgamesh what did he say he was fighting
monsters and dragons.
There are also tablets on which _______ recorded their business dealings—contracts, receipts, and inventories of goods—and thanks to these we know that, even before the Babylonians and Assyrians, the ancient Sumerians were already great traders
merchants
Their ______ could calculate with ease, and plainly knew the difference between what was lawful and what was not.
merchants
One of the first Babylonian kings to rule over the whole region left a long and important inscription, engraved in ______.
stone
It is the oldest law-book in the world, and is known as _______.
the Code of Hammurabi
So it is worth remembering when King Hammurabi lived: around ______ BC
1700
that is some ______ years ago.
The Babylonians, and the Assyrians after them, were disciplined and hardworking, but they didn’t paint cheerful pictures like the Egyptians
3700 years ago
Most of their statues and reliefs show kings
out hunting or inspecting kneeling captives bound in chains, or foreign tribes-people fleeing before the wheels of their chariots, and warriors attacking fortresses.
The kings look ______, and__________
forbidding, and have long black ringlets and rippling beards. They are also sometimes shown making sacrifices to Baal, the sun god, or to the moon goddess Ishtar or Astarte
For both the Babylonians and the Assyrians worshiped the ______ and the _______
sun and moon and stars
On clear, warm nights, throughout the year and over centuries, they observed and recorded everything they saw in the skies. And because they were intelligent, they noticed what
they noticed that the stars revolved in a regular way. They soon learnt to recognize those that seemed fixed to the vault
In those days people thought that the earth was a ______________
flat disk, and that the sky was a sort of hollow sphere cupped over the earth that turned over it once each day.
