The Akkadian Empire existed from B. He was at one point an officer who worked for the king of Kish, and Akkadia was a city that Sargon himself established. When the city of Uruk invaded Kish, Sargon took Kish from Uruk and was encouraged to continue with conquest. Sargon expanded his empire through military means, conquering all of Sumer and moving into what is now Syria. Under Sargon, trade beyond Mesopotamian borders grew, and architecture became more sophisticated, notably the appearance of ziggurats, flat-topped buildings with a pyramid shape and steps.
The final king of the Akkadian Empire, Shar-kali-sharri, died in B. Among these groups were the Gutian people, barbarians from the Zagros Mountains. In B. The ruler of Ur-Namma, the king of the city of Ur, brought Sumerians back into control after Utu-hengal, the leader of the city of Uruk, defeated the Gutians. Ur-Namma was attacked by both the Elamites and the Amorites and defeated in B. Choosing Babylon as the capital, the Amorites took control and established Babylonia.
Kings were considered deities and the most famous of these was Hammurabi , who ruled — B. Hammurabi worked to expand the empire, and the Babylonians were almost continually at war. The list of laws also featured recommended punishments to ensure that every citizen had the right to the same justice. Together with the control of the Amorites, this conquest marked the end of Sumerian culture.
Smelting was a significant contribution of the Hittites, allowing for more sophisticated weaponry that lead them to expand the empire even further. Their attempts to keep the technology to themselves eventually failed, and other empires became a match for them.
The Hittites pulled out shortly after sacking Babylon, and the Kassites took control of the city. Hailing from the mountains east of Mesopotamia, their period of rule saw immigrants from India and Europe arriving, and travel sped up thanks to the use of horses with chariots and carts.
The Kassites abandoned their own culture after a couple of generations of dominance, allowing themselves to be absorbed into Babylonian civilization. Reception of a victorious general of the Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia. Around B. The Assyrian Empire continued to expand over the next two centuries, moving into modern-day Palestine and Syria. Under the rule of Ashurnasirpal II in B.
His son Shalmaneser spent the majority of his reign fighting off an alliance between Syria, Babylon and Egypt, and conquering Israel. One of his sons rebelled against him, and Shalmaneser sent another son, Shamshi-Adad, to fight for him. Three years later, Shamshi-Adad ruled.
A new dynasty began in B. Modeling himself on Sargon the Great, he divided the empire into provinces and kept the peace.
His undoing came when the Chaldeans attempted to invade and Sargon II sought an alliance with them. The Chaldeans made a separate alliance with the Elamites, and together they took Babylonia. Sargon II lost to the Chaldeans but switched to attacking Syria and parts of Egypt and Gaza, embarking on a spree of conquest before eventually dying in battle against the Cimmerians from Russia.
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. Woolley decided to excavate near the ruins of a ziggurat and began to dig two trenches. Here, Woolley confirmed that the site was the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur. Woolley's discovery of Ur along with the artifacts and burials there give us a glimpse of life in Sumer 4, years ago. Woolley discovered graves of common people, but also royal graves, including that of a Sumerian queen named Pu-Abi.
Sargon was an excellent commander, he organized his army into different units, including donkey-drawn war chariots, used to scare and trample his enemies. Around 2, BC, the independent city-states of Sumer were conquered by a man called Sargon the Great of Akkad, who had once ruled the city-state of Kish.
Sargon was an Akkadian, a Semitic group of desert nomads who eventually settled in Mesopotamia just north of Sumer. The Sumerian king, Lugal-Zaggisi, tried to form a coalition of Sumerian city-states against Sargon, but he was defeated by the Akkadian.
Sargon is considered the first empire builder. Sargon made Agade the capital city of his empire. Sargon's daughter, Enheduanna, was first world's first credited author because she signed her name to a set of poems she wrote about her gods and goddesses. 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. Known for their innovations in language, governance, architecture and more, Sumerians are considered the creators of civilization as modern humans understand it. Their control of the region lasted for short of 2, years before the Babylonians took charge in B. Sumer was first settled by humans from to B. This early population—known as the Ubaid people—was notable for strides in the development of civilization such as farming and raising cattle, weaving textiles, working with carpentry and pottery and even enjoying beer.
Villages and towns were built around Ubaid farming communities. The people known as Sumerians were in control of the area by B. Their culture was comprised of a group of city-states, including Eridu, Nippur, Lagash, Kish, Ur and the very first true city, Uruk.
At its peak around BC, the city had a population between 40, and 80, people living between its six miles of defensive walls, making it a contender for the largest city in the world.
Each city-state of Sumer was surrounded by a wall, with villages settled just outside and distinguished by the worship of local deities.
The Sumerian language is the oldest linguistic record. It first appeared in archaeological records around B. It was mostly replaced by Akkadian around B. Cuneiform, which is used in pictographic tablets, appeared as far back as B. Writing remains one of the most important cultural achievements of the Sumerians, allowing for meticulous record keeping from rulers down to farmers and ranchers.
The oldest written laws date back to B. The Sumerians were considered to have a rich body of literary works, though only fragments of these documents exist. Architecture on a grand scale is generally credited to have begun under the Sumerians, with religious structures dating back to B. Homes were made from mud bricks or bundled marsh reeds. The buildings are noted for their arched doorways and flat roofs. Sculpture was used mainly to adorn temples and offer some of the earliest examples of human artists seeking to achieve some form of naturalism in their figures.
Facing a scarcity of stone, Sumerians made leaps in metal-casting for their sculpture work, though relief carving in stone was a popular art form. Under the Akkadian dynasty, sculpture reached new heights, as evidenced by intricate and stylized work in diorite dated to B.
Ziggurats began to appear around B. These impressive pyramid-like, stepped temples, which were either square or rectangular, featured no inner chambers and stood about feet high. Ziggurats often featured sloping sides and terraces with gardens. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was one of these. Palaces also reach a new level of grandiosity. In Mari around B.
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