The Fertile Crescent
These two rivers form the eastern edge of the Fertile Crescent and frame the plain between them.
What are the Tigris and the Euphrates?
The quality of worshipping many gods, like the Sumerians.
What is polytheistic?
Around 3300 BC, the Sumerians first starting drawing these simple symbols in clay to record trade and wages.
What are pictographs?
The most famous Sumerian story, named for a real king of Uruk.
What is the Epic of Gilgamesh?
A state that rules over many countries or kingdoms.
What is an empire?
From the Greek for “middle” and “river,” this name means the land between the two rivers.
What is Mesopotamia?
The primary language family of Mesopotamia, modern examples of which are Arabic and Hebrew (Sumerian is NOT one of these!).
What are Semitic languages?
From the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge,” this is the name of the Sumerian writing system.
What is cuneiform?
These Sumerian temple-towers also served the city as granaries and banks.
What are ziggurats?
Around 2400 BC this ruler conquered Uruk and began building the world's first empire.
Who is Sargon of Akkad?
The region's most abundant natural resource, used for bricks, pottery, and writing tablets.
What is clay?
Sumerian was not a Semitic language, which tells historians this about where the Sumerians came from.
What is that they did not originate in Mesopotamia?
Cuneiform took this long to learn to read.
What is eight years?
The counting system invented by the Sumerians, still used today to reckon time.
What is base 60?
Before he was emperor, Sargon held this humble job for Ur-Zababa, king of Kish
What is a gardener OR a cupbearer?
This nickname for the region comes from the fact that so many ancient civilizations began here.
What is the Cradle of Civilization?
The Sumerians said they came out of the ocean; one theory suggests they may have come from near this body of water before sea levels rose.
What is the Persian Gulf?
Written symbols that had both meaning and a specific sound attached (coming into use around 2800 BC), were known as this.
What are phonograms?
These people migrated into Mesopotamia around 2000 BC, destroyed Sumer and Akkad, and built the city of Babylon.
Who are the Amorites?
The ways Mesopotamian cities dealt with:
1. unpredictable flooding
2. invading neighbors
3. a lack of natural resources like wood, stone, and metal
What are irrigation, city walls, and trade?
Each Sumerian city was its own political unit, so we call them this. They were not unified until 2400 BC.
What are city-states?
Cuneiform stayed in use for this many years, into the 100s AD.
What is more than 3,000 years?
This British archaeologist rediscovered Ur in 1922 and found a queen buried with 74 servants.
Who is Sir Leonard Woolley?
“An eye for an eye” is this Latin principle, the idea behind Hammurabi's famous law code.
What is lex talionis?