Ancient Vocabulary
This is a fancy word for God.
What is a deity?
Ziggurats were designed to look like this shape in order to symbolize the connection between heaven and earth.
What are mountains?
This significant body of water is to the west of Syria, Iraq, and Israel.
What is the Mediterranean Sea?
These earthen barriers were constructed along river ways to help control flooding.
What are levees?
The act of taming an animal for your own use.
These bricks are fired and coated in order to make them waterproof. They were also often painted to add decoration to temples and walls.
What are glazed bricks?
Ziggurats were constructed from mud bricks which consist of these two essential ingredients.
What is straw and mud?
The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers originate in this modern day country?
What is Turkey?
This device cleverly lifts water from the river using a counterbalance system. Acting like a crane, it picks up water and then drops it where a farmer needs it.
What is a shaduf?
This important animal provided the natural materials to make clothing in ancient Mesopotamia.
What is a sheep?
This tar-like substance was used to seal and waterproof bricks.
What is bitumen?
The hundreds of workers, including gardeners, scribed, and accountants, required to run a major temple lived in this place.
What are the Taurus Mountains?
Far more cities and farms were build along this famous river in the Fertile Crescent.
What is the Euphrates River?
Because wood was scarce, this animal product was burned as fuel for warmth and in kilns.
What is animal dung?
These dyed bricks and clay tiles were put on Ziggurats to decorate them. These special decorations were only used on Mesopotamian temples.
What are cone mosaics?
These were often buried under Ziggurats in order to hold them in place and connect them to the Gods.
What are foundation nail statues?
This mountain, well known in the Bible, is thought to be where Noah parked his Arc during the great flood.
What is Mt. Ararat?
What is salt?
The breeding of this herd animal led to the rapid deforestation and eventual decline of wooded areas in Mesopotamia.
What are goats?
Because everyday people could not enter the Ziggurats to visit the gods, artisans were hired to create these idols of everyday people.
Although the gods were represented as statues, Mesopotamians believed that they still had this quality and therefore required food, bathing, and water.
What are human needs?
This small nation is home to the the confluence (joining) of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
What is Kuwait?
The process of land becoming saltier, water becoming scarcer, and soils becoming less fertile is known by this name, reminiscent of a biome.
What is desertification?
This insect, famous as a plague in the Bible, devoured crops and led to famine and crop loss in Mesopotamia.
What are locust?