A fancy word for farming, developed around 8000 BC by early humans.
What is agriculture?
Believed to be the earliest example of religious beliefs: everything has a living spirit.
What is Animism?
The lowest rung on the Sumerian social hierarchy, these people were temporarily owned by others and had fewer rights.
What are slaves?
A circular device that is often used in transportation. It can also be used to create pottery.
What is the wheel?
A lack of water in an area.
What is a drought?
Before farming was invented, the earliest humans became this in order to feed themselves.
Most common in early cities and city-states, a religion that believes in multiple gods.
What is polytheism?
A large independent city that rules over the surrounding area.
What is a city-state?
Natural occurring, humans learned how to harness and reproduce this in order to light dark areas and cook their food.
What is fire?
The average size of a group of hunter-gatherers.
What is 30?
Crucial to the spread of farming and the creation of large cities, this technique redirects water from rivers and spreads it out over a large area.
What is irrigation?
The leaders of religion in early Sumer.
What are priests/priestesses?
Although this group has often been discriminated against throughout history, they enjoyed almost equal status with men in early Sumer.
Who are women?
The earliest ranged weapons, primarily used to hunt from a distance.
What are bows/atlatls?
Known as the land between two rivers, this is the region where human civilization began.
What is Mesopotamia?
Teaching a single animal to behave in a certain way.
What is taming?
A massive structure that served as a temple, government office, and food storage facility in early Sumer.
What is a ziggurat?
The highest rung on the Sumerian social hierarchy, these people or their families often owned the land before a city was ever founded.
What are kings, leaders, and priests?
The earliest known tools, made out of rocks and used to chop and cut.
What are stone hand-axes?
Meaning "too much of something", a ___ of food allowed for specialization to occur and many inventions and discoveries to be made.
What is a surplus?
Selectively breeding a species in order to make it more useful to humans.
What is domestication?
Created by early humans as a form of creative expression using paints and pigments, may have had religious significance.
What are cave paintings?
The largest group on the Sumerian social hierarchy, did much of the work that city-states needed to function.
What are farmers, builders, craftsmen, and artisans?
Developed in early Sumer; this concept is used to measure time, determine how much land you need, count, and so much more.
What is mathematics?
An event that occurred in year 0 of our calendar, having great religious significance.
What is the birth of Jesus?