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Vocabulary
Geography of Mesopotamia
The First Civilization
Life in Sumer
Inventions
100
A sharpened reed used to press markings into clay tablets.
What is a stylus?
100
The region where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow.
What is Mesopotamia?
100
Early Mesopotamians organized themselves into these groups.
What are city-states?
100
Keeping official records was the job of this person.
What is a scribe?
100
This invention helped Sumerians with record keeping.
What is writing?
200
Flat land bordering a river
What is a floodplain?
200
This happens when there is not enough rain or snow that falls in an area of a long period of time.
What is a drought?
200
Highest level leader in Ancient Mesopotamia.
What is a king?
200
The first writing system the Sumerians developed using a system of symbols.
What is pictographs?
200
This was the first important tool invented to help farmers.
What is the plow?
300
An ancient region of southern Mesopotamia, in which civilization arose around 3300 B.C.
What is Sumer?
300
Farmers in Mesopotamia built these to carry water from rivers to their fields.
What are canals?
300
Sumerians learned to create tools of this.
What is bronze?
300
These two groups were at the top of the upper classes in Sumer.
What are kings and priests?
300
This invention helped farmers to take their crops to markets quicker and faster.
What is a wheeled wagon?
400
An ancient Sumerian or Babylonian temple that rose in a series of steplike pyramids.
What is a ziggurat?
400
A type of climate in which very little rainfall falls.
What is semiarid?
400
This allowed people in a civilization to stop farming and to specialize in other types of work.
What is food surplus?
400
The writing system that used wedge-shaped symbols.
What is cuneiform?
400
This is a special kind of wheel.
What is a potter's wheel?
500
A belief in many gods.
What is polytheism?
500
One of two major rivers that are in Southwest Asia that flow to the Persian Gulf.
What are the Tigris or Euphrates Rivers?
500
These are the five traits of civilization.
What are advanced cities, specialized workers, complex institutions, record keeping, and advanced technology.
500
Bronze was better than copper as a material for this reason.
What is stronger?
500
The Sumerians developed this in order to keep records of crops and trade goods.
What is arithmetic or mathematics?