Land Between Two Rivers
Trading goods instead of using money.
What is barter?
What was the name of the first Mesopotamian city?
What is Uruk?
Polytheism
What is the belief in more than one god?
Large powerful states to organize and run things.
What are city-states?
A wide flat plain in modern Iraq
What was Mesopotamia?
an independent state including a city and surrounding territory?
What is city-state?
Like people, they ate, drank, slept and married.
How did Sumarians believe their gods behaved?
Hours, minutes, seconds, 12 months with 30 days each
What is Mathematics and Astronomy?
Spread water and rich silt from their floodwaters--depositing a fresh layer of moist fertile soils every year.
What did seasonal flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates river affect farming in Mesopotamia?
40,000
What was the population of Uruk?
A system of writing using triangular wedge-shaped symbols for words, ideas, and sounds that are usually placed in clay using a wooden stylus.
What is cuneiform?
Helped boats and water trade
What is a sail?
An attachment to a plow to dump seeds into a trench to make planting much faster.
What was a seed funnel?
An invention that helped the Sumerians with land travel and trade?
What is the wheel and the cart?
Military leaders during wars refused to give up their power so this was developed.
What is kinship?
Mixed copper and tin for harder tools and weapons
What are bronze tools and weapons?
The effects of spring floods that washed away crops and villages, and the hot baking sun turning the ground rock hard, killing the crops without irrigation?
What were the challenges to Mesopotamia's geography given to the early Sumerian farmers that lived there.
Why was the area between two rivers called the Fertile Crescent.
What is shaped like a crescent moon, and extremely fertile farmland due to the overflowing of rivers with silt in them.
Barges or large rafts that workers would help pull along the river to transport large amounts of goods.
What is barges?
Rulers, top officials, priests, wealthy merchants, and land owners
What is the upper class?
Brought river water to fields. Allowed for better farming for food and increased the population
What is irrigation?
Dug miles of canals that connected to rivers with man-made canals to their fields.
How did the Sumerian invention of irrigation work to transform the environment?