Geography of Mesopotamia
This region, known as “the land between two rivers,” was home to the first cities.
What is Mesopotamia?
Early farmers built these high walls of earth to keep floodwaters from overflowing.
What are levees?
This was one of the biggest problems for early farmers living in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.
What is a food shortage?
The hot, dry climate of southern Mesopotamia made it difficult to grow these.
What are crops?
Sumerian community and surrounding farmland with its own government, laws, religion and culture.
What is a city-state?
These two rivers surrounded Mesopotamia and provided water for farming.
What are the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers?
These human-made waterways carried water from the rivers to the fields.
What are canals?
To solve the food shortage, people moved down into this region.
What is the plains of Mesopotamia?
When farmers didn’t maintain canals and levees, they could become blocked with this.
What is silt?
Neolithic people were able to survive in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains because their was a mild climate with plenty of __ .
What is rainfall?
This mountain range to the north had plenty of rain and trees, unlike the hot, dry plains below.
What are the Zagros Mountains?
These structures stored water for later use during dry times.
What are reservoirs or dams?
Because they lacked timber and stone, Sumerians built their homes and temples from this.
What are mud bricks?
When too many cities shared connected irrigation systems, this often happened.
What are water disputes?
This development caused food shortages in the Zagros Mountains.
What is population increase?
When the rivers flooded, they left behind this fine, fertile soil.
What is silt?
The Sumerians worked together to build and maintain these systems that controlled water flow.
What are irrigation systems?
To protect their cities from attacks, Sumerians built these strong defensive barriers.
What are city walls?
Floods were both helpful and harmful because they brought this to the land but could destroy crops.
What is water/floodwater or silt?
This caused the Mesopotamian Rivers to flood every spring.
What is melting snow in the mountains?
Because of its flat land and few trees or stones, people in Sumer built homes from this material.
What are mud bricks?
Disputes sometimes broke out between cities over who controlled this precious resource.
What is water?
Building and maintaining canals and levees required this kind of teamwork among Sumerians.
What is cooperation?
This term describes when farmers moved from the Zagros Mountains because there wasn’t enough farmland.
What is migration?
This is the main reason why Sumerian villages cooperated with each other. different
What is to keep the irrigation systems from clogging?