Homework

Fertile Crescent: Large are w/good rainfall and i
  * Agricultural Revolution – grain domestication and plant creates constant supply of food.
      * Begins c. 7000 BCE

C. 4000-3000 BCE Agricultural villages become city-state Mesopotamia.
- Each city state had rulers/religions
- Social hierarchies: rulers and workers
- Trade and contact with other cultures
- Built large architechural complexes
built templs, administrative buildings
Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians.

First Cities: Jericho – Agricultre creates large sustainable communities in near east
  * needed permanent dwellings
      * building materials
      * Old Testament/Torah
      * Earliest Stone fortifications discovered
      * 8000 BCE city of mud brick houses
First Cities: Ain Ghazal
  * Neolithic City: 7200 BCE
  * Found 30 plaster statues
  * 3 ft high, some life size
  * figures wore wigs/clothing
First Cities: Chatal Huyuk
  * 5000 Populations
      * Traded in Obsidian
      * Dwellings: single story building
      * No streets/plazas > Defense
Southern Mesopotamia
  * Plain of Southern Mesopotamia a fertile are:
  * Sumerians Develop this area
  * Created independent city-States
  * New technologies invented: Wagon Wheel
  * Literacy: System of writing on clay tablets
      * Sumer
      * 3500 – 2340 BCE – Sumer settled by Sumerians. Developed along Tigris and Euphrates
  * Cuneiform
      * A wedge-shaped symbols- clay tables with a style
      * Documented emergence of writing,arithmetic, organized system of just and epic of Gilgamesh
      * The Ziggurat
        * Stepped sculptures with a shrine or temple on top
        * First Ziggurats developed from practice of building upon rubble
        * An indication of wealth of city-stat
Top Register: Inana stands in front of the shrine accepting offerings from the priest-king
  * Note:
      * Horned headdress
      * Goddes Larger
        *... [continues]

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