Nestled between two rivers, the world's first major city sprang up in a fertile region called Mesopotamia.
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Mesopotamian civilization, their era, their inventions, and system. The studies focus on how Mesopotamia began and how it led to the formation of other cities. Their religion, geographic features, culture. The six lenses: art, culture, context, religion, architecture and aesthetics are used to study this region
Mesopotamian civilization, their era, their inventions, and system. The studies focus on how Mesopotamia began and how it led to the formation of other cities. Their religion, geographic features, culture. The six lenses: art, culture, context, religion, architecture and aesthetics are used to study this region
Mesopotamia and the Near East: Foundation of Western CulturePaulVMcDowell
Traces the history of Mesopotamia from the Sumerians to the Assyrians and Babylon, looks at the pantheon, including Innana, the goddess of love and war, the epic of Gilgamesh, and allied topics
What's the difference between nonlife and life? A biologist reflects on the qualities that define life.
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More than 2,000 years ago, Eratosthenes calculated the spherical size of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.
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Mesopotamia and the Near East: Foundation of Western CulturePaulVMcDowell
Traces the history of Mesopotamia from the Sumerians to the Assyrians and Babylon, looks at the pantheon, including Innana, the goddess of love and war, the epic of Gilgamesh, and allied topics
What's the difference between nonlife and life? A biologist reflects on the qualities that define life.
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More than 2,000 years ago, Eratosthenes calculated the spherical size of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.
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How does gold get from the Earth's surface to a cell phone? Choose a commodity and explore its journey from raw resource to finished product!
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What do you know about the Big Bang? Start off by judging a few claims before diving into the lesson.
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Students put themselves in the shoes of an ancient adventurer traveling the Silk Road, as Peter Stark describes what it was like to re-enact the journey. Discuss any insights that emerge and the benefits of examining history from this and other perspectives.
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The horse, once hunted and later domesticated, helped advance human communication and transportation, accelerating global change.
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Big History is about understanding the complete picture of the Universe, our planet, and how humans interact with each other and our environment. Sometimes you need to take a broad view to understand how you fit into the big picture, and at other times you need to take a closer look. It’s really understanding both perspectives that makes Big History unique. This opening activity is intended to pique your curiosity. We’re going to explore what might have happened on Easter Island. Was it famine? Disease? A natural disaster? Or something else altogether?
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A brief journey through the life and work of the father of modern observational astronomy.
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Art and Culture - 02 - Bronze Age OverviewRandy Connolly
Second module for GNED 1201 (Aesthetic Experience and Ideas). This one covers the early Bronze Age historical and cultural context, from the beginnings of urban culture in Mesopotamia up to the Assyrians.
This course is a required general education course for all first-year students at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. My version of the course is structured as a kind of Art History and Culture course. Some of the content overlaps with my other Gen Ed course.
The cradle of civilization is a term referring to locations where, according to current archaeological data, civilization is understood to have emerged.
Current thinking is that there was no single "cradle", but several civilizations that developed independently; with the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia and Egypt, understood to be the earliest.
Asian civilizations embrace, learn from, and respect one another with the objective of common progress and prosperity, resulting in the flourishing of individual civilizations as well as the establishment of a "community with shared future for mankind" where countries come together and join.
“To what extent has the Modern Revolution been a positive or a negative force?” is the driving question for Unit 9. The purpose of this activity is to apply Unit 9’s driving question
to a modern-day infrastructure development: the Interoceanic Highway (La Carretera). Construction on La Carretera, which connects the east and west coasts of South America, began in the early twenty-first century. By studying the scenes depicted in a photojournalist’s photographic essay, students will come to their own conclusions about the extent to which this road has been a positive or negative force as related to certain trends and topics (economic development and natural environment, for example). This activity will also help prepare students for Investigation 9, in which they’re asked to identify good and bad outcomes of trends referenced in the Investigation texts.
This activity will give students a chance to review some of what they learned in this lesson, and use it to think more deeply about what and how they would communicate with an alien species.
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Circling one star among hundreds of billions, in one galaxy among a hundred billion more, in a Universe that is vast and expanding ever faster – perhaps toward infinity. It’s easy to forget that we live in a place of astonishing grandeur and mystery.
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Unit 9: Comparing the Costs of Renewable and Conventional Energy SourcesBig History Project
You can’t get too far in a discussion about the nation’s electric power sector without running into the question of costs.
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This quick activity will get students brainstorming about life on Mars and what they would need to survive there.
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Use www.gapminder.org/data to fill out the data in each of the tables below. To find the data you need, make sure that you have the name of the category. On the gapminder.org/data page, you’ll see a table called “List of indicators in “Gapminder World.” Beneath that title, on the right side of the table, find the
Search box. Type the name of the category into that search area. Once you find the category, click on the magnifying glass on the right. That link will have the data you need to fill out each of the tables below.
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Spanning three centuries of history, from the dawn of the industrial age to modern times, three diverse
thinkers developed their own landmark theories on commerce, labor, and the global economy.
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In the final essay of a four-part series, David Christian explains
how advances in communication and transportation accelerated
collective learning.
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Lesson 9.2 Activity: The Impact of Population Growth EssayBig History Project
For this closing activity, students will construct an essay in which they discuss what they think are the three biggest impacts of human population growth in the modern era. By looking more closely at population growth, they will deepen their understanding of the impact of acceleration and will think about themselves in relation to population growth and the effect it might have on their own futures.
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Unit 8: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human SocietiesBig History Project
Jared Mason Diamond (1937 — ) is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently a professor of geography and of physiology at UCLA. His 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies, from which the following passages are excerpted, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. The basic premise of the book is to explain why Eurasian civilizations have survived
and conquered others, while refuting the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to intellectual, moral, or genetic superiority.
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Making comparisons is an important intellectual tool for all people and especially for historians and scientists. Historians, in particular, make comparisons across time to understand what
has changed and what has remained constant. This question looks at the spread of plague and our collective reaction to plague at two different times in human history—the fourteenth century and the nineteenth century. Such a comparison enables us to see clearly how we have changed.
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Lesson 8.3 Activity: Revising Investigation Writing - Sentence Starters Part 2Big History Project
Students have examined and revised an Investigation writing sample based on Criteria A, B, and C of the rubric. Now, they’ll undergo the same process with a peer essay. In addition, they’ll do this alone instead of in groups. So, although the process is the same as in the last Investigation writing activity, this one might be more difficult since students will move away from group work and will complete this worksheet on their own. However, it’s important for students to be able to accomplish this exercise on their own since in the next lesson, they’ll apply this same process to their own writing. Again, while the categories in the rubric are a useful tool for initially understanding the different elements of writing, they need to be looked at as a whole since the areas of focus are interrelated.
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Unit 8: When Humans Became Inhumane: The Atlantic Slave TradeBig History Project
Once Europeans had figured out how to be effective middlemen — buying and selling silver, tea, and fur, they turned to figuring out how to also become producers of the commodities they were trading.
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Unit 8: Investigating the Consequences of the Columbian ExchangeBig History Project
A new era in human history began in 1492 as the four world zones became connected. For the first time, humans created truly global networks.
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The account of the travels of the Muslim legal scholar Ibn Battuta in the first half of the fourteenth century reveals the wide scope of the Muslim world at that time.
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This collection of biographies provides students with detailed information about the voyages of these explorers including information about their motivation and how they inspired future generations of explorers. These men opened the door to a more interconnected world as the contacts they made helped to create connections between distant peoples and stimulate the growth of exchange networks and long-distance trade.
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Lesson 7.2 Activity: Essay - Were They Pushed or Did They Jump?Big History Project
You’re going to pick a civilization you’ve already researched, and then use the information from your Early Civilizations Museum Project, your Comparing More Civilizations Worksheet, and your Rise, Fall, and Collapse of Civilizations Worksheet to write a five-paragraph essay about whether that civilization was pushed (external forces were the main cause of its downfall) or it jumped (something internal was responsible—they were their own worst enemy). A “pushed” example: Two empires went to war. You might say the winning empire “pushed” the losing empire into collapse. An example of a civilization having “jumped” can be found in the Easter Island Activity earlier in the course: One of the theories for the collapse of Easter Island is that the inhabitants depleted the natural resources they needed to survive. The people were, in a sense, the cause of their own destruction—they “jumped.”
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Lesson 7.2 Activity: Social Status, Power, and Human BurialsBig History Project
This activity provides students with an opportunity to start thinking about the impact that farming can have on the way humans live and relate to each other. It will also allow them to think about the kinds of questions archaeologists and historians might ask when they must rely upon artifacts rather than written evidence to learn about the past.
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Unit 7: Greco-Roman: Early Experiments in Participatory GovernmentBig History Project
Instead of rule by a single person, Athens and Rome developed governments with widespread participation by male elites, which lasted about 170 years in Athens and 480 years in Rome.
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During the same narrow sliver of cosmic time, cities, states, and civilizations emerged independentlyin several places around the world.
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Model Attribute Check Company Auto PropertyCeline George
In Odoo, the multi-company feature allows you to manage multiple companies within a single Odoo database instance. Each company can have its own configurations while still sharing common resources such as products, customers, and suppliers.
Francesca Gottschalk - How can education support child empowerment.pptxEduSkills OECD
Francesca Gottschalk from the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation presents at the Ask an Expert Webinar: How can education support child empowerment?
Unit 8 - Information and Communication Technology (Paper I).pdfThiyagu K
This slides describes the basic concepts of ICT, basics of Email, Emerging Technology and Digital Initiatives in Education. This presentations aligns with the UGC Paper I syllabus.
A Strategic Approach: GenAI in EducationPeter Windle
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Generative AI, Image Generators and Large Language Models have had a dramatic impact on teaching, learning and assessment over the past 18 months. The most immediate threat AI posed was to Academic Integrity with Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) focusing their efforts on combating the use of GenAI in assessment. Guidelines were developed for staff and students, policies put in place too. Innovative educators have forged paths in the use of Generative AI for teaching, learning and assessments leading to pockets of transformation springing up across HEIs, often with little or no top-down guidance, support or direction.
This Gasta posits a strategic approach to integrating AI into HEIs to prepare staff, students and the curriculum for an evolving world and workplace. We will highlight the advantages of working with these technologies beyond the realm of teaching, learning and assessment by considering prompt engineering skills, industry impact, curriculum changes, and the need for staff upskilling. In contrast, not engaging strategically with Generative AI poses risks, including falling behind peers, missed opportunities and failing to ensure our graduates remain employable. The rapid evolution of AI technologies necessitates a proactive and strategic approach if we are to remain relevant.
Read| The latest issue of The Challenger is here! We are thrilled to announce that our school paper has qualified for the NATIONAL SCHOOLS PRESS CONFERENCE (NSPC) 2024. Thank you for your unwavering support and trust. Dive into the stories that made us stand out!
Honest Reviews of Tim Han LMA Course Program.pptxtimhan337
Personal development courses are widely available today, with each one promising life-changing outcomes. Tim Han’s Life Mastery Achievers (LMA) Course has drawn a lot of interest. In addition to offering my frank assessment of Success Insider’s LMA Course, this piece examines the course’s effects via a variety of Tim Han LMA course reviews and Success Insider comments.
3. Nestled between the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers, the
world’s first major city
sprang up in a fertile region
of land called Mesopotamia.
2
3
4. The first city
Between approximately 3600 and 2600 BCE, the people of Uruk created the
innovations characteristic of cities ever since: social hierarchies, specialized
occupations, coercive political structures, writing, religion and literature,
and monumental architecture. What is a city? By “city” we mean simply a
large group of people, tens of thousands, collected into a whole and living
in a defined place with structures designated for a range of specific social
functions. To support a city, people living on the land around it had to be able
to generate stable surpluses of food from the fertility of the soil and the
creatures that inhabited it. In addition, people in the city had to devise ingenious ways to distribute those surpluses, ways that would reinforce constructive patterns of conduct and practice.
Cities began to emerge about the same time in various places around the
world. But most archaeologists agree that it is fair to claim Uruk (pronounced OO-rook) as one of the world’s first cities (Uruk is its Akkadian
name; its own people called it Unug; the Hebrew Torah called it Erech;
and its current name, Warka, is Arabic.) Uruk arose about 5,500 years ago,
no time at all when measured against the more than 200,000 years of Homo
sapiens or the 6 million years of hominin evolution.
Location, location, location
Uruk arose in the place now called Iraq, about 150 miles south of modern-day
Baghdad. Greek historians called this area Mesopotamia, or “the land
between the rivers.” Those rivers were the Euphrates to the west and the
Tigris to the east, both of which flowed from the Taurus Mountains in
Anatolia (now Turkey) in the north down to the Persian Gulf in the south.
By roughly 4000 BCE people living in higher places in what is now Iraq had
settled down to care for domestic sheep and goats and to grow wheat, barley, and peas. Yet their climate was changing; less rain was falling, and they
needed to move to more stable sources of water.
4
The ruins of Uruk
5
5. As people migrated into the two river valleys, they found that the soil produced abundant crops due to the fertility of topsoil from repeated flooding
of the rivers. They could grow enough to store surplus grain, enough to
support other individuals with occupations other than farming. The surplus
grain needed to be collected and distributed; probably priests first managed
this task. In addition to grains and domestic animals, people had plenty of
fish and fowl from the river and marshes. Beer had already been invented,
and a goddess of beer, named Ninkasi, was worshipped.
Writing, beliefs, and everyday life
A great deal is known about Uruk because of excavations of the site beginning in 1850 and because the earliest writing in the world comes from there,
dated to about 3500 BCE. People in Uruk wrote on clay tablets with reeds.
The writing is called “cuneiform,” named after the wedge-shaped reeds
that writers pressed into wet clay. Since clay tablets are more durable than
the silk, bark, bamboo, or papyrus used by other people for writing, many
of Uruk’s tablets have survived and are now held in museums throughout
the world.
From inscriptions found in Uruk we know that its people built a temple to
a sky god called An and another one to his daughter, Inanna, goddess of love
and war (later known as Ishtar). Inanna served as the patron goddess of
Uruk; its inhabitants believed that they attracted her there by building a special
house for her, staffed with priests and servants. The priests managed the
people’s contributions and gradually built up their power, using temples as
centers for the redistribution of surplus food.
As people learned to farm, they changed their clothing from wild-animal
skins to what they could make from their domesticated animals and plants.
In Mesopotamia this meant that most people wore woolen garments made
from the fleece of their sheep, even in hot weather. Only the elite could wear
linen, a textile made from the fibers of flax plants, because the process of
making it took much longer than weaving or knitting wool.
6
Cuneiform writing was produced by pressing reeds into wet, unhardened clay
Uruk at its height
By 5,000 years ago Uruk held 40,000–50,000 people, and after another
few hundred years it reached its peak of 50,000–80,000 inhabitants. By
that time there were 11 other cities between the rivers, and they engaged in
frequent warfare with each other over land, water, and other resources.
Priests gradually had to share their power with warrior leaders, a system
that eventually evolved into a single king ruling each city.
7
6. Early clay tablets in Uruk contain a “standard professions list,” which listed
a hundred professions from the king down through ambassadors, priests,
and supervisors and on through stonecutters, gardeners, weavers, smiths,
cooks, jewelers, and potters. The social structure was topped by a small
ruling and priestly elite, with a much larger group of commoners who either
owned property or did not, and a bottom small group of slaves, those
who were captured in war, convicted criminals, or people heavily in debt.
As a single authoritarian ruler emerged to lead Uruk and its surrounding
farms and villages, historians say that the first state emerged almost
simultaneously with the first city. The state consisted of powerful elites
who could coerce labor and tribute. Why did the majority of people allow
a few people so much power? This is difficult to answer, but on the one
hand it seems that the elites took power as more resources became available. On the other hand, it seems that citizens gave power in exchange
for organization, which permitted large-scale projects like irrigation, and
for security and protection. What may have begun as consensual power
may have evolved into coercive power as elites accumulated more resources.
Writing began in Uruk as a way to keep track of how many sheep, goats,
and measures of grain passed through the central warehouses. It began with
pictures made in wet clay representing the various goods. After about
400 years people had figured out how to use symbols and abstract numbers
instead of drawing a picture for each item. They used a small wedge to
represent one, a small circle to represent 10, a large wedge for 600, and a
large circle for 3,600. Their system of numbers was based partly on 10
and partly on 60 for measuring grain. This latter base-60, or “sexagesimal,”
system led to viewing a circle as 360 degrees.
After about a thousand years, people in Uruk had developed their system
of writing sufficiently to compose hymns, funeral songs, and superhero
epics. Here are some lines from “The Lady of the Evening,” a hymn to the
evening star, which represented Inanna (Sumer refers to the area where
people spoke Sumerian, from the vicinity of modern-day Baghdad down
to the Persian Gulf):
8
At the end of the day, the Radiant Star, the Great Light that fills the sky,
The Lady of the Evening appears in the heavens.
The people in all the lands lift their eyes to her…
There is great joy in Sumer.
The young man makes love with his beloved.
My Lady looks in sweet wonder from heaven.
The people of Sumer parade before the holy Inanna.
Inanna, the Lady of the Evening, is radiant. I sing your praises,
holy Inanna. The Lady of the Evening is radiant on the horizon.
(Wolkstein and Kramer, 1983)
Poets in Uruk also gave us our first superhero story — in fact, our first
recorded story of any kind — The Epic of Gilgamesh. The tale imagines
Gilgamesh, a king who may have actually ruled Uruk at about 2750 BCE,
as 2/3 divine and 1/3 human. He has a friend, Enkidu, who becomes citified
and stops living as a wild hunter. They go on many adventures together,
one of which results in Enkidu being condemned to death, and Gilgamesh
has to accept the loss of his friend. This beautiful story has several modern
versions. Here are a few lines describing the city of Uruk:
When at last they arrived, Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi [the boatman],
“This is the wall of Uruk, which no city on earth can equal. See how
its ramparts gleam like copper in the sun. Climb the stone staircase,
more ancient than the mind can imagine, approach the Eanna Temple,
sacred to Ishtar, a temple that no king has equaled in size or beauty,
walk on the wall of Uruk, follow its course around the city, inspect its
mighty foundations, examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built,
observe the land it encloses: the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards,
the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and marketplaces, the
houses, the public squares.
(Mitchell, 2004)
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7. The legacy of Uruk and Mesopotamia
Despite all the amazing innovations by its people, Uruk faced eventual decline.
After Mesopotamia experienced several hundred years of constant warfare,
Sargon of Akkad (ruled 2334–2279 BCE) conquered most of it. A serious
drought occurred in about 2250 BCE. By 1700 BCE all of southern Mesopotamia had declined into a backwater of other empires. The underlying
reasons seem to be environmental. The irrigation that Mesopotamians used
to increase their crop yields increased the salinity, or salt content, of
the soil. (As the sun evaporated the water standing in the fields, it left the
mineral salts that had been dissolved in the water.) As the salinity of the
soil increased, the yields of grain, especially of wheat, decreased gradually.
By 1700 BCE crops were depleted by as much as 65 percent.
Mesopotamia had a new time of glory as Babylonia, under Hammurabi (ruled
1792–1770 BCE) — who had his capital at Babylon, a city about 250 miles
northwest of Uruk on the Euphrates River. Hammurabi may be most famous
for his Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest examples of a “written” set
of laws. Other empires warred with Babylonia until it had a final moment
under King Nebuchadnezzar, who in 586 BCE conquered Judah and
Jerusalem and sent at least 10,000 Jewish people into exile in Babylon.
This is thought to be close to their original home. According to the Old
Testament, Abraham came from the city of Ur, one of the 12 city-states in
southern Mesopotamia, located about 50 miles southeast of Uruk. Apparently Abraham left Ur in about the 20th century BCE, in the midst of drought,
warfare, and collapse, to travel southwest with his band of followers,
eventually to settle in what is now Israel, carrying with them traditions from
Mesopotamia.
Traditions from southern Mesopotamia also were adopted by Greek scholars,
who got them from Babylonia. Especially in mathematics, ideas from
Mesopotamia persist. Our day is still divided into 24 hours, each hour into
60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds. A circle still consists of 360
degrees. Cuneiform writing was used regionally until the beginning of the
Common Era, when it disappeared; about 300 current scholars have learned
10
Hammurabi receives the laws from the Mesopotamian deity Shamash
to read it. By 300 CE people had mostly abandoned Uruk, and it was completely empty by the time of the Arab conquests in 634 CE.
People in Uruk put together all the pieces of what we call civilization 5,000
years ago. They combined kings, writing, monumental temples and palaces,
specialized occupations, and literature into a culture remarkably similar
to what we still know, despite the many changes that have occurred since.
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