Mesopotamian cities emerged around the fifth to third millennia BCE, with the earliest urban settlements in ____, the southern delta region.

Sumer

Mesopotamian cities were characterized by a set of double walls, dikes, canals, and a towering temple, known as a ___, at the center.

ziggurat

ziggurat is a temple that rose on one or more platforms to create a stepped profile, serving as an ___, a sacred marker indicating a culture’s center of the world.

axis mundi

___ is the oldest settlement in the region, and its temple to the god Enki was incorporated into a colossal stepped mound.

Eridu

The ___ in Uruk, built between 3400 and 3000 BCE, served as the focus of the city's religion and government.

White Temple

Sargon the Great seized power and built a royal palace at ___, signaling a shift from a temple-centric to a king-centric system of power.

Akkad

The palace at ___, destroyed by King Hammurabi, featured a labyrinthine plan that segregated the paths of servants and troops from the king.

Mari

The term ___ refers to a human-made acropolis or mound that served as a site for both the royal palace and the primary temple.

tell

The city of ___ emerged as the largest in Bronze-Age Mesopotamia after the demise of Sargon’s Akkad.

Ur

The houses at Ur were single-story mud-brick structures with rooms wrapped around an open court, similar in concept to the Roman ___ and Moroccan ___.

domus

riad

The temple district, or ___, was a solemn void with orthogonal coordinates, providing a planned contrast to the city's twisted network of streets.

temenos

The Nile and Sacred Geometry The ancient Egyptians used ___ and proportional systems to create immense works of astounding geometrical accuracy.

orthogonal planning

The earliest royal tombs were loaf-shaped rectangular tumuli called ___.

mastabas

A ___ was a special sealed chamber within a mastaba that contained a statue of the pharaoh.

serdab

The architect ___ transformed the royal tomb into Egypt’s first pyramid for King ___.

Imhotep

Djoser

King Sneferu built the first perfectly prismatic pyramid, the ___, after a series of earlier attempts.

Red Pyramid

The ___ period, following centuries of civil strife and famine, saw a new type of funerary memorial that combined a solar sanctuary terrace temple with a rock-cut tomb.

Middle Kingdom

The design of the mortuary temple at ___, commissioned by Mentuhotep I, was the antithesis of the pyramids of Giza, signaling a more diffused system of authority.

Deir el-Bahri

Unlike the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Harappans intentionally avoided building religious and dynastic ___.

monuments

The two best-excavated Harappan sites are ___ and ___.

Harappa

Mohenjo-daro

Harappan cities were characterized by unusually thick city walls and sophisticated systems of ___ to manage sewage and water.

brick-lined drains

The walls of Harappan cities were built to defend against ___ like monsoon floods rather than human invasions.

natural calamities

One of the greatest mysteries of Harappan cities is their lack of religious buildings, though the ___ at Mohenjo-daro may have had religious functions related to ritual bathing.

Great Bath

The most available medium of expression for Mesopotamian architects was ___.

clay

The process of converting the mud-brick walls and cuneiform tablets of palaces like those at Ebla and Mari into a more permanent form of terracotta was achieved by ___.

fire

The ___ was one of the three pyramids built by King Sneferu, and his final effort resulted in the first perfectly prismatic pyramid, the Red Pyramid.

Bent Pyramid