Ancient Civilizations

Flashcards on Ancient Civilizations

Stone, bronze, and iron tools

Durable materials that survive for long periods, helping us understand past ages.

Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age

Subdivided due to distinct sub-periods within each.

Stone tool usage

An early period of human history, predating modern humans.

Middle Paleolithic Period

The period when modern human beings emerged.

Upper Paleolithic Period

Approximately 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens dominated.

Cultural Modernity

A controversial idea suggesting that modern human behavior emerged at a certain point in history.

Material Record

Evidence of abstract thought and symbolic behavior found in the material record.

Abstract Thought

Emerges through art, music and body modification.

Earliest instruments

Hollowed bone possibly used as whistles.

Ochre

A naturally occurring dye used on the skin, found in skeletal remains.

Reasons for body modification

To differentiate from others, attract a mate, or signify hierarchies.

Mesolithic Period

From about 12,000 to 8,000 BCE, the middle stone age.

Neolithic Period

From about 8,000 to 3,000 BCE, the new stone age.

Agricultural Revolution

Transition from hunter gatherer to agricultural societies

Culture

Human beings have it and not all human beings have civilization.

Copper

A technology that transitioned between stone and bronze.

Early Bronze Age civilizations

Ancient Egypt and Sumeria

Middle Bronze Age

From about 2,000 to 1,500 BCE, associated with the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and Minoans.

Late Bronze Age

From about 1,500 to 1,200 BCE, associated with the New Kingdom of Egypt and Mycenaeans.

Mycenaeans

The people in the Iliad and the Trojan War.

Bronze

Made of copper and tin, holds a cutting edge and is seen as a kind of magic.

Bronze production and distribution

Controlled by an aristocratic elite.

Ornamental ax heads

Used as a kind of proto-currency.

Bronze Age collapse

A collapse of the bronze age economy around in the ancient world.

Bronze trade networks

Copper and tin generally do not occur in the same geographical places.

Cause for disrupted trade

Volcanic eruption that disrupted agriculture.

Sea Peoples

Migrants displaced showed up in the Mediterranean Sea and fought with Egypt.

Early Iron Age

Where the iron technology began.

Alphabetic language

Made by the Canaanites in the Levant and popularized by the Phoenicians

Philistines

Phoenicians and interacts with people.

Middle Iron Age

Marked by the rise of Greek civilization.

Archaic Age

The period of the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Late Iron Age (Classical Period)

Associated with Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great.

Rome

Founded in May. Is the period when the Greek civilization is flowering

Agricultural Revolution

Super important in human history, that is when we transition from hunter gatherers to sedentary agriculturalist lifestyle.

Placing Irish peoples in timeline

Where Neolithic Irish farmers fit in with other things.

Fertile Crescent

Along the Mediterranean up through Syria and down into Mesopotamia.

The Lavants

Discovered agriculture in three places that separately seem to have developed agriculture.

Mesopotamia Tigris and Euprates River Valley.

Tigris Euphrates River Valley.

Egypt

The Nile.

Essential Success of Agriculture

Floodplain

Domestication

Altering wild species through cross breeding to produce a species that is dependent of you for its survival.

What domestication is

Taking wild grasses and turning them into Grain.

Human diet

Shifting to a carbohydrate-based diet.

Cognitive Development

A steady food supply as opposed to an unsteady food supply.

The real consequence

Permanent habitation, building to live in.

Early Houses

Doors are in the roof in the ceiling.

Result of Labor Intensive

Greater damage to their skeletons, earlier onset of arthritis, many more fractures, and other kinds of injuries to the skeletal structure.

Protect the Stuff

Build fences and walls around our house.

Another important byproduct

Increase in population.

Can eat before

Cream of wheat.

Have more people

People can have different things.

Diversification of labor

One of the problems that begins to emerge how we value that labor.

Very quickly, disparities

The value of labor in the community.

Slavery

This is where it usually begins.

Communities

Development of what we would think of as kingdoms.

Numbers

That is exactly right.

Tool

You have to invent them.

Clay Tablet

Receipt.

Early form of Writing

On the clay tablet.

Sacral Position

Priests.

As a byproduct

Social Stratification.

Supposed to be this way

Mindset.

Civilization

Permanent Habitation, Diversification, Writing Systems, Social Hierarchy.