Humanities 1301 Intro to Chapter 4 Critical Analysis – Flashcards
Flashcard maker : Anna Collins
the first indication of the self conscious, symbol making human occurred during the
Neanderthal culture
The earliest humans attempted to gain control over objects through the use of
sympathetic magic
According to recent findings, the first people who lived a settled village life based on agriculture were
the settlers in what is now modern day Israel & Iraq
The term prehistory refers to
the study of history before written records
What distinguished the Homo Sapiens from primates?
communication by means of language
Farming brought about
communal organization
The most basic definition of culture is
the manipulation of nature
The following weapon system came online toward the end of the Ice Age
bows and arrows
The burial of human dead gave evidence of the symbol making human known as
Homo Sapiens
The ritualistic performance of the hunt by the pygmies in the African Congo suggests the importance of prehistoric art as
a sacred function
Neolithic sites have been excavated in
Southwest Asia, East asia and Meso-America
The first urban civilizations all appeared
on river banks
The earliest writing on clay tablets found in Sumer came about as a result of
accounting
Stonehenge likely represents the desire of early inhabitants of England to
predict the movements of the sun and moon
The following development, at about the same time that systems of writing emerged in Mesopotamia, afforded humans a significant control over nature
Mettallurgy
The inhabitants if the earliest civilizations looked upon the forces of nature~ sun,wind and rain~ as alive
Animism
The “Venus” of Willendorf has exaggerated breasts and abdomen because
the artist wanted to show a symbol of fertility, not an individual
Cuneiform writing
was originally used to make notations concerning production and trade
The literal translation of “Mesopotamia” is “the land_______”
between two rivers
The Tigris and the Euphrates are known for their
contribution in creating rich soil of the Fertile Crescent
The first of Mesopotamia’s many civilizations was the city of
Sumer
The world’s first epic poem was
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The epic of Gilgamesh explores the Mesopotamian sense of
fear and insecurity
Which of these represents consolidation of the various tribal laws into one central legal plan?
Hammurabi’s Code
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king searches for
everlasting life
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Unapishtim is the hero of a
flood myth
The massive, terraced towers of mud and brick constructed by the Mesopotamians are called
ziggurats
The following creation of the Sumerians is still used today in telling time
a base-60 number system
The _______ developed the basic alphabet that finally morphed into modern western languages.
Phoenicians
The beginning of Hebrew history is personified by which of the following?
Abraham
In the Hebrew Bible, there are 2 accounts of the creation of females. In the first, woman is created
with man in the image of God
Who of the following led the Hebrew people out of Egyptian slavery?
Moses
Historically, why did the Hebrews not go immediately to the promised land after leaving Egypt?
It was occupied by strong local tribes
The Hebrew god is named
Yahweh
Which best describes how the God of the Hebrews punishes the sin of worshipping other gods?
He punishes the sinner and his family for generations
the world’s first empire was created by
Sargon !
The Standard of Ur depicts the Mesopotamian
social order and division of labor
What makes Hammurabi’s Code so forceful?
divine decree
Which of the following geological features forms Mesopotamia?
The Tigris and Euphrates rivers
The ancient capitol of the Persian Empire was
Persepolis
The introduction of iron-forging technology to Mesopotamia was by the
Hittites
Job is an example of the Hebrew quest for
divine explanations for human sufferings and death
a ziggurat was built to
serve as a shrine and temple to link the realms of heaven and earth
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible are collectively called the
Torah
Which Iron Age empire combined fighting techniques and engineering ingenuity to swallow up most of the land between the Persian Gulf and the Nile Valley by 700 B.C.E.?
The Assyrians
In Egypt, the Hebrews were
reduced to the status of state slaves
The Decalogue was a/an
Hebrew covenant between God and the faithful
Ethical monotheism is the belief in
a sole, omnipotent (single, all-powerful) God
The following theme appears in both Hebrew and Mesopotamian literature
a flood story
The following were early Hebrew kings
David and Solomon
King Nebuchadnezzar was likely the inspiration for the biblical
Book of Job
The Hittites introduced
Iron
In the “Hymn to the Aten” how was the sun depicted?
as symbolic to the inevitability of death and the promise of rebirth
Egyptian civilization emerged along the banks of the ______ River in Africa
Nile
The Egyptians found security in
the natural elements
Successful elements of ancient Egyptian civilizations included which of the following?
A uniform language, geographical isolation & a shared political and cultural life
Which of the following is true of the pyramids?
They contained the pharaoh’s most valued possessions
Which of the following best describes the cosmology of the ancient Egyptians in North Africa?
They viewed the world as a flat platter floating on water
The Egyptian Osiris myth vividly describes the idea of
resurrection
Which of the following is associated with Osiris?
Papyrus scroll from the Book of the Dead
A belief in the existence of many gods is known as
polytheism
The Palette of Narmer depicts
the union of Upper and Lower Egypt
Egypt was conquered in 332 B.C.E. by which of the following invaders?
Alexander the Great
The name of the king who united Upper and Lower Egypt was
Narmer
Recent excavations near Gizeh suggest that the promise of life after death was
anticipated by all social classes
Early Egyptian tomb structures, usually single story, are
mastabas
At the top of the Egyptian power hierarchy serving the pharaoh was
vizier
A principle subject of Egyptian poetry was
love
In art of the Old Kingdom
Upper-class people are shown larger than lower-class people
Our knowledge of Egyptian visual art comes primarily from
tombs
The Egyptian canon of artistic representations of the human form gave the proportions of the human body as determined according to the width of
a clenched fist
Akhenaten in the New Kingdom is known for having introduced
monotheism
The Egyptian temples that have survived were
adorned with painted reliefs
Pyramid like structures at the entrance to an Egyptian temple, representing the mountains encircling the world, are called
pylons
Egyptian commemorative pillars are called
obelisks
The statue of Mycerinus and Queen Kha-Merer-Nebty II represents
transfer of power from the woman to the man
The figurative voyage from light to dark as one entered the Egyptian temple was represented by a room of
hypostyles
Which of the following does the text use to describe musical poetry of the Egyptian New Kingdom?
lyric
Spatial depth in Egyptian art is achieved
by placing one figure above another
In the New Kingdom, one pharaoh changed to the practice of monotheism perhaps to rival the power of the
local priests
with the advent of his declaration of monotheism, Akhenaten
became unpopular because of increased taxes on the people
In Egyptian society, slaves
were victims of war
A ruler who combines political with spiritual power is characterized as a ________ monarch.
theocratic
The following was usually part of the vizier’s responsibility
mobilization of an army
What is the Book of the Dead?
a collection of funerary prayers
What natural forces were considered sacred in Egyptian society?
the sun and the Nile
Indus Valley civilization was notable for
expertise in bronze casting
In India, religion is grounded in ________, the belief in an all pervading divine spirit.
pantheism
The classic language of ancient India was which of the following?
Sanskrit
The Aryans introduced or were responsible for the following
Sanskrit
The Mahabharata is
an epic
India’s oldest known devotional texts are the
Vedas
Hinduism is best understood by way of religious texts known as
Upanishads
the joining of Atman(self) and Brahman results in which of the following?
nirvana
The Law of_______ states that the collective spiritual energy gained from good deeds determines one’s physical state in the next life.
Karma
Ancient India developed the most rigid social hierarchical ordering system of it’s time, called
caste
China’s oldest known text is
the Book of Changes
The earliest Neolithic Chinese peoples worked to produced which of the following?
silk
The occupants of the “dragon throne” who represented China’s earliest kings were the______ dynasty.
Shang
The _________ dynasty were famous for their bureaucracies and intricate testing systems for bureaucrats.
Zhou
The most powerful personified spirits in the ancient Chinese world view were those of
departed ancestors
The Law of Karma holds that accumulated deeds
determine your physical state in the next life
In the Bhagavad-Gita, the fundamental teachings of Hinduism are expressed by the inclusion of an episode from the epic
Mahabharata
In the Shang dynasty, rulers were more similar to
the kings of Egypt
China’s oldest written text is unusual in that it contains no creation myths or stories of gods. It is called
I jing
The Dao is best defined as
the way
Daoism and meditation are compatible because the adherent to Daoism seeks
individual insight
Shang diviners heated which of these to produce cracks the priests might then read to forecast the future?
inscribed bones
The ancient history of the Americas is not as easily understood as that of India and China because
we know of the peoples only from their artifacts, there were more varieties and numbers of cultures in the America, written records were not kept
The power given by the gods to the Chinese rulers was called
Mandate of Heaven
Religion during the Shang dynasty
honored a supreme being
Both India and China religions build on a respect for
vegetation and natural elements
The first Americans came to the land mass via
ice bridges between Alaska & Siberia
The most ancient American urban areas were located in which of the following modern countries?
Peru
The “rubber people” of what is now Mexico were the
Olmecs
The stamp of the Classical period on humankind comes from its
Humanism and individualism
Greek city-states first emerged
on islands and peninsulas in the Aegean Sea, along the coast of asia Minor, in southern Italy and Sicily
Which of the following is the name given to the un-deciphered Minoan writing that has survived?
Linear A
The Greeks are distinct from other ancient civilizations in their
love of wisdom
The earliest Greek society, the Minoans, is known for
ancient fertility cults
Which of the following describes the Mycenaean civilization?
burial of rulers in tombs, construction of gigantic fortifications on the Greek mainland, war with Troy forms the setting for both the Iliad and the Odyssey
The most powerful deity of the Greek pantheon was
Zeus
Explain why Percy Bysshe Shelley said “We are all Greeks.”
Humankind is influenced by Greek ideals of reason, beauty and the good life
The Greek hero Achilles differs from the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh in that Achilles
seeks individual honor and glory
Greek popular religion produced no sacred scriptures or doctrines, but the oracle at ______ became very famous throughout the region
Delphi
The early Greek city-states were forced to unite against rising threat of
The Persians
That the Iliad was improvised orally and not written down is shown by
Homer’s use of repeated metric formulae
A direct democracy is one in which
all citizens take part in making laws
Citizens of Athens included which of the following?
Only landed males over the age of 18
The so called “father of history” who introduced a travelogue of his trips to Egypt and Asia was
Herodotus
The excerpt from Pericles’ Funeral Speech shows that when Pericles made the speech, Athens was
a democratic city-state
Which of the following is the fullest description of what causes the tragic events of Antigone?
Creon follows a rigid policy in a situation calling for flexibility
________ was a leading statesman and proponent of Athenian democracy who dominated the city-states politics for over 30 years.
Pericles
The ancient Greeks marked time using a four-year measurement called the
Olympiad
Creon’s exchange with his son, Haemon, suggests that the Athenian audience of the time would have been sensitive to which of the following issues?
Creon’s rejection of advice from the Theban populus
The death of Creon’s wife, Eurydice, near the end of the play
comes as a complete surprise
The number of surviving plays from the ancient Greek theater is thought to be
45
Which of the following defines the term “hubris”?
excessive pride
In order to persuade Crito that he cannot break the law, Socrates portrays the laws as
the equivalent of Socrates parents
The philosopher Heraclitus had a decisive influence on Socrates. His name is associated with the notion
that all things are in a state of flux and change
The Greek physician remembered as the father of medicine was
Hippocrates
Athens’ premier philosopher and proponent of cross examination and inductive reasoning was
Socrates
Ultimately, Socrates might be likened to Achilles and Antigone, in that like them
he preferred death to dishonor
In his Ethics, _____ argued that the good life was identical to the life of reason, and would be guided by the Golden Mean.
Aristotle
The belief of Plato that mathematics should serve as the standard of certainty and clarity for all knowledge shows the influence of
Pythagoras
In the “Allegory of the Cave”, the ultimate goal of the thinker is to come into contact with
the Form of the Good
For Plato, the real of the purely intelligible contains objects of knowledge that we grasp
by means of mind alone
For Socrates, the fact that the soul knows things that it could not possibly learn from sense experience is a sign
that the soul must have existed before its present life
Looked at as an ethical document; the Allegory of the Cave tends to the following conclusion
virtue is knowledege
Aristotle’s ethical teachings can be reduced to 2 basic maxims of traditional Greek folk wisdom
Do nothing in excess and know yourself
the Iliad is a work that describes events related to
Mycenaean attack on the coastal city of Troy
Which of the following is NOT true of ancient Greek life?
Each polis had it’s own language and religion
The pre-Socratic philosophers were searching for
the basic “stuff” of nature
Socrates refused to escape from an Athenian jail because he
refused to dishonor the laws of the polis
Plato’s Theory of Forms conveys the idea that
reality lies in a realm beyond sense perception.
