Western Civ. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 Test Terms – Flashcards
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Parts of a Civilization
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Agriculture, the domestication of animals that made farming possible, the construction of cities, and the invention of writing.
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First True Civilization
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Sumer
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Sumer and Major Cities
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Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, and Kish
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*Lugals*
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Military action was most efficiently directed by a single commander to whom everyone owed obedience--the king, whose formal title was this.
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*Mesopotamia*
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An ancient region in Western Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, now part of Iraq.
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Two Major Rivers: Significance/Development of
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The Tigris River, with its deep bed, flooded less broadly but with a strong current. The Euphrates, on the other hand was broad and shallow, overran its banks easily, and scattered highland silt over a wide expanse. The faster-flowing Tigris usually reached its high-water mark in April, while the Euphrates generally reached full flood about a month later.
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Sumerian Writing Impact
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The Sumerians invented writing during this age, starting with primitive early pictograms, or drawn representation of objects. These gave way to a sophisticated system of ideograms, which represent concepts, and phonograms, or marks indicating syllabic phonetic values. The latter are similar to the shortcuts used by today's text messengers. Sumerian writing used nearly 2,000 symbols, which meant that literacy remained a tightly held monopoly of professional scribes, who consequently enjoyed positions of great significance in society. Without them, kings and priests could not compile records, issue decrees, or establish legal or liturgical canons.
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*Enlil*
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The great sky god En-Mebaragesi built a temple in Nippur for.
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Job of Royal Officials
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Had to adopt a fawning, obsequious tone that makes a modern reader squirm to remain in the pharoah's good graces. Each nome was administrated by a nomarch appointed by the king, and they all reported to a central official called a vizier. The nomarchs oversaw all public works projects, coordinated food distribution, heard appeals, and dispensed justice. Assisting all these was an army of scribes who kept census records, tallied tax revenues, noted expenditures, and issued the government's decrees.
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Isis
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Sister of Osiris who formed him back together with Anubis to have a baby with him before he died. She gave birth to Horus who avenged his death by killing Seth, who killed Osiris.
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Osiris
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Incestuous brother of Isis who became the first god-king of the earth that Ptah had created, but his brother Seth who was jealous of his kingship and relations with Isis killed him and scattered his body across the Nile. After his son Horus avenged him, it is believed every pharaoh after was a reincarnation of him. And upon his death, every pharaoh transformed into Osiris, who ruled over the realm of the dead for eternity.
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*Ziggurats*
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Vast terraced pyramid-like mounds the Sumerians build to recognize a particular patron god. They stood atop which lavishly decorated temples that served as the earthly home of the god or goddess.
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*Nomes*
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Regional groupings along segments of the Nile, they eventually coalesced into larger units until finally, around 3150 BCE, the entire kingdom was unified under a single ruler.
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*Epic of Gilgamesh*
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An epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia. Dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur, it is often regarded as the first great work of literature. It relates the adventures of a powerful but egotistical king whose arrogance leads him to offend the gods. It also described a great flood and served to remind the people of the unpredictability of the gods while creating a reference point for the start of their own history.
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"Poem of the Righteous Sufferer" meaning:
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It expresses the agonies of an unnamed Sumerian who despite his strict ritual observance has nevertheless suffered the loss of his wealth and social position. A later Babylonian writer reworked the myth and turned this poem into a song of praise for the god Marduk. In the original tale, the dominant tone is despair.
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Parts of Egyptian "Pyramid Texts":
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Incantations, magic spells, proclamations, and hymns were inscribed on the walls of the royal tombs. These texts guided the dead through the wasteland and provided sets of prayers and incantations that could be used against the demons. They supplied the answers needed to satisfy the questions posed by Osiris and the other judges.
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*Ma'at and Concept*
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A recognition of the world's ordering and a commitment not to upset it. Scholars commonly translate it as "justice," which is too generious. Ma'at, in practice, was a kind of moral stasis, an acceptance of the world as it is, a reluctance to change anything for fear that the result might be worse than the reality already experienced. Early Egypt thus embodied a conservative principle that may be its most significant legacy to Western culture.
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*The "Great Flood Myth"*
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A mythical great flood sent by capricious gods that covered the entire earth and all but annihilated mankind. Much like the Biblical tale of Noah and the Ark, for which it served as a model, the Great Flood never happened but retained its mythic power because of the peoples' genuine fear of actual flooding. The Tigris and Euphrates occasionally swelled to unusual size and covered farms, fields, and flocks.
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Akkadians
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A Semitic people overwhelmed the Sumerian city-states around 2350 BCE and established the Akkadian Period, which lasted until about 2100. They had lived for several centuries along the upper Tigris, trading with the Sumerians and the peoples of Syria. Although they were foreigners, they respected Sumerian culture and adopted its language, institutions, and religion.
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*Empire*
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An extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority, formerly especially an emperor or empress.
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Patrilineal/Matrilineal
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"Through male heirs" / "Through the female heir"
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Enki
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The god of waters (later identified with the Babylonian god Ea)
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*Abzu and Tiamat*
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The world itself came about through the movement of 2 primordial forces--the male and female principles--which resulted in the creation of the physical world and then of the gods themselves. The Annunaki feared the creation of even more gods, so Enki and Enlil killed them.
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Shamash Hymn
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Known as this after the Babylonian name for the sun god of Utu worshipped in the city-state of Sippur, it offers praise for the god's relentless protection of the weak and troubled. The hymn goes on to praise the Utu/Shamash for punishing corrupt judges and dishonest merchants, for granting long life to those who work for justice, and for rewarding the honest and kindly.
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Lower and Upper Egypt
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For 600 miles the Nile meanders slowly northward, cutting a green swath of fertile land on either side of the riverbed, until about a 100 miles shy of the Mediterranean it branches out in a delta with no fewer than 7 major openings to the sea, spread over nearly 250 miles of coastline. This delta region forms "Lower Egypt" and the 600 mile long river valley directly south of it comprises "Upper Egypt." Together the 2 regions made up approximately 12,000 square miles of arable land, and they were home to human communities dating back to 5,000 BCE.
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*Horus*
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The god of Isis and Osiris that avenged Osiris's death by killing Seth and became the embodiment of future pharaohs.
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Old Kingdom
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Egypt's Middle and New Kingdoms, the Babylonian (and later Persian) Empire in southern Mesopotamia, the Assyrian Empire of northern Mesopotamia, and the Hittite Empire in Asia Minor. Between these powerful kingdoms lay a sprawl of smaller states along the eastern Mediterranean coastline and skirting the southern edges of the Anatolian mountains. Once established, this patchwork of big and small states lived in relative harmony, in a dense web of commercial, cultural and diplomatic connections that inspired some remarkable advances in each society.
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Middle Kingdom
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The erosion of royal authority, beginning in the 5th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, brought about the First Intermediate Period in Egypt. In this relatively brief but turbulent period, the local nomarchs usurped royal power, plundered farmers' property, and engaged in widespread lawlessness. The Middle Kingdom did produce an exceptionally large body of writing.
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New Kingdom
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The embarrassment of the Hyksos conquest proved to the Egyptians that the defense provided by their surrounding deserts no longer sufficed. Realizing that Egypt's relative isolation was at an end, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom decided to seize the initiative by extending their might to other lands. They subdued the Nubians to the south, which guaranteed Egypt's access to the gold mines of the region—a necessity now that gold had been established as the international standard for commerce throughout the Near East.
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"Ten Lost Tribes of Israel"
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These brutal conquerors annihilated tens of thousands and sent the rest off into slavery throughout the Assyrian Empire. 10 of the 12 tribes of ancient Israel that were said to have been deported from the Kingdom of Israel after it was conquered by the Assyrian Empire. They were named Asher, Dan, Ephraim, Gad, Issachar, Manasseh, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, and Zebulun—all sons or grandsons of Jacob.
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*Ushabti*
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Funerary figurines made of clay or wood were exceedingly common. Though simple in design, these figures ("those who respond") represented the servants who continued to work for one in the after-life. They were the servants of the dead, charged with providing food and water, performing physical labor, and in some cases providing sexual amusement.
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*Phoenicians and Significance*
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They were particularly successful, since they took to the sea and established a network of trading colonies that stretched across the major Mediterranean islands (Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearics) and along the northern coast of Africa. Their name, which the ancient Greeks picked up from a West Semitic dialect, meant "the purple people"—a reference to their expertise in dyeing. Their most important contribution to Western history was dissemination of its alphabet, which simplified the task of writing. Theirs was among the first alphabets in Western history, but since it provided the model for the alphabet later adopted by the Greeks, it led directly to the alphabet used in the Western world today.
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*Akhenaton*
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Instituted a radical change by renaming himself this. He was previously known as Amenhotep IV. He elevated a minor solar deity called Aten to supreme status among the gods. He closed the temples to Amon-Ra, violently suppressed their cults, and promoted Aten as the sole true and universal deity. He was the first to push for monotheism, and everyone had to subject themselves to Aten.
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*Zoroastrianism (include gods)*
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A man named Zoroaster began to preach the supremacy of a single god and the requirement of an ethical basis of life as the proper way of worshipping him. It was the beginning of this, the first transitional Western religion. He claimed to have received a vision of this "Wise Lord," Ahura Mazda. He preached that he was the one true and eternal God, altogether wise, just, and good; significantly, though, Ahura Mazda was not all-powerful—for he had an adversary named Angra Mainyu, later known as Ahriman. "Truly there are 2 primal spirits, twins renowned to be in conflict. In thought, word, and act they are two: the Good and the Bad" It was in order to defeat Ahriman, Zoroaster taught, that Ahura Mazda created the world and all living things, to provide a battleground for the cosmic struggle.
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*Queen Hatshepsut*
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Her reign from 1478-1458 BCE was notable for its prosperity and peace, but is best remembered for the spectacular mortuary temple she had constructed at Deir el-Bahri—a series of terraced gardens and broad colonnades carved into the high cliffs of the river valley. All of the pharaohs of the New Kingdom after Thutmose I chose to be buried in the Valley of the Kings. Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I, the queen of Thutmose II, and the ban of her stepson Thutmose III.
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Goal of Egyptianizing
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To Egyptify the broader Near East had less to do with aiding the development of civilization than with simply bringing more people, whether slave or free, into the service of the pharaoh.
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*Battle of Qadesh*
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Took place between the forces of the Egyptian Empire under Ramesses II and the Hittite Empire. , The Hittites focused their military efforts on the Egyptian-held portions of Syria and Palestine. They advanced slowly. They could not put as many soldiers on the field as the Egyptian army could. The turning point came in 1286-1285 BCE, when Egypt, under Ramses II, and the Hittites, under their king Hattusilis III, declared after an inconclusive battle at Qadesh and established the first written peace treaty in Western history.
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Ahura Mazda
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The god Zoroaster claimed to have received a vision of this "Wise Lord," Ahura Mazda. He preached that he was the one true and eternal God, altogether wise, just, and good; significantly, though, Ahura Mazda was not all-powerful—for he had an adversary named Angra Mainyu, later known as Ahriman. "Truly there are 2 primal spirits, twins renowned to be in conflict. In thought, word, and act they are two: the Good and the Bad" It was in order to defeat Ahriman, Zoroaster taught, that Ahura Mazda created the world and all living things, to provide a battleground for the cosmic struggle.
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Philistines
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In contrast to the Phoenicians, the Phillistines settled in the territory just south of Phoenicia. They are best known as the villains in the Hebrew conquest of the Promised Land, the barbarous people whose champion was the giant Goliath. Possibly an offshoot of the Peleset (one of the groups singled out by the Egyptians as being among the Sea Peoples), they in fact were an urban, commercial people who practiced little agriculture—just enough to put them at odds with pastoralist groups like the Hebrews. Little is known of their language, but archaeological remains link them with ancient Greek culture. They introduced grape and olive vines to the Holy Land, which are indigenous to the Greek archipelago, for example. They occupied the region of Palestine that provided much of the copper and tin needed to produce bronze. Their control of such strategic sites and their access to superior weaponry, while making it impossible for their foes to forge similar weapons of their own, is what made the Phillistines so substantial a foe to the advancing Hebrews.
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Earliest Dates of Iron Objects/Iron Age
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Iron ore is plentiful in the Near East, and people had been mining it for a long time. Objects made of iron have been dates as early as 5,000 BCE. By 1200 BCE, metalworkers had begun to perfect their methods. By 1100 BCE iron weapons began to proliferate; by 800 BCE most common homes were well supplied with iron pots, tools, and utensils.
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*Avesta*
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A sequence of hymns to Ahura Mazda. They were 17 poems known as the Gathas that were passed on orally for many centuries until the Persian acquired writing. By the time the Gathas were finally written down in the 3rd century CE, a great number of other holy texts had been produced by Zoroastrian priests. These were combined with the original Gathas, and the result was the Avesta—the holy book of the Zoroastrians.
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"Book of the Dead"
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The only full-length text of any sort that Egypt contributed to Western literature until the 19th century. This book, when placed in a casket, theoretically opened the gates of paradise, such as it was, to anyone who died with it in his or her possession. It is not a work of literary art; it is an anthology of incantations, magical spells, boilerplate praise poems, and cribbed solutions to the riddles put to one by Osiris at the entrance to the House of Judgement.
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Code of Hammurabi
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The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code of ancient Mesopotamia, dating back to about 1754 BC. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. It contains 282 clauses, addressing issues like property rights, water rights, marriage, violent crime, and wage regulations. It neglects to mention many equally vital aspects of Babylonian life, such as the commercial marketplace that formed the life hood of the economy. The Code tells us much about how Babylonian society differed from the Sumerian one it supplanted. It references to the phrase "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
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Persian "Royal Road"
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A 1,600-mile roadway from Sardis (near the Aegean coast, in Anatolia) to Susa (near the Persian Gulf, in modern day Iran) that became the main artery for moving goods, capital, services, information, and soldiers through the heart of the empire. It was constructed by Darius.
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Hammurabi and Military Conquests
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One of the most famous early Babylonian rulers. He passed endless false rumors, usually of his own making and reiterated in person by his many ambassadors. They warned each city-state of a plot supposedly being hatched in another. Believing the lies, the other Amorite kings continually attacked one another for nearly 20 years and exhausted themselves in the process. Hammurabi then went on the offensive and in less than a decade conquered them all. He emerged as the sole ruler of virtually the entire Tigris-Euphrates region; thus was built the great Babylonian Empire.
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Hyksos
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Pharaohs were able to renew public building programs, but these projects required more laborers than the local population could provide, which led the pharaohs to recruit groups of foreigners (Hyksos in Egyptian) to work in the mines and fields.
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Sea People
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Called this by the Egyptians; this new group attacked swiftly throughout the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean seas, setting off shockwaves of dispossessed war refugees much farther inland than the Sea Peoples themselves ever advanced. They appeared in the Nile delta in 1207 and within 20 years had gained control of most of it. They effectively ended the Egyptian empire in Palestine, since the pharaohs no longer had access to the sea and hence could not engage in trade or diplomacy. No one knows who the Sea People were. They caused a lot of destruction and the Egyptians and Hittites learned from them.
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*Origin of Indo-European*
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The newcomers were a varied crew, related to one another by language: each spoke one of a family of languages known today as Indo-European. In 1786, an Englishman named Sir William Jones, then serving as a judge in colonial India, delivered a paper to the Asiatic Society in which he observed that ancient Sanskrit (the ancestor from which the major languages spoken in northern India are derived) shared an exceptional number of word roots and grammatical forms with ancient European tongues like Greek, Latin, Gothic, and the Celtic languages; from this he argued that they must therefore be related. The common ancestor soon came to be called Proto-Indo-European and is now believed to have originated somewhere north of the Black Sea.
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Nebuchadnezzar
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One of the neo-Babylonian kings (605-562 BCE), led his army into Jerusalem, destroyed the Hebrew Temple, and carried tens of thousands of Hebrews into slavery back east, in Babylon. He was noted for constructing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as well.
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*Magi*
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Zoroastrian priests were called this.
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Monotheism/Polytheism
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The belief in a single, supreme deity. / The belief in many supreme deities or gods.
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Cyrus
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Led the Persians, was the undisputed master of the east, the largest empire the Western world had yet seen. He freed the Hebrews and allowed them to return to Jerusalem, where they quickly established a semiautonomous vassal state. Cyrus portioned out his empire with care and forethought. He was also wisely content to let the Hebrews go their own way.
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*Darius*
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A cousin of Cambyses carried the dynasty after Cambyses' death triggered a dynastic crisis, since he died young and without an heir His reign lasted from 521 to 486 BCE, during which time he reformed the administration and undertook an extensive campaign to improve the empire's infrastructure. He created the Royal Road, and he also cut a canal that connected the Nile with the Red Sea, to facilitate trade with Egypt, and brought systematic irrigation to the Iranian plateau for the first time, which dramatically increased the agricultural production of the land.
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*Torah/Tanakh*
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The Hebrew Bible, the T stands for Torah which means "instructions." It has 5 books attributed to Moses under the first heading, the prophets from Joshua to Malachi under the second, and all the remaining writings under the third.
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Anshei Knesset ha-Gedolah
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According to Jewish tradition, the entire set of books was finally established, ordered, and canonized around 450 BCE by a group remembered as the "Men of the Great Assembly."
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2 Distinct Versions of Jewish Bible
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The Masoretic text compiled in Hebrew in the 2nd century CE, and the Greek text the Septuagint, compiled around 200 BCE for the Greek speaking Jews of the Hellenistic era.
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Covenant
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An agreement, or promise (that the Hebrews' made with God).
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YHWH
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The term Yahwist (J) uses to stand for God.
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*Yahwist*
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(J), is believed to have been the first, and his writings can be identified by his use of the term YHWH to stand for God. He is presumed to have written most of Genesis, and certainly those parts of it that relate the stories of Abraham and his descendants. J's God is always YHWH in Hebrew (which English-language Bibles represent by the all-capitals word LORD), and as we have seen, YHWH frequently intervenes directly in his human characters' lives.
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*Elohist*
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(E), uses a different but never depicts any direct human encounters with hum. In Genesis, the long final section telling the tale of Joseph and his brothers come from E. (Joseph is the first human being in the Bible who never sees or hears God personally, yet still believes.) E's handiwork is the patchiest, with few long passages apart from the Joseph story, which suggests that it reflects an oral as opposed to written tradition, something interwoven here and there throughout the J narrative.
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*Deuteronomist*
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(D) is the most controversial of the authors. Some scholars consider him to be the author of the book of Deuteronomy but of little else, whereas others regard him as the most critical figure in Biblical transmission.
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Judah/Israel
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Those in the hilly south called themselves the people of Judah, while the northern-based tribes took the name of Israel.
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Diaspora
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Known as "exile" or "scattering."
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*Babylonian Captivity*
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The Chaldeans destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem and took the Jews eastward into this.
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Tumeh
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The bans on women entering the Temple or performing other liturgical rites during menstruation or immediately after giving birth, times when they are labeled "impure" or "unclean" (Hebrew tumeh), may seem misogynistic but appear less so when one considers the more numerous conditions that rendered a man tumeh.
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*Song of Songs*
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Also known as the Songs of Solomon, which consists of a poetic dialogue between a bride and bride-groom that celebrates married love in all its emotional and physical intimacy.
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*She'ol*
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Known as the Biblical underworld.
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*Gentiles*
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A person that was not Jewish.
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*rabbis*
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A Jewish scholar or teacher, especially one who studies or teaches Jewish law. A person appointed as a Jewish religious leader. The status of rabbis had a long lineage going back centuries, the word meant something like "master."
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*Septuagint*
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The Septuagint, compiled around 200 BCE for the Greek speaking Jews of the Hellenistic era. One of the two versions of the Jewish Bible.
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Aftermath upon return of Jews
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The small minority of exiles who returned to Jerusalem consisted primarily of those associated in one way or another with the Temple and palace. Their efforts to reestablish their old authority in Jerusalem left the Diaspora communities free to develop their rabbinical traditions without resistance. Few of the Jews who had remained behind in Judah welcomed the idea of reinstalling the old hierarchy, so relations between the population and the returnees remained tense.
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Hebrew Bible portrayal of earthly history
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The variations in the canon are important: the Hebrew scriptures evolved over time rather than emerging fully formed and perfect at a single moment in history. The difficulties hardly negate the Bible's value as a historical source. Rather, we must read the texts on their own terms: they portray not an earthly history in the usual sense but the development of a relationship--the growth of a people's understanding of their connection to a transcendent deity.
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*Solomon*
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Son of David who he succeeded and thew his considerable energy into enlarging his father's palace complex. He also began the construction of a temple to house the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon also expanded the royal palace until it formed a vast complex with the Temple. Moreover, he built the Israelites' first commercial fleet. He was a wise and great ruler who championed the causes of justice and piety. He wrote psalms, too, and is credited with writing the books of Proverbs, and the Song of Songs.
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Ezra
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As late as 458 BCE, the prophet Ezra came to Jerusalem from Babylon with his own edition of the Torah, promoting reform along rabbinical lines. He is indeed the essential source for rabbinical Judaism.
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Jeremiah
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One of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible. He was among the Jews who went to Egypt, prophesied YHWH's further wrath upon the apostates who gave themselves over to foreign gods. Credited for authoring Jeremiah, 1st and 2nd Kings, and Lamentations.
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*Abraham*
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Previous name Abram, a patriarch of two great nations. God commanded him to take Isaac to the top of a hill and sacrifice him.
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Noah
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The legend of Noah and the Ark clearly derives from the Sumerian tale of the Great Flood.
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Moses
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Lead the Egyptians out of bondage, received the Torah on Mount Sinai, and guided them to the Promised Land.
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Joseph
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Jacob's son reportedly lived to be 110. Known to be the favorite son among his ten other brothers.
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Saul
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Samuel selected Saul to be the first king of all the Hebrews. He stopped the Philistine advance into the hills but was unable to push them back to the coast.
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*Miriam*
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Moses's sister, helped to guide the Hebrews across the Red Sea and led their celebration of thanksgiving once they had reached the other side.
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*Esther*
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A young Jewish girl who becomes queen of Persia and uses her position to forestall a plot to annihilate the Jews within the empire.
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Cyrus the Great
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Persian emperor who released the Jews and allowed them to return to Jerusalem in 538. His decision triggered a predictable conflict.
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*Cuneiform*
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Technique of writing developed in Mesopotamia whereby wedge-shaped marks were impressed in clay tablets.
