2,000 B.C.

Mesopotamia, The New World, and Egyptian

The land between the rivers/ Euphrates and Tigris

The birth place of formal religion, writing, math,

law ,and to a large extent,

architecture.

Melting pot, mixture of traditions and religions.

Man made mountains/ ziggurats (tower of Babel)

The wheel

Written language/ cuneiform

First legal codes

Ur the home of Abraham

Ziggurats( stair to heaven)/ to build on a raised area. The gods were believed to live in a temple on the top. Only the

chief priests were allow in the temple to care for the god’s needs. Ziggurats were built of sun baked bricks and had a

pyramidal shape

•Every organized religion has traces to Babylon

•Nimrod built a city and established a common religion /descendent of Ham

•Tower of Babel

•Hammurapi gathered laws into a unified code

                                                                                                                                                         

 

                                                                           

king of Babylon

Code of Hammurapi set up a

social order based on the rights

of the individual

Eye for an eye and tooth for a

tooth

The strong shall not injure the

weak

The stone slab on which the code

was carved was discovered in Susa,

Iran in l901. A relief carved above

the code shows Hammurapi before

Shamash, the sun god, being

commanded to establish just laws.

He abolished the worship of other

gods.

Writing

Invention of zero ( meant completeness)

Blood letting and perhaps human sacrifice

Hierarchical city-state unions

Mesoamerican calendar

Mesoamerican ball game played with rubber balls. The object was to get the ball in a stone basket using knees, elbows, hips, or heads. It was so difficult to achieve the goal that the game was over when a goal was made.

•System of writing

•Genius for mathematics/astronomy

•Refined form of architecture

•Located/ Mexico and Central America

http://www.anthroarcheart.org/tblw49.htm

Of all the urbanized people of the Americas, the Incas were the most brilliant engineers. The Huari-Tiahuanaco performed amazing feats of fitting gigantic

stones together, and the Nazca designed mind-numbingly huge earth-drawings that still exist today. But the Inca built massive forts with stone slabs so

perfectly cut that they didn't require mortar—and they're still standing today in near-perfect condition. They built roads through the mountains from Ecuador to Chile with tunnels and bridges. They also built aqueducts to their cities as the

Romans had. And of all ancient peoples, they were the most advanced in medicine and surgery.

.The lost Inca cityOf Machu Picchu,

high in the mountains of Peru

Native American Art

• Much native American art was inspired by visions. The shaman (priest-healer) would reproduce objects the gods communicated to him during a trance. Among the results of drawing on such subconscious impulses were extremely distorted Eskimo masks, among the most original art ever seen.

Shaman’s mask with the sun, moon and dog spirits.

Mound builders/ the first environmentalists?• Native Americans believed in

unity with nature. • Tribes constructed mounds,

some 100 feet high, from Florida to Wisconsin. Some imitated the shape of a tribe’s totem animal, such as an enormous , bird with spreading wings. Others were simply shaped like domes, but in each case, the builders hauled millions of tons of earth in baskets then tapped it down. The volume of the largest one near St. Louis is greater than that of the great Pyramid. In some cases, inner burial chambers, contained treasures, like the body of an aristocrat clothed entirely in pearls.

•Mound builders partly inspired Earthworks, movement that emerged in the late 1960’s, to make the land itself a work of art. Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” (now underwater in Great Sale Lake, Utah) is one of the better known examples of the movement.

•Southwest tribe

•Geometric design rugs colored with herbal and mineral dyes/ carmine red

•Shamans created sand paintings for healing, fertility, huntingSand painters still use natural pigments, like

powdered rock,corn pollen, and charcoal, to produce temporary works on a flat bed of sand.

•Carved and painted Kachina dolls out of cottonwood roots to represent gods and teach religion.

•Decorated underground kivas in Arizona with elaborate mural paintings of agricultural deities.

•Northwest tribe

•Totem poles

•Masks

•Decorated houses

•canoes