Most researchers today, however, believe that climate change drove people to abandon hunting and gathering in favor of pastoralism and agriculture. So great was the global warming that ended the last Ice Age that geologists gave the era since about 9000 B.C.E. a new name: the Holocene.
by HistoryNerd94 November 13, 2010
Family of related languages long spoken across part of western Asia and northern Africa. In antiquity these languages included Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. The most wide–spread modern member of the Semitic family is Arabic.
As early as 2900 B.C.E., personal names recorded in inscriptions from the northerly cities reveal a non-Sumerian Semitic language.
by HistoryNerd94 December 14, 2010
A system of writing in which wedge-shape symbols represented words or syllables. It originated in Mesopotamia and was used initially for Sumerian and Akkadian but later was adapted to represent other languages of western Asia. Because so many symbols had to be learned, literacy was confined to a relatively small group of administrators and scribes.
Because the reed made wedge-shaped impressions, the early pictures, which were more or less realistic, evolved into stylized combinations of strokes and wedges, a system known as cuneiform writing.
by HistoryNerd94 December 25, 2010
A small independent state consisting of an urban center and the surrounding agricultural territory. A characteristic political form in early Mesopotamia, Archaic and Classical Greece, Phoenicia, and early Italy.
The term city-state refers to a self-governing urban center and the agriculture territories it controlled.
by HistoryNerd94 December 17, 2010
An ambiguous term often used to denote more complex societies but sometimes used by anthropologists to describe any group of people sharing a set of cultural traits.
Scholars agree that political, social, economic, and technological phenomena are indicators of civilization.
by HistoryNerd94 September 25, 2010
The intellectual and artistic flowering in Europe during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries sparked by a revival of interest in classical antiquity.
The Renaissance celebrated human possibility.
by HistoryNerd94 December 28, 2011
The central figure in the ancient Egyptian state. Believed to be an earthly manifestation of the gods, he used his absolute power to maintain the safety and prosperity of Egypt.
The Egyptian state centered on the king, often known by the New Kingdom term pharaoh, from an Egyptian phrase meaning "palace."
by HistoryNerd94 December 26, 2010