Ancient Civilizations: Cuneiform And Hieroglyphics

The pyramids were built for a king, for his afterlife. All of his prized possessions were in the pyramid with him. The great egyptians believed after you died you came back to life. That's why they wrapped their kings like mummies, they did this to preserve the body.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the Sumerians would be their creation of Cuneiform. Cuneiform was the world’s first writing system. Cuneiform was based on wedge shaped characters representing words, but later developed into representing word sounds and concepts. This was probably the most momentous contribution of the Sumerians. Writing is important to all civilizations, without it our world wouldn’t be the way it is today. Although most Sumerian citizens were illiterate and couldn’t read or right, cuneiform was a huge achievement made by the

The majority of ancient Egyptian structures studied by architectural historians and planners alike, were erected to honor a pharaoh or as a grand tomb for their journey through to the afterlife. Whether the structure was in the form of a temple, tomb or statue, the ritual and spiritual influence is unquestionable. The location, scale, and materials used to construct these monuments are all defining factors of how the space is used and functions.

These large stone structures were built as tombs for kings that died. The Egyptians who built the pyramids needed to learn the specialized skills of mathematics, geometry, engineering, and architecture, as stated in document three.

That was an act of human creation of the Near Eastern river valleys of Sumer and Egypt. Cuneiform writing in Sumer and the hieroglyphics in Egypt was developed in this time period. Such things as the Code of Hammurabi and the fall of the Assyrian Empire, The Persian wars, assassination of Julius

For an irrigation system, they used water from the Nile River by blocking it with dams, ditches, or canals to move water to a selected area and built reservoirs to store the water ( Doc 3 ). To move this water they used a bucket attached to a weighted pole, called a Shaduf ( Doc 3 ). The Egyptians also built the pyramids as tombs for pharaohs and embalmed the wealthy’s bodies (Doc 4 ) as a way of preserving the bodies and to stop decaying. THeir achievements of developing an Irrigation system are still helps in the Middle East as a way of creating more arable land ( Doc 3

Much of the pyramids history is on the inside. One of the many things inside of the pyramids are (sometimes also known as mummies) are the bodies of the pharaohs. When pharaohs died in Ancient Egypt, they were believed to become gods. In order to properly put them at rest, they had to do a proper burial. To do this, people has to take out every organ of the body except for the heart. The heart is told to hold the soul, so they couldn’t remove it. After this, they stuff the body with cloth and sew the skin up. They put chemicals on the body to dry it out, and set for 40 days. The body was then covered in oils, precious stones, and amulets and bound with longs strips of cloth over and over again. A highly decorated mask was set on the face and wrapped again in cloth. This whole process took about 70

Pharaohs were eminent figures to the people of the New Kingdom Egypt who had control over the entire Egypt itself as they were leaders of both politics and religion. The Valley of the Kings was the burial place chosen to be the final resting place for pharaohs of the New Kingdom era. The structure of the royal tombs were constructed to imitate that of the underworld, and were built underground to protect the tombs from tomb robbers – the tombs were not intended to be seen by outsiders. Each tomb depicted the pharaoh’s personality, and their interests and such, as the tombs vary from decoration and possessions placed alongside the body. The general construction of the tomb included: an entrance corridor with wall paintings; the decorations on

Before the actual writing on the clay tablets was created, the Sumerians originally had tokens. The tokens were items that represented words. They were kept safe together in a sealed clay envelope. The way the Sumerians knew what was in the envelope was that they press the tokens into the clay on the outside. The reason that they had the tokens in

There is much debate on how the Ancient Egyptian Pyramids in Giza were built. King Khufu’s pyramid, from the Old Kingdom, stands at 146 meters high, has a base of 230 meters, while using 2.4 million stone blocks; each block averaging between 2.5 to 15 tons (Van Der Mieroop). These extreme numbers force researchers to try and create hypotheses on how the Ancient Egyptians were able to construct such colossal monuments. Although we have an idea of where and how the Egyptians obtained the materials used for their creation, it is still unclear how they were able to take stone blocks that weighted several tons so high up, have such precision that not even a credit card could slip through the blocks, and was capable of pointing the pyramids

This script dates back to the Middle Bronze Age which would be approximately 2500 BC. They have not ascertained if this was an example of proto-writing (symbols) or if it is actual writing of the syllabic type. It has been suggested this might be a mature style of writing. Historians learned about the early Chinese Shang Dynasty from 1200 BC from the written documents on bones, bronze or turtle shells. A stone slab, with 3,000 BC year old writing, was discovered in the Mexican State of Veracruz. This would be the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere. The Phoenician alphabet is basically the proto-Canaanite alphabet from the Iron Age (1050 BC). The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language. The tribe known as Latin (Romans) adopted writing from the Etruscans (tribe from Tiras, son of Japheth) and the Western Greeks in the fifth century. The first pure alphabet with single symbols emerged around 1800 BC in ancient Egypt. Semitic workers in Egypt developed this alphabet as a representation of language. Historians make a distinction between prehistory and the history of early writing, but have disagreed if proto-writing is considered true writing. Papyrus (reed) was the principle writing

First of All, they invented the first form of writing, called the cuneiform. Sumerians wrote on clay tablets with a special tool called a stylus. Sumerians used cuneiform to make the first symbol. Sumerian writing developed from early symbols called pictographs. They also used writing for business records. Writing was not the only great Sumerian invention. In time Sumerian students went to school to learn how to read and write.

In ancient times two neighboring civilizations emerged whose culture, economies, governments, and innovations were a result of the river systems on which they depended. Ancient Mesopotamia was in the Near East spanning modern day Iraq, Kuwait and parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran. Mesopotamia’s name in Ancient Greek is translated as “land between the rivers,” referring to the Tigris and Euphrates river systems between which Mesopotamia was located. In Ancient Egypt, as in modern day Egypt, the Nile River played a major role in this Northern African civilization.

The pyramids were built as a tomb for the pharaoh. Their belief was that the top point of the pyramid was the gate for the soul to travel to the afterlife and return to earth if chosen. These tombs were built which line up with certain stars and planets.

In the deserts of Egypt lie the colossal remains of an ancient civilization. These enormous works of human endeavor are the only member of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World that time has passed down to us. These are, of course, the great pyramids of ancient Egypt. But these imposing structures were not built to impress civilization millennia down the road. The pyramids in fact had a purpose to the ancient Egyptians. While they seem very simple in nature, as they are simply four-sided pyramids with square bases, they had a meaning for those that had them built. Even by today’s standards, the pyramids of ancient Egypt were an impressive feat of engineering, due to their enormous size, both in building materials and finished product.