Download glossary unit 2, lesson 1 mesopotamia

SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1ST ESO
HISTORY
GLOSSARY
UNIT 2: THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS: MESOPOTAMIA
UNIT 2. 1. MESOPOTAMIA
1.22 AND 1.2. : THE FIRST CITY-STATES
FERTILE CRESCENT: An area in the Middle East where the first urban
civilizations
appeared.
CITY-STATE: an ancient city with independent government and its surroundings.
EMPIRE: All the territory, including other city states, that a kingdom or city-state
conquered in Mesopotamia. V.g: The city state of Akkad conquered other cities of
lower Mesopotamia (Ur, Uruk), forming the Akkadian empire.
HARVEST: the amount of a crop that is collected.
TAXES: the amount of money that citizens had to pay to the monarch.
ADOBE: a mixture of clay and straw used to make bricks for building.
WORSHIP: to show devotion for a god or a goddess
PRIEST: a person who performs religious ceremonies in the ancient world.
ZIGGURAT: a large rectangular temple, pyramid-shaped, made of several levels
of bricks with a temple at the top, used to communicate with the gods in Ancient
Mesopotamia.
MONARCH: the king of the queen of a city-state in Ancient Mesopotamia.
CUNEIFORM: Mesopotamian writing system which used symbols (pictograms) to
write in the form of a wedge (
) leaving on the clay tablets the
impression of a groove made by a dip pen.
HAMMURABI’S CODE: It was the FIRST SET OF LAWS that was recorded or
written. King Hammurabi of Babylon ordered to write it on a standing stone block
of basalt using CUNEIFORM SYSTEM OF WRITING.
1.3. MESOPOTAMIAN ART
ARCH: architectonical element with a curved shape that supported a lot of weight
used to construct buildings in Ancient Mesopotamia.
GLAZED CERAMICS: A type of brick decorated with coloured glass, like the blue
glazed ceramics covering the façade of the Ishtar Gate in Babylon.
STELE: A marble or stone slab where Mesopotamians artists engraved military or
hunting scenes