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| This was the entral hill in the city of Athens tha, during classic times, was the location of the city's principal temples, particularly the Parthenon, whch was dedicated to the goddess Athena. |
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| This man was an Athenian philosopher and a student of Plato. Unlike Plato, Aristotle rejected the Thery of Forms and decided that people come to understand the world no because of ideal forms as Plato said but through individual examples experienced through the sense. This led to the development of scientific diciplines as we know them today. |
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| This was a box contructed of precious wood and gold. It contained the tablets on wih the Ten Commandments were inscribed, and it was first housed in the Tabernacle (or the tent of Meeting =) before it was moved into the First Temple in Jerusalem. |
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| This was a religious text from ancient Egypt written in hieroglyphs containing prayers, spells, and hymns; the knowledge of this text of this work appears on many tomb walls. |
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| This is an agreement between God and man, and it was a religious concept that originated with the Isrealites and still continues to be the fondation of the mordern faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The idea behind a convenant is that God promises His followes certain things in exchange of theirobedience. |
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| This was the system of writing used in ancient Masopatamia that utilized wedgeshaped markes in clay. It was first developed by the Sumerians. The cuneiform system utilized several thousand characters that coud stand for both things and syllables. |
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| This was a philosophical method developed by Socrates that sought to determine the truth of an assertion by using repeated questions to strip away the assumptions surrounding the assertion. |
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| Also known as the Assembly in English, the Ecclesia was establishted by Solon the Reformer so that the common people of Athens had a body to represent them. Under the tyrant Cleisthenes, all political powerwas lodged with the Ecclesia. It was a direct democracy in that all free-born adult male citizens of Athens participated and voted in the Ecclesia. |
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| These were a series of gardens built upon terrances in the city of Babylon that were constructed by the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar. The Hanging GarGd |
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| This is considered by historians to be that period from about 1100 BC to 383BC when the Greeks developed their culture largely without significant outside influences andhad relatively little cultural or political influence outside of Greece. |
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| This is considered by historians to be that period between about 383 BC toabout 200 BC when Greek culture was pushed farther to the east due to the conquests of theAlexander the Great, and Greek culture in Greece proper was opened up to more outsidecultural influences from places such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. |
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| his was the system of writing in ancient Egypt. It used characters, orhieroglyphs, that could be used to stand for objects or for syllables. The hieroglyphic systemhad between 700 and 800 hieroglyphs. |
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| This was an ancient people who lived in what is today Turkey. They were Indo- European speakers whose empire reached its height between 1400 BC to about 1200 BC.Their most significant legacy was that they unlocked the secret of working iron, and Hittite ironsmiths later spread this knowledge to other cultures. |
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| This was the mainpalace complex of the Minoans on the Island of Crete. Itinfluenced later Greek architecture and art. |
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| This word from ancient Egyptian translates as “justice,” or “what is right.” It was aconcept upon which the governmental system of ancient Egypt was based. Ma’at was also agoddess: the goddess of justice, and when a person died, their soul would be put into a balancealong with the feather of Ma’at todetermine whether it deserved eternal life |
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| This is the river valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what istoday modern Iraq where the first true civilization arose about 4,500 BC. Mesopotamia washome to a variety of groups in ancient times, most of whom spoke Semitic languages, includingthe Sumerians, Akkadians, Kassites, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The Mesopotamiansdeveloped a system of writing known as cuneiform and built large temple mounds known asziggurats. |
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| This is a kind of religion in which only one god is prayed to and believed in.Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are the principal monotheistic religions in the world today. |
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| The Mycenaeans lived in what is today Greece from about 2000 BC to about1100 BC, and they were the first Greek speakers to move into this region. They were mostlikely a mix of Greek speakers from the north and pre-Greek speaking Neolithic peoples. Theprincipal city state thatmodern scholars have learned the most from is Mycenae, and for thisreason the city has given its name to the entire civilization. |
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| This was a defensive alliance formed by the city of Sparta afterthe Persian Wars. It became one of the two major alliances that fought in the PeloponnesianWar. |
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| Pericles was an Athenian who fought in the Persian Wars, and afterward theAssembly of Athens made him a magistrate, or one of the full-time politicians who administeredthe day-to-day functions of government in the city. Under his leadership, some of the greatestarchitectural works that we associate with the Greeks were built upon a central hill in the cityknown as the Acropolis. |
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| These were the rulers of Egypt during the Old, Middle,and New Kingdomperiods. They were considered gods on earth and the crucial link between this world and theeternal world of the Egyptian gods. |
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| This man was an Athenian philosopher and a student of Socrates who developed theTheory of Forms; this was the idea that perfection exists beyond the human mind. He used thisidea to write his most famous work, the Republic. |
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| This man was one of the greatest of the Egyptian pharaohs. He ruled from 1279BC to 1212 BC during the period of the New Kingdom. It was under his rule, historians believe,that the Twelve Tribes of Israel fled Egypt under the leadership of Moses. |
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| This man was a king of the Semitic-speaking Akkadians. In about 2350BC, he first extended his rule over all of the Akkadian cities and then swept down andconquered the Sumerian city states, thus creating the Akkadian Empire. |
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| This man was an Athenian philosopher. He did not write anything down ordevelop any doctrines. Instead he developed a system of question-and-answer known asDialectics (or Socratic Questioning) by which truth could be discovered. |
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| These philosophers in Hellenic Greece were a transitional school between theCosmologists and the Speculative Philosophers. They focused upon teaching young menrhetoric and oratory and believed in moral relativism, or the idea that any moral position canjustified through a well-crafted argument. |
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| This is a society in which most members have no direct or even indirectrelationship to the ruler. Moreover, family relations no longer have any relevance in the politicalorder because it is constituted separately from the principal familial structures. |
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| The Sumerians were the first Mesopotamian society to emerge on the historicalstage about 4500 BC. They lived in what is today southern Iraq, where they established about adozen independent city states such as Ur, Lagash, Eridu, Kish, and Uruk. Many culturalconventions that characterized the Mesopotamian culture such as writing and religion originatedwith the Sumerians. |
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| These were the basis of the law for the ancient Israelites as well asfor their Jewish descendants. They were delivered by Yahweh, or God, to Moses atop MountSinai after the Israelites left Egypt. |
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| This was Plato’s most famous work. It incorporated his Theory of Forms bydescribing the perfect city state. Plato believed Athens could become almost perfect if it couldmodel itself upon the city state he described in the Republic. |
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| This was a philosophical principle developed by Plato. This principleasserted that a perfect version of all things existed in a super-conscious realm known as theRealm of Forms or the Realm of Ideas. |
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| This is the most important set of ancient Israelite scriptures. It is composed of the firstfive books of what Christians call the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, andDeuteronomy. The Torah outlines the early history of the Israelites as well as the laws deliveredby Moses. This includes the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law. |
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| In the Greek city states during the Hellenic Age, these were persons to whomtemporary dictatorial powers were given to alleviate a social crisis. Tyrants were people whoboth the commoners and land-owning nobility trusted to arrive at a solution that would beacceptable to both sides. |
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| This is the name of the God of the ancient Israelites (as well as their Jewishdescendants), and it translates as "He who has always been and always will be." He is also theGod of Christians and Muslims. Unlike the gods of other ancient peoples, Yahweh wastranscendent and thus was above and beyond nature rather than part of it. |
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| These were pyramidal-shaped structures about seventy feet high that were foundin every city in ancient Mesopotamia. They housed each city’s main temple, which sat atop themound. The ziggurat had a series of receding tiers that were built upon a rectangular, oval, orsquare platform; the temple at the top was accessed by steep staircases. |
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