1. Thomas F. X. Noble
Barry S. Strauss
Duane J. Osheim
Kristen B. Neuschel
Elinor Accampo
David D. Roberts
William B. Cohen
www.cengage.com/history/noble/westciv6e
Chapter 1
The Ancestors of the West

2. Overview (1 of 3)
• Origins, to ca. 3000 B.C.
– The First Human Beings
– The Revolution in Human Culture, ca. 70,000–10,000
B.C.
– The Coming of Agriculture, ca. 10,000–5000 B.C.
– Neolithic and Copper Age Europe, 7000–2500 B.C.
– The Emergence of Civilization, 3500–3000 B.C.

3. Overview (2 of 3)
• Mesopotamia, to ca. 1600 B.C.
– The City-States of Sumer
– Conquest and Assimilation, ca. 2350–1900 B.C.
– Hammurabi’s Code
– Divine Masters
– Arts and Sciences

4. Overview (3 of 3)
• Egypt, to ca. 1100 B.C.
– Divine Kingship
– Life and Afterlife
– War Abroad, 1786–ca. 1150 B.C.
– Reform at Home and Its Aftermath, 1352–1075 B.C.
– Arts and Sciences in the New Kingdom

5. Origins, to ca. 3000 B.C. (1 of 2)
• Anatomically modern human beings are called homo
sapiens sapiens and first appeared about 100,000 years ago.
• Humans lived by hunting animals and gathering nuts and
berries until agriculture was invented shortly after 10,000
B.C. in western Asia.
• Early Europeans were skilled metalworkers and architects,
but they lagged behind the more advanced regions, Egypt
and Mesopotamia.

6. Origins, to ca. 3000 B.C. (2 of 2)
• The first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt emerged
between 3500 and 3000 B.C. and probably contained the
first cities.
• Civilization meant bigger and more complex societies, with
specialized labor forces, strong governments, and well-
structured armies.
• Along with cities, came writing, which developed
independently in Egypt and Mesopotamia between about
3500 and about 3100 B.C.

7. Mesopotamia, to ca. 1600 B.C.
• Approximately thirty city-states of southern Mesopotamia spoke
Sumerian and flourished in the third millennium B.C.
• Sargon, an Akkadian, conquered the Sumerian cities of
Mesopotamia and united them in one kingdom.
• Hammurabi’s Code (1792–1750 B.C.), one of the earliest
collections of laws, reveals the inequality and harshness of
Mesopotamian society.
• Mesopotamians were religious, believed in many gods, and
expected only a grim and shadowy Netherworld after death.
• Mesopotamia’s rich culture excelled in mathematics, astronomy,
and epic poetry.

8. Egypt, to ca. 1100 B.C. (1 of 2)
• The Nile River, with its dependable annual flooding, gave ancient
Egypt fertile soil, economic prosperity, and an optimistic
worldview.
• Egypt invented the idea of worshiping the king as a god;
eventually, the king became known as pharaoh.
• Egyptians believed in a happy afterlife after death, as long as the
gods judged that the dead person had led a life without sin.
• Egypt’s New Kingdom was a great military power that expanded
into southwest Asia.
• The earliest known Indo-European civilization is that of the
Hittites, who established a great kingdom in today’s Turkey and
left thousands of documents.

9. Egypt, to ca. 1100 B.C. (2 of 2)
• The conflicts between Hittites and Egyptians led to history’s first
great system of diplomacy, its first well-documented battle
(Qadesh), and its first peace treaty between equals.
• The Amarna reform of the 1300s was history’s first great struggle
between church and state.
• The Egyptians excelled at architecture, such as the pyramids, as
well as at sculpture and medicine, and they invented the solar
calendar that we still use (in revised form) today.
• We are not sure why, but the great civilizations of the ancient Near
East all either declined, split apart, or collapsed not long after 1200
B.C.