Describe Advances Made by Ancient Indian Civilizations in Art and Literature Quizlet

The ancient Sumerians, who flourished thousands of years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what today is southern Iraq, built a civilization that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley. Every bit the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, "The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention."

In what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented new technologies and perfected the big-scale use of existing ones. In the process, they transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated and kept track of information and time.

The Sumerians' creativity was driven to an extent by their land's lack of natural resources, according to Philip Jones, associate curator and keeper of the Babylonian section at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

"They had few copse, near no stone or metal," he explains. That forced them to make ingenious utilize of materials such as dirt—the plastic of the ancient earth. They used information technology to make everything from bricks to pottery to tablets for writing.

Merely the Sumerians' real genius may take been organizational. They had the ability to have inventions that had been developed elsewhere and employ them on a much bigger calibration. This way they could mass-produce goods such as textiles and pottery that they could and then trade with other people.

Every bit Kramer writes, at that place was something in the Sumerian identity that drove them to dream large and think ingeniously. "Spiritually and psychologically, they laid great stress on ambition and success, preeminence and prestige, honor and recognition," he explains.

The Sumerians' innovations gradually spread and led to the development of the modern technologically advanced earth that we alive in today. Here are some of the areas where the Sumerians left their mark.

Mass-Produced Pottery

Bowl from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia.

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Other ancient people made pottery by hand, merely the Sumerians were the first to develop the turning wheel, a device which immune them to mass-produce it, according to Reed Goodman, a doctoral candidate in the art and archaeology of the Mediterranean at the University of Pennsylvania. That enabled them to churn out large numbers of items such as containers for workers' rations, sort of the ancient forerunner of Tupperware.

Writing

An early writing sample fromMesopotamia using pictographs to create a record of food supplies.

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Jones says that information technology'due south probable, though non 100 percentage certain, that the Sumerians were the first to develop a writing system. Either way, it's clear that they were using written communication by 2800 B.C. Merely they didn't set up out to write great literature or record their history, simply rather to go on track of the appurtenances that they were making and selling.

"Their very get-go texts are but numbers and bolt," Jones explains. They did that with a organisation of pictographs, which essentially were drawings of various objects. Somewhen, though, they began to combine pictographs to express ideas and actions. The pictographs evolved into symbols that stood for words and sounds.

Scribes used sharpened reeds to scratch the symbols into moisture clay, which dried to course tablets. The system of writing became known as cuneiform, and as Kramer noted, it was borrowed by subsequent civilizations and used beyond the Middle East for two,000 years.

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Hydraulic Applied science

A Mesopotamian relief showing the agricultural importance of the rivers.

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The Sumerians figured out how to collect and aqueduct the overflow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—and the rich silt that it contained—and so use information technology to h2o and fertilize their farm fields. They designed complex systems of canals, with dams synthetic of reeds, palm trunks and mud whose gates could be opened or closed to regulate the flow of water.

The Chariot

Calibration model of a unproblematicii-wheeledchariot which was invented by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia.

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The Sumerians didn't invent wheeled vehicles, just they probably adult the offset two-wheeled chariot in which a commuter drove a team of animals, writes Richard Due west. Bulliet in The Bicycle: Inventions and Reinventions . Goodman says that there's testify the Sumerians had such carts for transportation in the 3000s B.C., simply they were probably used for ceremonies or by the military, rather than as a means to become around the countryside, where the crude terrain would have made wheeled travel difficult.

The Plow

Imitation of a Sumerian plow.

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According to Kramer, the Sumerians invented the plow, a vital technology in farming. They even produced a manual that gave farmers detailed instructions on how to use various types of plows. And they specified the prayer that should be recited to pay homage to Ninkilim, the goddess of field rodents, in gild to protect the grain from being eaten.

Cloth Mills

A Mesopotamian woman weaving.

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While other cultures in the Center East gathered wool and used it to weave cloth for wearable, the Sumerians were the first to do it on an industrial scale.

"The Sumerians' innovation was to turn their temples into huge factories," Goodman explains. He notes that the Sumerians were the first to cross kin lines and class larger working organizations for making textiles—the predecessors of modern manufacturing companies.

Mass-Produced Bricks

An archaeological site in Mari, Syrian arab republic (modernistic Tell Hariri) that was an ancient Sumerian urban center on the western bank of Euphrates river.

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To make up for a shortage of stones and timber for building houses and temples, the Sumerians created molds for making bricks out of dirt, co-ordinate to Kramer. While they weren't the first to employ clay as a edifice material, "the innovation is the ability to produce bricks in large amounts, and put them together on a big scale," Jones explains. Their buildings might not take been equally durable as stone ones, but they were able to build more than of them, and create larger cities.

Metallurgy

The lion-headed eagle made of copper, gold, and lapis lazuli by Sumerian culture.

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The Sumerians were some of the earliest people to apply copper to make useful items, ranging from spearheads to chisels and razors, co-ordinate to the Copper Development Association. They also fabricated art with copper, including dramatic panels depicting fantastical animals such as an hawkeye with a lion's caput. According to Kramer, Sumerian metallurgists used furnaces heated by reeds and controlled the temperature with a bellows that could exist worked with their hands or feet.

Mathematics

Cuneiform script, developed by the Sumerians.

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Archaic people counted using uncomplicated methods, such every bit putting notches on bones, but it was the Sumerians who adult a formal numbering organization based on units of 60, according to Robert East. and Carolyn Krebs' book, Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries of the Aboriginal World. At starting time, they used reeds to go along runway of the units, just eventually, with the development of cuneiform, they used vertical marks on the dirt tablets. Their organisation helped lay the background for the mathematical calculations of civilizations that followed.

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