Today in Western Civ class we had our first test of the semester.  I thought that the test was very fair because we were able to use our blog. My blogs helped me a lot because I took all of my notes and posted them to my blog. Overall I hope & think I did a good job.

Today in western civ class we went over a review for our test which will be tomorrow January 29th.  The test will be easy if I study over the questions and important facts we went over today. We found out that the test will be multiple choice, fill in the blanks, and will have a few short answers. This will be our first test of the semester and it will also be our first test grade in power school.
Here are the notes & some things that will be on the test.

- know 14,000 a human race existed
- Paleolithic age
- Neolithic age
- Know about the agriculture revolution
- know that women had a lower status then men
- "cuneiform" first writing by sumerians
- gods & goddesses
- "Epic of Gilgamesh"
- know what a ziggurat is - huge temple on top of a "mountain"
- nomads drove herds of domestic animals
- Hammurabi's code
- know Indo - Europeans : what they mean & what they are

In western civ class today we finished our first chapter "Prehistory to Civilization".

Here are the notes we took in class ... 

The Earliest Cities: Mesopotamia (lo-2)

• District know as Sumer occupied the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. 
• Population increased due to new irrigation techniques 
• Cities and Towns were founded, some with as many as 40,000 inhabitants 
• Better food storage allowed for diversity in professions: priest, tradesmen, etc. 
• Sumerians invented the earliest form of writing called cuneiform
• Sumerians first divided the hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds; they also organized a calendar based on moon cycles
• The Ziggurat was a Sumerian temple built on top of a “mountain” of earth
• King Hammurabi of Babylon created a series of laws known as “Hammurabi’s Code” - laws that included “an eye for an eye” and regulations of marriage, divorce, and punishments for all sorts of crimes

Mesopotamia: the expansion 

• Indo-Europeans were people from the grasslands of the Russian steppe who introduced the horse to the Near East
• The warlike Indo-European tribe known as the Hittites settled in Asia Minor
• The Hittites had a lucrative trade in metals and conquered nearly all of their neighbors, even threatening Egypt

At the end of class we were assigned to make a google document or google sides about Hammurabi's Code. We had to pick some laws that we thought were similar to ones we have now a days and ones that are completely absurd. 

Our Western Civ class was very short today due to the 2-hour delay. But we started our new chapter which is about Prehistory to Civilization (3000 - 1200 B.C.) 

Before Civilization: Prehistoric Era (Lo - 1) 

• Origins and
  "ages" of Human Beings 
• 200,000 years ago a human species emerged in southwestern Africa
• 14,000 years ago, worldwide human race existed 
• Paleolithic age is the earliest prehistoric age 
• Neolithic age was marked by tool making and the beginning of agriculture

Agricultural Revolution 

• Also know as the Neolithic Revolution 
• Population rose, because they could now care for the children 
• Hierarchies in village life, women had a lower status and were to do more domestic duties
• Invention of the wheel and plow made it possible to produce enough food for storage 
• Villagers were still polytheists, worshipped multiple nature, human and animal gods

Mesopotamia then .... 

Mesopotamia Now 

Today in western civ class we picked our seats and began to meet all of our new classmates. Im pretty mad that Grace & McKenna aren't in my class anymore but life goes on. We started off by talking about how we set up our new blogs and the link for Mr. Schick's blog. For the people who had Mr. Schick last semester it wasn't hard to set up another blog, because we just had to click a few simple buttons. For the two new students they had to make gmail accounts and they then had to set up their blogs.  I feel that western civ will be a good class and very interesting.

Below are the words we had to define:

- prehistory: the period of time before written records.

- Paleolithic Age: second part of the Stone Age beginning about 750,000 to 500,000 years BC and lasting until the end of the last ice age about 8,500 years BC.

- Neolithic Age: latest part of the Stone Age beginning about 10,000 BC in the middle east

- Agricultural Revolution: a significant change in agriculture that occurs when there are discoveries, inventions, or new technologies that change production.

- cuneiform: denoting or relating to the wedge-shape characters used int he ancient writing systems of Mesopotamia, Persia, and Ugarit, survive mainly impressed on clay tablets.

- ziggurat: a rectangular stepped tower, sometimes surmounted by a temple.

- Indo-Europeans: a large, widespread family of languages, the surviving branches of which include Italic, Salvic, Hellenic, Celtic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian, spoken by about half the world's population: English, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Albanian, Lithuanian, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, and Hittite are all Indo-Europeanlanguages.