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.