Sra: Imagine It!, Themes, Taking a Stand, Ancient Civilizations Ecology, Great Expectations, Earth in Action, Art and Impact, Level 6

The first emperor was in power for only eleven years. But in that brief time, he created a unified country out of all the warring kingdoms that he had conquered. Qin Shihuang built four thousand miles of roads that connected all parts of his huge empire. Instead of many different written languages, he decreed that there would be just one, just as there would be only one kind of currency and one system of weights and measures.

Qin Shihuang wanted to protect his new empire from barbarian tribes. So he built the first Great Wall of China. There already were many small walls scattered across the northwest frontier. The emperor had these walls joined together to create 1,500 miles of fortification.

With a workforce of half a million slave laborers, it took only twelve years to build the wall. It was an amazing feat; to this day, it remains the longest man-made structure in the world. But the wall was also built at a tremendous cost in terms of human suffering. During its construction, it was called "the longest cemetery on earth" because so many thousands of men died building it.

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Although he died a natural death, there had been at least three attempts to assassinate him. The emperor had 270 palaces and he moved from one to another constantly, never spending two nights in the same place. He went out only at night and only in disguise, so great was his fear of plots against him.

Qin Shihuang boasted that his descendants would rule China for ten thousand generations. However, his royal family, or dynasty, stayed in power barely beyond his own lifetime. After his death in 210 b.c., one of his twenty sons took the throne. Then just three years later, there was a peasant rebellion. One of its leaders became emperor, beginning a new dynasty-- the Han dynasty--that ruled China for the next four hundred years. Still, the empire that Qin Shihuang created lasted for more than two thousand years. Until 1912, China was ruled by an emperor, each, like Qin Shihuang, considered all-powerful and godlike.
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For centuries after that, the world forgot about the buried, broken army of clay ... until that day in 1974. More than anything, Qin Shihuang wanted immortality. Now, each year more than two million people from all over the world come to his burial site to see his army. So, perhaps, in some way, the emperor has lived on.

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Jane O'Connor

O'Connor has written more than thirty children's books, including the popular Nina, Nina Ballerina series. She was inspired to learn everything she could about the terra-cotta warriors after encountering them while on vacation in China. When she discovered there were no children's books on the subject, she decided to write one herself. In addition to being an author, O'Connor is also an editor. She and her family live in New York City.
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Ancient Civilizations: Theme Connections

Within the Selection

Across Selections

Beyond the Selection

Write about It!

Imagine yourself as one of the farmers who found the buried head. Describe your emotions as you make the discovery.

Remember to look for pictures of terra-cotta soldiers or other ancient Chinese artifacts for the

Genre

Feature

Emperor Qin Shihuang crushed freedom more than most rulers in China's history. He believed that ignorant people were easier to control than educated ones, so he ordered all books burned. Books might put dangerous ideas into people's heads, he feared.

Among the ideas Qin Shihuang considered dangerous were those of Confucius. Confucius believed that people were good by nature and could learn to be better.

Confucius believed moral standards of his time were too low and rulers should set good examples. Education could help in the quest to become a better person, he believed. This idea of education for all was unusual in a society run by feudal lords.

One of Confucius's famous teachings was "Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you." By contrast, the emperor buried scholars alive.

Confucius said a country should be governed by a kind and just ruler. Subjects should then respect and obey their rulers. Confucius also believed society should be based on family and people should respect and obey their parents.

Values of Confucius

People are good.

People should treat others fairly.

People should behave well.

People should respect and obey their parents.

Rulers should be just, kind, and well behaved.

Subjects should respect and obey their rulers.

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After the fall of the Qin dynasty, Confucianism gained influence under the Han dynasty. The courts and the government were separated. Society was family-centered. Education grew more important. Finally, during the second century b.c., the emperor made Confucianism the basis for public education.

Confucian works were restored and became the core of the education system. Confucian classics were taught by educated teachers. Later, civil service tests were based in part on these teachings. Over time, Confucianism took hold of Chinese thought and politics.

Confucianism has now spread from China to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Some Western scholars study it as well. It is easy to see, however, why a tyrant might consider these ideas dangerous.

How does the chart help you learn about Confucius's teachings?

Explain why a tyrant might find Confucius's teachings dangerous.

The United States is a democracy. Explain why you would or would not want our country governed according to Confucius's teachings.

Try It!

As you work on your investigation, think about how you can use charts to organize your information.

* fertile

* canals

* reservoirs

* reed

* wedges

* dikes

* imported

* abroad

Vocabulary Strategy

Sometimes you can use word structure to determine the meaning of a new word. For example, suppose you did not know the meaning of reservoir . Knowing that its base word, reserve, means "to save for later use" might help you figure it out.

From the fields, I used to watch the boys on their way to school. They were learning to write. Someday they would be scribes.

I wanted so much to learn to write. My parents told me only rich people could afford to have their sons taught to write. They needed me to help them farm the land.

It was, after all, the fertile land that helped our civilization grow. Farming was an honorable occupation.

Our land was not on the banks of the river. We needed canals to bring the water to our farm. I wanted to write about how my people learned to move water around in these canals. I wanted to write about how they stored water in the reservoirs . Without these inventions, we might not have become the great society we are.

I was lucky. My aunt married a wealthy man. My new uncle was fond of me. He paid for me to learn to write and hired a worker to replace me on the farm.

It was much harder than I expected. I used a cut reed to carve wedges into stone. Writing took a lot of practice, and there were so many signs to learn.

Finally, I was able to write the story of my people. I wrote about how they made a vast desert into a farm belt. I wrote how they built dikes to protect their villages. I wrote how they channeled water into reservoirs. I described the metals they imported from abroad and the tools they made from them. Someday, perhaps someone will read how hard work and good ideas made us a great civilization.

Concept Vocabulary

The concept word for this lesson is legacy. A legacy is something handed down by custom or tradition. What is the legacy of Mesopotamia?

Game

Genre

Comprehension Strategy: Adjusting Reading Speed

As you read, adjust your reading speed to ensure that you understand the most challenging and vital information in the text.
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Focus Questions

What role did geography play in the growth of Mesopotamia? What is the importance of the stele of Hammurabi?
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This map shows the major cities of the Mesopotamian civilization, as well as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which have shifted their courses many times throughout history.

Fertile Crescent

Production note: captions with the class attribute value "legend" correspond to content that appears in the legend contained in this image.

Mesopotamia is a Greek word, meaning "the land between the rivers." These rivers are the Tigris and Euphrates, which wind their way south from the mountains of what is now eastern Turkey, and across the flat plains of present-day Iraq, until they pour into the Persian Gulf.

Mesopotamia is part of the "fertile crescent," a curve of land stretching from the Persian Gulf north and west to the Mediterranean Sea. It was here, more than ten thousand years ago, that people, for the first time ever, learned to produce their food by farming. Instead of moving from place to place, hunting animals and gathering wild plant foods, they settled down, growing crops and keeping sheep and cattle. In one part of the fertile crescent, Mesopotamia, villages grew into towns and then cities, the first in the world. It was in these cities that writing, kingship, temples, irrigation, bronze-making, written laws, and many other features of later civilizations were invented.

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The civilization was created around 4000bce by people who lived in a region called Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia. These people were the Sumerians, who built the first cities, such as Ur and Uruk. Around 2350bce. Sumer was conquered by Sargon, king of Akkad, the region to the north, who created the world's first empire. Akkadian, a language related to Arabic and Hebrew, replaced Sumerian as the main language. Yet despite changes of language, the arrival of new peoples, and the rise and fall of more empires, the main features of Mesopotamian civilization, such as the writing system, continued for thousands of years.

How Do we Know?

For thousands of years, early Mesopotamian history was forgotten. The only signs that the civilization had ever existed were large earth mounds, called tells, which stood out against the plains. Tells were formed over thousands of years, from fallen buildings made of dried mud bricks and other rubbish left behind by ancient people. From the early nineteenth century, European travellers began to dig into the tells. They found the ruins of ancient palaces and temples, together with sculpture, pottery and other treasures. They had rediscovered the world's first cities.

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Like Egypt, where another early civilization developed, the region of Mesopotamia, where Iraq is today, is a hot climate with little rain. In both ancient civilizations, it was only possible to grow food thanks to the annual flooding of rivers -- the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia. Unlike the Nile, which flooded at the right time of year to plant crops, Mesopotamia's rivers flooded when the crops were already growing in the fields. The water had to be channeled and stored, so that later it could be used to water the fields.

In early times, people lived and farmed close to the rivers. To prevent floods from washing away their villages, they built dikes, raised mounds on the river banks. They dug canals and ditches to carry the water away from the river to the reservoirs. Canals also carried water to areas which had been previously desert, allowing more and more food to be produced.

The rivers also carried silt, which was left behind after the flood season ended. To prevent the canals filling up, this silt had to be dug out regularly. This was hard work, but everyone knew that it had to be done to stop the land returning to desert.

The most important food crops were barley and dates. Date palm trees are either male or female. Male flowers produce pollen, which female flowers use to make fruit. One male tree produces enough pollen for fifty female trees. To have plenty of dates, Mesopotamian farmers grew more female trees, cutting down most male trees for wood. Usually pollen is carried from tree to tree by insects, such as bees. With so few male trees, farmers did the job themselves.

How Do we Know?

The number and size of ruined Mesopotamian cities, in areas which are now desert, show that irrigation and farming were carried out on a massive scale. How else could the people who lived in these cities be fed? We also have the evidence of thousands of dried up ancient irrigation canals, found across the deserts of southern Iraq. More evidence comes from ancient texts concerning farming, including instructions for irrigating fields and planting and harvesting crops.

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Writing

The Sumerians needed to keep records of cattle, sheep and crops. Around 3300bce, they began to do this by drawing simple pictures on clay tablets. A picture of a bull's head was used to show cattle, while an ear of barley stood for grain. Pictures could also be used to show ideas. A drawing of a foot, for example, could stand for a journey. Over time, this style of drawing changed, with curved lines becoming groups of straight wedges, the quickest marks to make with a cut reed called a stylus. From these marks, Mesopotamian writing was called "cuneiform," meaning wedge-shaped.

By 3100bce, people had realized that a sign could be used to show the sound of the word as well as the object itself. So the sign for a bull could be the sound "gu" (bull in Sumerian), while the sign for a fish could be "ku" (fish in Sumerian). By grouping sound signs together, people could now spell different words. In doing this, they had invented writing.
A scribe writes on a soft clay tablet, using a reed stylus. Around his neck he has a "cylinder seal," which he can roll onto the clay to leave his signature. Cylinder seals were made from metal, stone, bone and shell.
Many thousands of clay tablets with cuneiform writing have been found, including whole libraries, often baked hard in ancient fires. This tablet has a list of different goods. Numbers were made by pushing the blunt end of the stylus into the clay, making circles and crescents. This is an early form of cuneiform, with signs still resembling pictures.

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Cylinder seals were used to sign letters and to seal jars or doors to protect valuables. This plaster impression, made by the seal on the right, shows the scribe, who is the figure on the left, being presented to a seated goddess by another goddess.

Cuneiform was a difficult writing system to learn. While our alphabet has just twenty-six letters, there were more than six hundred cuneiform signs. Some boys were sent to school at a young age to train to be professional writers, called scribes, but only wealthy people could afford to have their sons trained. We know about school lessons thanks to thousands of exercise tablets that have been found. These have a text written by a teacher on one side, with a pupil's copy, less skillfully done, on the other. Some of these exercises describe schoolboys' lives: "When I rose early in the morning, I faced my mother and said to her, 'Give me my lunch, I want to go to school!' My mother gave me two rolls and I set out."

Although cuneiform was invented for record keeping, many more uses were found for it. It was used to write down laws, histories, stories, hymns, letters, scientific texts, and recipes. It continued to be used for almost 3,200 years, by many different peoples across western Asia.

How Do we Know?

The fact that we can read cuneiform today is largely thanks to an English scholar named Henry Rawlinson. In 1825, he found long cuneiform inscriptions carved on a high cliff face in Iran, in three ancient languages: Babylonian, Elamite and Old Persian. Rawlinson copied these, and correctly guessed that the signs at the start of each text were the name of the Persian king, Darius. By trial and error, he went on to read more and more of the signs. First he deciphered the Old Persian inscription, using his knowledge of the modern form of the language. He then spent years deciphering the other two languages.

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Craftworkers

The Mesopotamians were experts at making tools, weapons and sculptures out of metal. At first, the main metal they used was copper. Then some time before 3000bce, they discovered that adding a small amount of tin to the copper made a new harder metal, called bronze. Bronze was much better for making tools and weapons. It also melted at a lower temperature than copper, was more fluid, and was easier to cast.

To make flat tools, such as knives, the craftworkers carved their shape on a flat stone. Then they heated lumps of copper and tin together in a stone or pottery vessel, called a crucible, until they melted. The liquid bronze was then poured into a stone mould.
The head of a king, dating from 2300-2200bce, was made from copper. It once had eyes, probably made from precious stones.

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Mesopotamians were also fine potters. Some time before 4500bce, they invented the potter's wheel, which allowed them to shape a bowl while turning it. The earliest pots were made on a slow wheel. Around 2000bce, they invented a fast-turning wheel, which allowed them to make vessels with thinner walls in quicker time.

How Do we Know?

In any ancient site, the commonest craft item found is pottery. Unlike metal objects, which can be melted and recycled, a broken pot can only be thrown away. While wood or textiles decay, pottery will last forever in the earth. Metal objects, such as the copper head of the king, survive more rarely. Evidence for how they were made comes from examining the objects themselves. Archaeologists have found stone moulds used to make knives, still scorched black by hot metal. The "lost wax" method was also invented in other countries, such as China and East Africa, and is still used today.

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Trade

Mesopotamia had plenty of clay, bitumen (natural tar), reeds and palm trees, whose wood is only good for making rough beams. The country lacked all other raw materials, such as stone, metal, and good timber for building or making furniture. So from the beginnings of Mesopotamian civilization, people had to trade with other lands to get the materials they needed.

The easiest way to transport heavy goods, such as stones, was by water, along rivers and canals and across the sea. Boats were made of bundles of reeds, waterproofed by coating them with bitumen. Reed boats are still used in Iraq today, and remains of ancient boats show that they have been built in the same way for at least 7,500 years.

It was much easier to row a boat downstream, carried along by the current, than upstream. For journeys upriver, donkeys were often used to pull the boats. They could also carry goods across land, where no water route existed.

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Large amounts of tin and copper were imported to make bronze. Bronze items, such as tools and weapons, were then sold abroad. Other goods sold abroad included textiles, pottery, barley and dates. Grindstones, which every family needed for grinding barley into flour, were imported in vast quantities from the north. At a place now called Yarim Tepe, archaeologists found a building, dating from 4500bce, in which a single room held several hundred grindstones. This must have been a merchant's warehouse.

How Do we Know?

Objects in Mesopotamian sites made of stone or metal must have been made of materials from other lands. This is evidence of long distance trade. Seals used by Indian merchants have also been found in Mesopotamian cities, proving that people were trading with India. More evidence comes from many thousands of clay tablets, which include records of business agreements and complaints about the failure to deliver promised goods.
Mesopotamian boats were rowed, using leaf-shaped oars, or punted: pushed along with a pole driven into the river bed. These boats, with both ends curving up to points, are exactly like modern Iraqi river boats. Pictures of boats on seals show that sails were also used for long sea journeys across the Persian Gulf.

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