1/23/15

Today in West Civ we continued to talk about Mesopotamia. We talked about how the Sumerians organized a calendar and divided an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds. We also talked about King Hammurabi of Babylon and the series of laws he created known as "Hammurabi's Code." Here are the other things that we talked about during class. 

More on Mesopotamia

• A pantheon of Sumerian gods and goddesses emerged, with many of the deities representing the natural element of the world.
• The world's first (surviving) epic was the Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh," which told of a great flood.
• 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.

Civilization in Mesopotamia

• Wandering nomads drove herds of domesticated animals in many areas, especially to the south of Sumer in Arabia
• 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

The Expansion of Mesopotamian Civilization

• Indo-Europeans were people from the grasslands of the Russian steppe who introduced the horse to the Near East.