Exploring the Past

Unit One: Exploring the Past

Civilisations

Topic01:

Modern civilization has kept changing at a fast pace. Discuss.

Typical Essay:

A century ago, people were able to live in better conditions than their parents thanks to the progress made in science and technology. But in practice, the outcome of this progress was slow to materialise. For instance, most people still used to travel long distances on foot or by stage coach. And as mechanization was not introduced significantly in daily activities, household chores still had to be done manually, and were therefore time consuming.

On the other hand, community life was still an asset for social cohesion, since people had more opportunities to meet and interact. So they were able to chat with neighbours at shops or in clubs and have a cup of coffee with friends or relatives and tell stories and jokes. Likewise, family visits were frequent and kept the folklore alive, with the grandparents who used to tell traditional tales or sing lullabies or folk songs to their grandchildren. Unfortunately, with the development of audiovisual means such as the cinema, radio, television and then personal appliances like the computer, CD-ROMs and DVDs, the chances of socialization are dwindling and the lack of interaction between people may increase stress, loneliness and anxiety.

  Could we then complain that we are missing out on some ingredients in life which used to make our great grandparents happier? This is probably so, since closer contacts among neighbours, friends and families had to be beneficial for communal harmony. However, scientific progress in all fields, particularly in medicine, modes of transportation and communication, and agribusiness can only show that our lives are today quite fulfilling and , if anything, more comfortable than a century ago.

Topic02:

Algeria was the cradle of many ancient civilizations. Discuss.

Typical Essay:

Algeria is a huge country in Northern Africa. It covers 920,000 square miles (2,380,000 sq. km), making it more than three times the size of Texas, and the 11th largest nation on Earth. It shares borders with Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, and Western Sahara, and has coastline on the Mediterranean.
People have been living in the region that is now Algeria, and the surrounding Maghreb, for more than 200,000 years. The first civilizations sprang up between 4000 and 8000 years ago, eventually forming a cohesive population, usually referred to collective as the Berber culture.
From about 900 BCE Algeria has been invaded repeatedly by various peoples, mostly from across the Mediterranean. First the Phoenicians came, trading along the coast and eventually establishing Carthage in nearby Tunisia and various outposts in Algeria. Then came the Romans, who conquered the Berbers more-or-less completely by 24 AD. By the 4th century Algeria had been converted to Christianity.
Beginning in the 8th century Algeria, and the greater Maghreb, became a strategic target for the expanding Islamic world. By the end of the first decade of the 8th century the Umayyads had conquered all of North Africa, including Algeria. Over the next few centuries Algeria converted to Islam and was Arabized dramatically.
In the 16th century Algeria came under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and became a center for Mediterranean piracy and privateering. It was in Algeria that the infamous pirate Red Beard (neé Barbarossa) eventually was based, as a provincial governor. During this period both Arabs and native Berbers saw their roles diminished, as Turkish became the national language and Turks became entrenched in most positions of power. Piracy continued to spread and become institutionalized in Algeria, as well as its neighbors, in a confederacy known as the Barbary States. In addition to capturing the wealth of European traders, these pirates also began capturing Christians as slaves, a turn of events that eventually led the young United States to enter into two of its earliest wars against the Barbary Coast.
In the early 19th century Algeria was conquered by the French, who began to settle and develop the region. Although infrastructure developed under French control, to the majority of the Muslim inhabitants of Algeria, France was seen as a harsh colonial power. Resistance and open revolt continued throughout all of the French occupation, but it began to grow substantially and develop during the 1930s. Although relatively peaceful attempts were made for a Constitution and more equality in the mid-1940s, these were met with no support by the French government.
By 1954 the situation had gotten bad enough that the citizenry revolted on a massive scale. The National Liberation Front was the main body of revolt, launching a full-scale civil war that would last for eight years. In that time nearly two million Algerians would die, and another two to three million were relocated. Independence was finally achieved in 1962, after one of the longest, bloodiest wars for independence in modern history.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-should-i-know-about-algeria.htm

Topic03:

Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Greek civilization.

Typical Essay:

 The Greeks were very interested in science as a way of organizing the world and making order out of chaos, and having power over some very powerful things like oceans and weather. From about 600 BC, a lot of Greek men spent time observing the planets and the sun and trying to figure out how astronomy worked. They must have gotten their first lessons from the Babylonians, who were very good at astronomy and also very interested in it.
By the 400's BC, Pythagoras was interested in finding the patterns and rules in mathematics and music, and invented the idea of a mathematical proof. Although Greek women usually were not allowed to study science, Pythagoras did have some women among his students. Socrates, a little bit later, developed logical methods for deciding whether something was true or not.
 In the 300's BC, Aristotle and other philosophers at the Lyceum and the Academy in Athens worked on observing plants and animals, and organizing the different kinds of plants and animals into types. Again, this is a way of creating order out of chaos.
 After Aristotle, using his ideas and also ideas from Egypt and the Persians and Indians, Hippocrates and other Greek doctors wrote important medical texts that were used for hundreds of years.

Topic04:

Write a composition on the ancient Egyptian civilization.

Typical Essay:

  Egypt is one of the most fertile areas of Africa, and one of the most fertile of the countries around the Mediterranean Sea. Because it is so fertile, people came to live in Egypt earlier than in most places, probably around 40,000 years ago. At first there were not very many people, but gradually Egypt became more crowded, so there was more need for a unified government. Around 3000 BC (5000 years ago), Egypt was first unified under one ruler, who was called the Pharaoh.
  The pharaoh’s government guaranteed both external and internal security to the people of Egypt. As a consequence, the Egyptians grew very proud of their country and became so fond of the pharaoh hat they worshipped him as a god-king. This national pride and identification with the pharaoh kept the unity of ancient Egypt and made its civilization prosper for many centuries
  From that time until around 525 BC, when Egypt was conquered by the Persians, Egypt's history is divided into six different time periods. These are called the Old Kingdom, the First Intermediate Period, the Middle Kingdom, the Second Intermediate Period, the New Kingdom, and the Third Intermediate Period.

But the economy of ancient Egypt was ruined by all the resources that the pharaohs put into the building of pyramids and the gradual decline and fall of ancient Egyptian civilization.

Topic05:

Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Egyptian civilization.

Typical Essay:

Egyptian scientists were generally most interested in observing nature and practical engineering, and they were very good at both of these things. The pyramids and temples, for example, show good knowledge of geometry and engineering. Egyptian engineers used the Pythagorean Theorem, thousands of years before Pythagoras was born.
Because the Nile flood was so important to Egyptian farming, scientists also worked out good ways to measure how high the flood was going each year, and kept accurate records and good calendars. You can see here how the Egyptian wrote down numbers. The device they used to measure the height of the Nile flood is called a Nilometer.
They also worked out good ways to move water from the Nile to outlying farms in the desert, using hand-powered irrigation pumps (shadufs) and canals.
It may also have been Egyptian scientists who first figured out how to make yeast-rising bread.

Topic06:

Write a composition on the achievements of the ancient Egyptian civilization in architecture.

Typical Essay:

 People tend to think that Egyptian building styles stayed the same for the whole period of Egyptian history, from the beginning of the Old Kingdom to the end of the New Kingdom two thousand years later, but that's not true. The Egyptians built different kinds of buildings at different times, just like any other group of people.
 In the early part of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians built mainly mastabas, a kind of tomb with a flat roof like a house. Then throughout most of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians built the pyramid tombs which are now so famous. Of course they also built smaller buildings like houses and butcher shops.
  In the Middle Kingdom, the mastaba tomb came back again, although in a more elaborate form for the Pharaohs. They didn't build any more pyramids. Then in the New Kingdom there was a lot of building that was not tombs: temples for the gods especially, but also palaces for the Pharaohs.

Topic07:

Write a composition on the ancient Sumerian civilization and its achievements.

Typical Essay:

The people who settled down and began to develop a civilization, in the land betweenthe Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, are known as the Sumerians. About a thousand years later, the Babylonians took over in the south, and the Assyrians took over in the north, but the Sumerian culture lived on.

The Sumerian civilization probably began around 5000 BCE. In the beginning, they were an agricultural community. They grew crops and stored food for times of need.

The ancient Sumerians were very smart. They invented, amongst other things, the wheel, the sailboat, and the first written language, frying pans, razors, cosmetic sets, shepherd’s pipes, harps, kilns to cook bricks and pottery, bronze hand tools like hammers and axes, the plow, the plow seeder, and the first superhero, Gilgamesh.

They invented a system of mathematics based on the number 60. Today, we divide an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds. That comes from the ancient Mesopotamians.

Some Mesopotamian words are still in use today. Words like crocus, which is a flower, and saffron, which is a spice, are words borrowed from the ancient Mesopotamians.

The ancient Mesopotamians created a government that was a combination of monarchy and democracy. Kings ruled the people. Elected officials who served in the Assembly also ruled the people. Even kings had to ask the Assembly for permission to do certain things.

Law held a special place in their civilization. In Babylonian times, laws were actually written down. But there were always laws. The laws clearly said how you had to behave and what your punishment would be if you did not behave correctly. And the laws that were later written down, for the most part, were laws created by the ancient Sumerians. 

Ancient Sumer was a bustling place of three or four hundred people. The ancient Sumerians built many cities along the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Archaeologists believe that their largest city, the city of Ur, had a population of around 24,000 residents! 

Topic08:

Write a composition on the ancient Phoenician civilization.

Typical Essay:

  Another great race of people descended from the Babylonian or Semitic stock were the Phoenicians. They inherited the intellectual and adventurous side of Babylonian life, and through them the use of the alphabet, or written language, was spread abroad over all the world.

  The Phoenicians were earth's first-known sailors and explorers. In tiny barks, such as we of today would think scarcely safe for navigating a river, they coasted the entire Mediterranean Sea and even ventured far along the shores of the tempestuous Atlantic. They went not as traders in the ordinary sense, but as bold adventurers, eager to see new things, resolute to confront and conquer whatever sudden, unknown danger leaped upon them.

  Their home lay along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, adjoining Palestine, the home of the Hebrews. There they built mighty cities--Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, celebrated in song and story, the richest, most strongly guarded towns of their day. From these, the daring little ships sped forth ready to traffic or to plunder--for the Phoenicians were ever pirates where piracy seemed most profitable--ready to turn miners and dig in the tin mines of England, or become herders and raise flocks in the fertile valleys of Spain. They were, as the Greeks called them, a "red people," ruddy of face and probably of hair. The whole world knew and liked and feared these red Phoenicians, these first ready-witted searchers of the globe.

Topic09:

Write a composition on the achievements of the ancient Indus valley civilization in architecture and art.

Typical Essay:

The earliest big buildings in India were built by the Harappan people in the Indus River valley, about 2500 BC. The Harappan buildings included high brick walls around their cities to keep out enemies. Most of the buildings were ordinary houses, with rooms arranged around a small courtyard. Probably some families owned a whole house (and lived in it with their slaves), while others rented only one room in a house, and the whole family lived together in the one room. The rulers built bigger buildings, like this public bathing house and a town warehouse for storing wheat and barley, also out of mud-brick and baked brick. Like the houses, these bigger buildings were square or rectangular, with small courtyards in the middle. They used arches, but, like the Sumerians and the Egyptians, they only used them underground, as drains or foundations for buildings.
The major themes of Indian art seem to begin emerging as early as the Harappan period, about 2500 BC. Although we're still not sure, some Harappan images look like later images of Vishnu and Shiva, and the tradition may start this early.With the arrival of the Indo-Europeans (or Aryans) around 1500 BC, came new artistic ideas.
Around 500 BC, the conversion to Buddhism of a large part of the population of India brought with it some new artistic themes. But at first nobody made images of the Buddha - only stupas (STOO-pahs), symbolic representations that didn't look like a person.
Then the conquests of Alexander the Great, in the 320's BC, also had an important impact on Indian art. Alexander left colonies of Greek veteran soldiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and these soldiers attracted Greek sculptors (maybe some of the soldiers were sculptors). Their Greek-style carvings attracted attention in India - the first life-size stone statues in India date to the 200's BC, just after Alexander.During the Guptan period, about 500 AD, the great cave temples of Ajanta and Ellora were carved. Scenes from the life of the Buddha became popular, and statues of the Buddha.
Finally, the arrival of the Islamic faith and Islamic conquerors about 1000 AD brought iconoclasm to India, and a love of varied and complex patterning derived from Arabic and Persian models. This affected even Hindu artists who had not converted to Islam. Small Persian-style miniature paintings also became popular.

Topic10:

Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Indus valley civilization?

Typical Essay:

 From the time of the Harappans to the time of the Islamic conquests, Indian scientists and mathematicians were leaders in many different fields. They especially stood out in mathematics and engineering.
The Harappans in 2500 BC had a sewage system at their city of Mohenjo-Daro, and carefully laid out, straight streets. So even though we can't read their writing, we know that the Harappans understood a lot of geometry.
 A severe climate change halted development at Harappa around 2000 BC. The Aryan invasion of 1500 BC also seems to have stopped scientific advances for a while, but it did bring military advances to India in the form of horse-drawn war chariots. Around 800 BC, when the Aryans in northern India learned to smelt iron from the Assyrians in West Asia, this gave them another military advantage.
 Around 500 BC, thanks to Persian influence, the city of Taxila (in modern Pakistan) became a great scientific center. Atreya, a great botanist (plant specialist) and doctor, was working at Taxila about this time. Around the 300's BC, Indian farmers seem to have been using water wheels to lift water for irrigation - the earliest water wheels in the world.
 By 250 or 200 BC, under Mauryan rule, Indian scientists were the first in the world to be smelting iron with carbon to make steel.
 In the 600's AD, Indian mathematicians may have been responsible for inventing the numeral zero, and the decimal (or place) system (or it is possible that they got this idea from Chinese mathematicians). This made it a lot easier to add and multiply than it had been before. Indian mathematical ideas soon spread to West Asia and from there to Africa and Europe.
 Indian advances in iron-working led to some new ideas in the 1000's and 1100's AD. First, Indian architects were the first to use iron beams to replace wooden beams for building big temples. Second, Indian blacksmiths discovered a kind of iron that made a very strong and flexible kind of steel, called wootz steel.

Topic11:

Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the Roman civilization?

Typical Essay:

Roman scientific achievements are mostly in the areas of medicine and engineering. The Romans invented a lot of new ways to mine for metals like silver and gold and lead. They developed water mills as well for grinding grain. And they were the first people to really use concrete for major building projects. The use of concrete helped them to develop the dome and the barrel vault and the cross vault. They used their vaults to build aqueducts to carry fresh water to towns, and they used their engineering skills to build sewage systems to keep their towns clean and healthy.
Roman subjects in Phoenicia also invented blown glass, and mold-made pottery and oil lamps were also first made in the Roman period.

In medicine, Galen wrote during the Roman Empire, and he was the first to describe many symptoms and treatments. His medical textbook was the standard for over a thousand years.  The Romans didn't do that much work in mathematics, but they did develop their own way of writing numbers.

Topic12:

Write a composition on the achievements of the Roman civilization in architecture?

Typical Essay:

One of the things the Romans are most famous for is their architecture. The Romans brought a lot of new ideas to architecture, of which the three most important are the arch, the baked brick, and the use of cement and concrete.
Around 700 BC the Etruscans brought West Asian ideas about architecture to Italy, and they taught these ideas to the Romans. We don't have much Etruscan architecture left, but a lot of their underground tombs do survive, and some traces of their temples.
In the Republican period, the Romans built temples and basilicas, but also they made a lot of improvements to their city: aqueducts and roads and sewers. The Forum began to take shape. Outside of Rome, people began to build stone amphitheaters for gladiatorial games.
The first Roman emperor, Augustus, made more changes: he built a lot of brick and marble buildings, including a big Altar of Peace and a big tomb for his family, and a big stone theater for plays. Augustus' stepson Tiberius rebuilt the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman forum. Augustus' great-great-grandson Nero also did a lot of building in Rome, including his Golden House.

Then in 69 ADVespasian tore down some of the Golden House to build the Colosseum. Vespasian's son Titus built a great triumphal arch, and his other son Domitian built a great palace for himself on the Palatine hill.

 Even though Domitian was assassinated in 96 AD, later architects continued to use the techniques that had been developed for his palace, just as later emperors continued to live in Domitian’s palace. Trajan’s architect used brick and concrete arches to build a new forum with a big column in it and an elaborate market building that is the source of modern shopping malls. Trajan also built the first major public bath building in Rome. It may have been the same architect who later designed Hadrian’s Pantheon, a temple to all the gods, which used brick and concrete to build a huge dome. Nobody would build a bigger dome for more than a thousand years.

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/romans/architecture/romarch.htm

Topic13:

Write a composition on the ancient Roman system of government.

Typical Essay:

From 500 BC to nearly 1500 AD, for two thousand years, Roman government had more or less the same system. Of course there were some changes over that time too.

When the Roman Republic was first set up, in 500 BC, the people in charge were two men called consuls. The consuls controlled the army, and they decided whether to start a war and how much taxes to collect and what the laws were. There were also prefects in Rome, whose job was to run the city – some heard court cases, some ran the vegetable markets or the meat markets or the port. Finally, there was also an Assembly of all the men (not women) who were grownup and free and had Roman citizenship.

Once the Romans began conquering other places, far away from the city of Rome, they also had a system of provincial governors – men who took charge of a province of the Empire, and who heard court cases there. They were also in charge of the army while it was conquering places.
By about 50 BC, the time of Julius Caesar, these generals had begun to take over the government and not pay any attention to the consuls or the Senate anymore, and just do as they pleased. They could do that, because they had the army with them.

Augustus, in 31 BC, was one of these generals. But he realized that people didn’t like this pushing people around, and so he set up a different system keeping the Senate and the consuls This system kept on going for the next 1500 years, more or less.

Topic14:

Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Chinese civilization.

Typical Essay:

In early and medieval China, as in the Roman Empire, science seems to have been oriented mainly towards engineering and practical inventions, and not so much towards theoretical ideas about how the natural world worked. It was in Han Dynasty China that paper was first invented, and about the same time that the magneticcompass, for telling north from south, was also invented there. Scientists in China also invented gunpowder.
Chinese scholars also conducted scientific observations of plants and animals, and also of astronomy (the stars and planets). The many detailed and careful drawings of flowers and other plants, and star charts, from China show this interest.
The influence of Confucius made China a place where logical thought was also highly valued. Mathematics was taught in the schools, through the use of a math textbook called the Nine Chapters, which may have been written as early as the Han Dynasty in the 200's AD (but nobody knows for sure).
By around 850 AD, under the Tang Dynasty, Chinese printers were experimenting with block printing, and around the year 1000 they invented moveable type.

Topic15:

Write a composition on the ancient Islamic civilization.

Typical Essay:

People first came to the Arabian Peninsula probably about 150,000 BC, in the Old Stone Age. They were hunters and gatherers. By 2000 BC (or possibly earlier) Semitic-speaking people had moved into the Arabian Peninsula, also coming from the north. They were nomads when they arrived, who travelled around with their sheep and goats pasturing them in different pastures at different times of year. And they stayed nomads: many of them are nomads today.
In the southern part of the peninsula, on the other hand, the people were farmers. Nobody is sure where they came from, but the Queen of Sheba mentioned in the Bible may be one of these people.
By the time of Alexander the Great, we start to know a little more about the Arabs, because the Greeks were trading with them. The Romans also traded with the Arabs, who got spices and other things from India and sold them to the Romans for gold.
In the long war between the Sassanids and the Romans, different tribes of Arabs fought on each side. In this Late Antique period, the kingdom of Saba (Sheba) fell apart.

The Prophet Mohammed was born in the northern Arabian trading city of Mecca between 570 and 580 AD. When he was forty years old, he heard the angel Gabriel speaking to him and telling Mohammed that he was a prophet in the line of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, who would continue the faith those prophets had started. Mohammed's faith was called Islam (iz-LAMM). After a slow start, Mohammed made a lot of converts to his religion, and after he won some military battles, most of the other Arabic tribes also converted to Islam. After they had done that, Mohammed's successors attacked first the Romans and then the Sassanids to convert them. By 640 (after the death of Mohammed) the Arabs controlled most of West Asia, and soon after that, under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs, they conquered Egypt. By 711, the Umayyads controlled all of Western Asia except Turkey (which was still part of the Roman Empire), and all of the southern Mediterranean: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and most of Spain.