World History: Patterns of Interaction: Chapter 2

Each city and the surrounding land it controlled formed a city-state. A city-state functioned much as an independent country does today.

In time, some military leaders became full-time rulers. These rulers usually passed their power on to their sons, who eventually passed it on to their own heirs. Such a series of rulers from a single family is called a dynasty.

Sumerians exchanged products and ideas, such as living in cities, with neighboring cultures. This process in which a new idea or a product spreads from one culture to another is called cultural diffusion.

The belief in more than one god is called polytheism.

By taking control of both northern and southern Mesopotamia, Sargon created the world’s first empire. An empire brings together several peoples, nations, or previously independent states under the control of one ruler.

To the north, near the sea, Lower Egypt includes the Nile delta region.

To the Egyptians, kings were gods. The Egyptian god-kings, called pharaohs, were thought to be almost as splendid and powerful as the gods of the heavens.

This type of government in which rule is based on religious authority is called a theocracy.

For the kings of the Old Kingdom, the resting place after death was an immense structure called a pyramid.

Royal and elite Egyptians’ bodies were preserved by mummification, which involves embalming and drying the corpse to prevent it from decaying.

Simple pictographs were the earliest form of writing in Egypt, but scribes quickly developed a more flexible writing system called hieroglyphics. This term comes from the Greek words hieros and gluph, meaning “sacred carving.”

Although hieroglyphs were first written on stone and clay, as in Mesopotamia, the Egyptians soon invented a better writing surface—papyrus reeds.

Geographers often refer to the landmass that includes India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as the Indian subcontinent.

Seasonal winds called monsoons dominate India’s climate. From October to February, winter monsoons from the northeast blow dry air westward across the country.

The Huang He, whose name means “yellow river,” deposits huge amounts of yellowish silt when it overflows its banks. This silt is actually fertile soil called loess, which is blown by the winds from deserts to the west and north.

Shang kings consulted the gods through the use of oracle bones, animal bones and tortoise shells on which priests had scratched questions for the gods.

Feudalism is a political system in which nobles, or lords, are granted the use of lands that legally belong to the king.