WORLD
Use our resources to learn more about ancient civilizations.
Teachers, scroll down for a quick list of key resources in our Teachers’ Toolkit, including a link to today’s simple MapMaker Interactive map.
Photograph courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Discussion Ideas
- Take a look at the gorgeous clay tablet above. Just like the Kushim tablet, it’s a record of Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia. Where is Mesopotamia?
- Mesopotamia is an ancient name for the rich valley of the Tigris-Euphrates river system. In fact, Mesopotamia means the “land between the rivers.” Take a look at this video to learn more about Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization.”
- The Tigris-Euphrates river system includes most of modern-day Iraq, and parts of Kuwait, Iran, Turkey, and Syria.
- The writing system used throughout modern Mesopotamia is Arabic. What writing system does the Kushim tablet use?
- What it is: It’s an pictographic script simply named “Uruk III.” (Bonus points if you got that one.) Pictographic script describes a writing system that communicates meaning through a resemblance to a physical object. The pictograms for grain in the Uruk tablet above, for instance, actually look like little stalks of grain. The video above calls Uruk III the “birth of the rebus writing system.”
- What it is not: Hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphs are not really pictographs. Instead of a picture representing an object, a picture represents a word or morphemes. Morphemes are components of words. (“Morphemes,” for example, has two morphemes: the word itself, morpheme, and s, which makes the word plural.)
- What it is not: Developed cuneiform. Sumeria’s most famous writing system, the wedge-shaped cuneiform, was still evolving when the Kushim tablet was written. Take a look at this terrific example of how the cuneiform sign for “head” evolved from the Uruk period (3000s BCE) to around 1 CE.
- What it is: It’s an pictographic script simply named “Uruk III.” (Bonus points if you got that one.) Pictographic script describes a writing system that communicates meaning through a resemblance to a physical object. The pictograms for grain in the Uruk tablet above, for instance, actually look like little stalks of grain. The video above calls Uruk III the “birth of the rebus writing system.”
- Robert Krulwich, the author of the Nat Geo blog, says the name of a king doesn’t show up until several generations after Kushim, our historic beer-brewing accountant. Who was this king, and where do you think he was from?
- Iry-Hor was a pharaoh of Upper Egypt in the 3200s BCE. (Upper Egypt is the southern part of the modern country. “Upper” refers to the region’s proximity to the sources of the Nile River. The Nile Delta region, on the other hand, is Lower Egypt.)
- Who do you think was the first named woman in world history?
- It could have been Kushim, although it’s unlikely. The name of someone who was definitely a woman was first written around 3200 BCE. Neithhotep was the wife of Namer, pharaoh of the 1st Dynasty in ancient Egypt. Narmer and Neithhotep probably united the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt into a single powerhouse civilization.
TEACHERS’ TOOLKIT
Nat Geo: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know?
Nat Geo: Uruk, Sumeria, Mesopotamia map
Nat Geo: Mesopotamia video
The Schoyen Collection: Beer Production at the Inanna Temple in Uruk (the Kushim tablet)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Cuneiform tablet: administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars
LandmarkMedia: Written Word—Birth of Writing video
2 thoughts on “Who was the First Person in History?”