Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent Structured Notes
Please do not forget to study your Powerpoint slides
 The valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were the site of the world’s
first civilizations.
 Fertile Crescent, a large arc of rich, or fertile farmland.
 Silt is a mixture of rich soil and tiny rocks, to the land. The fertile silt
made the land ideal for farming.
 Irrigation is a way of supplying water to an area of land. Sumerians used
irrigation to water crops.
 Canals are human–made the waterways
 A type of arrangement in which each worker specializes in a particular
task or job is called a division of labor.
 The Sumerians developed the first civilization in Mesopotamia. The
Sumerians developed the first advanced society.
 Most people in Sumer were farmers, they lived mainly in rural, or
countryside, areas.
 The centers of Sumerian society, were the urban, or city, areas.
 A city-state consisted of a city and all the countryside around it.
 Polytheism is a religion that worships many gods.
 Priests were people who performed religious ceremonies.
 Social hierarchy is the division of a society by rank or class.
 The Sumerians made many advances that helped their society develop.
 Sumerians invented the first writing system.
 Sumerians invented many forms of art.
 Cuneiform is the world’s first system of writing.
 Pictographs were picture symbols. Pictographs enabled writers to express
feelings.
 A scribe, or writer, would be hired to keep track of items people traded.
 An epic is a long poem that tells a story of a hero.
 A ziggurat, a pyramid-shaped temple tower, rose above the city.
 Sumer sculptors produced many statues of the gods for their temples.
 After the Sumerians, many cultures ruled parts of the Fertile Crescent.
 Stone Cylinder rolled over clay to sign and seal documents or
decorate other clay objects.
 Sumerians played stringed instruments called lyres.