Early Civilizations and Classical Empires
Key terms, river valleys, and classical empires from the Neolithic Revolution to Rome, Han China, and India.
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Questions Covered in This Set
11 cards to master
Neolithic Revolution
The shift starting around 10,000 BCE from foraging to farming and animal domestication, which produced food surpluses and made cities possible.
Why does surplus matter in history?
Surplus food fed people who didn't farm, allowing specialized jobs: priests, soldiers, scribes, artisans, and kings.
The six features historians use to define a civilization
Cities, specialized labor, organized government, complex religion, record-keeping/writing, and advanced technology or art.
Mesopotamia: rivers, writing, and famous law code
Tigris and Euphrates; cuneiform writing and ziggurats; Hammurabi's Code (~1750 BCE), one of the first written law codes.
How did geography make Egypt more stable than Mesopotamia?
The Nile flooded predictably and deserts acted as natural barriers, producing a unified kingdom; Mesopotamia's open plain and violent floods produced warring city-states and invasions.
Indus Valley civilization: distinctive features
Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro had grid streets, brick sewers, and standardized weights; the script is still undeciphered and there is little evidence of kings or armies.
Shang China contributions
Oracle bones (earliest Chinese writing), bronze casting, and ancestor veneration on the Huang He; the Mandate of Heaven developed under the later Zhou.
What is an empire, and what was the 'Axial Age'?
An empire is a state ruling many peoples and territories; the Axial Age (c. 600 BCE–600 CE) produced Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity.
Greece: political forms and legacies
A network of polis city-states — Athenian direct democracy (free adult males only) and Spartan militarized oligarchy; legacies include Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, drama, geometry, and Hellenistic culture after Alexander (334–323 BCE).
Compare how Rome and Han China held their empires together
Rome used law, citizenship, roads, and engineering; Han China (206 BCE–220 CE) used a Confucian exam-tested bureaucracy and a shared script uniting different dialects.
Ashoka and Gupta India
Ashoka (r. 268–232 BCE) converted to Buddhism after the Kalinga war and inscribed edicts on dharma and tolerance; Gupta mathematicians developed the concept of zero and the decimal system.
