Ali’s beautifully designed double page on the potential sources about her famous life
Anastasia’s lively and colourful work on the same topic
Well done, girls! Your work is beautiful and does you credit.
Now, for those addicted word-learners amongst you…
Here is a little quizlet on ancient Egypt. I plan to add more words to it soon. Perhaps in a spare moment over the weekend.
The “Natufians” were hunter-gatherers whose descendants eventually became the first farmers and herders in the Fertile Crescent. Ultimately a great civilisation developed in that region. The people of that civilisation were called the Sumerians and they are generally credited with inventing the wheel and developing the first alphabet. These were remarkable achievements for people with hardly any wood, whose best material for a writing surface and for building houses was mud.
The ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramid of Giza without the wheel. In addition, they developed their own system of writing, probably influenced by the Sumerians. The ancient Egyptians usually get the credit, among other things, for domesticating cats, embalming bodies with great skill and living successfully in a land that, except for a thin fertile strip near its river, was basically desert. It was an improbable place for such a major and successful civilisation, made possible only by the existence of that river, the Nile, and by the talents of the people. Every year the Nile delivered its fertile silt to the inhabitants of the Nile Valley, its floodwaters sweeping down from the Ethiopian mountains in the south to the plains of the north. Every year the Egyptian peasant farmers used that silt and water to crop their land and grow the food that supported the whole population.
Some of my students think it would have been much easier for human beings once they started to farm. My students point out that people would no longer have encountered as much danger from hunting and would have felt more confidence about having food when they needed it. While these are fair points, farming in ancient Egypt was labour-intensive, to say the least. A peasant farmer was also at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This was no easy life. Hunter-gatherers six or seven thousand years before in a fertile area like the Fertile Crescent might well have had more leisure time and fewer people telling them what to do – and no one to tax them as well.
Find out about ancient Egypt at these links, ensuring that you make notes on topics that could help with assignment research:
You will have encountered most or perhaps all of the words below in the first week of studying history. But even if you know a particular word, that doesn’t always mean that you fully understand it and could use it in a sentence, during class or in a test. That’s why it’s often useful to revisit strange or unfamiliar words, just to make sure they have become friends and allies in your mental dictionary.
I made up the quizlet below to help my students use the words of history in everyday life. You know, at the dinner table, when your parents ask you that dreaded question: “And what did you learn at school today?”
After you have worked through this quizlet a few times, you’ll be able to reply: “Well, since you ask, I discovered that once the glaciers of the last Ice Age had melted, the area of the Fertile Crescent was an ideal location for the gradual development of agriculture. The hunter-gatherers who lived there gradually gave up their nomadic lifestyle and took up farming, domesticating plants and animals and beginning to live in larger settlements with more complex social structures. This change had a lasting impact on human history.”
Your parents will be stunned.
“And now,” you will say, “if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and brush up my extensive vocabulary before I go to bed. May I be excused?”
Of course your parents will release you. They’ll be speechless. They may even forget to make you do the washing up.