Reference no: EM131862714

Assignment

SHORT ANSWER--a good paragraph or two

1. How do historians study, divide up, and evaluate the past?
2. How did the original human hunter-gatherer communities become civilized, with what problems and changes to their cultures?
3. What did the Ancient Middle Eastern civilizations contribute to the foundations of Western culture?
4. How did the Greeks and later Hellenistic rulers succeed and fail in politics?
5. How did Rome grow from a city-state to an empire unifying the Mediterranean?
6. How did the new religion of Christianity begin and grow?
7. How did Roman Empire fall in the West, yet last another 1000 years in the East?

LONG ANSWER--several paragraphs, a good two or three pages.

Discuss the importance of religion in the ancient world. You might consider the following questions: What religious forms did the first peoples have? How did religion serve the needs of the Middle Eastern civilizations? What changes did the Greeks and Romans bring to beliefs? How were Judaism, Christianity, and Islam different from other religions and from each other?

1. Explain the various approaches ancient civilizations had to government. You might consider the following questions: What rights and roles did the states in Egypt and Mesopotamia give to their leaders? What forms of self-rule did the Hebrews/Jews attempt? How did the Greeks provide alternate conceptions of politics? How did various political structures of the Romans reflect their expansion?

2. Discuss the problem of empire in the ancient world. You might consider the following questions: How did the first empires come about? What were the strengths and weaknesses of the universal empires of Assyria and Persia? How did the Greeks fail at empire yet succeed at civilization? How did the Roman Empire arise out of a crisis, create more crises, and yet survive for several centuries? What caused the ultimate failure of the western portion of the Roman Empire, and what were its consequences?