NY Regents 9.1: Development of Civilization

The Fertile Crescent — the arc of productive land stretching between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is today Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey, curving toward the eastern Mediterranean…

Çatalhöyük sits in central Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, on the plateau between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean — exactly the inland peninsula that bridges Europe and Asia. Around 7500 BCE…

Around 3200 BCE, in the temple bureaucracy of Uruk — one of the world's first true cities, in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) — scribes began pressing wedge-shaped marks into wet clay to record…

Around 3100 BCE, the ruler known as Narmer consolidated Upper and Lower Egypt into a single kingdom, an event commemorated on the Narmer Palette discovered at Hierakonpolis (ancient Nekhen) in…

By around 2600 BCE the Indus (Harappan) civilization — its cities Harappa and Mohenjo-daro built from standardized fired brick — used carved steatite seals, often showing a one-horned 'unicorn' beast…

Around 2560 BCE the pharaoh Khufu's tomb was completed at Giza, on the west bank of the Nile near the ancient capital of Memphis in what is now northern Egypt. Originally 146 metres tall, the Great…

Around 2500 BCE Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, located on the right bank of the Indus River in the Sindh province of modern Pakistan, about 28 km south…

Around 2334 BCE Sargon of Akkad unified the city-states of Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now central Iraq — into history's first empire, stretching from…

This monument stands in Ur, in modern-day Iraq — built on the broad, river-fed plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, just inland from where those rivers once emptied into the Persian Gulf. Around…

Around 1900 BCE the major cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation — including Mohenjo-daro on the Indus in modern-day Sindh, Pakistan, and Harappa on the Ravi River in Punjab — were gradually…

Around 1754 BCE the Babylonian king Hammurabi promulgated his famous law code at Babylon, a city on the Euphrates River about 85 km south of modern Baghdad in Iraq. The stele bearing the 282 laws…

This is Anyang, in modern China, situated on the flat plains of the Yellow River basin in the interior of East Asia. Around 1600 BCE, the Shang Dynasty rose here as China's first archaeologically…

Around 1470 BCE the pharaoh Hatshepsut completed her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari on the west bank of the Nile, directly across from the ancient city of Thebes (modern Luxor) in Upper Egypt. The…

Around 1346 BCE the pharaoh Akhenaten established a new capital city called Akhetaten (modern Amarna) on the east bank of the Nile in what is now the Minya Governorate of central Egypt, roughly 312…

At Yinxu, near modern Anyang, the Shang dynasty capital on the North China Plain (c. 1200 BCE), diviners heated ox shoulder-blades and turtle shells until they cracked, then read the cracks as…

In 1046 BCE at Muye, near modern Xinxiang on the North China Plain, the Zhou people and their allies crushed the army of the last Shang king. The victorious Zhou justified overthrowing the Shang with…