Writing and Power

I myself found it very interesting and true that the civilizations that incorporated writing into their systems were pretty much civilized and would be remembered.  Today if you look back on history you see all of these civilizations and how they started to use writing more and more.  We still study these cultures and people today because it is kind of a mystery how they themselves started to use writings.  For example the Mesopotamians, Chinese, and Egyptians were all early civilizations that we can look back on and study because in early times they were smart enough to developed a writing system and leave behind details about how they lived and worked through things.  The packet also talked about how people and gods came to be, from the creation of people and the world.  People have so many beliefs of how the world and people came to be because every culture has different people who believe different things.  Some believe that there is only one divine god who started everything, while others believe that there is/was several.  They believe that we were made to protect and serve the planet earth, while other believe that the god/gods created us to serve and worship them.  From reading all of the different stories it is very hard to believe any of them because they all provide good points, but it is hard to tell who is telling the truth. we just have to just keep on reading on, or maybe just decide for ourself.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

In class when we all were examining and talking about The Epic of Gilgamesh it was very interesting to see how people read and reacted towards the story.  It was really neat how everyone interrupted the beast and how he would act.  Everyones stories were pretty cool as well because every group added their own little flare to the story.  It is hard to believe that people actually acted like that back in the days because it is very possible to think that humans could have been that primitive.  We all know that people weren't always the smartest, so to read the story about how early people were able to tame and convert a primitive being like Enkidu to a normal human like themselves was just fascinating.  I myself wonder how Enkidu really did look and see for myself the ways that he really acted because I think that it would be rather interesting to see a primitive beast turn human.  For me it is just kind of hard to picture in my mind this sort of event taking place.

Chapter 2 first farmers

I found it very interesting by how quickly the early people learned how to improve their crops and technology.  They were able to start domesticating animals to help them with their crops, by harnessing the power of the stronger animals in order to help pull their tools to irrigate the land.  People didn't always think of animals as tools, but after we evolved and adapted, we were then able to use animals and raise them to help us in many ways.  People also started to farm animal and raise them for food instead of just going out and hunting them all of the time, which I thought was very smart of the early people to start doing because it would save them so much time, plus they would just always have access to it if they really needed it.  One thing that really stood out to me was the way that the farmers were able to take corn and transform it from a plant with a single cob of about an inch,  and getting the cob to grow six times the size by 1500.  But the farmers didn't just stop there, they were able to even double the length of that cob later on.  I really likes how people were able to share all of their ideas about agriculture in order to get more efficient ways of obtaining crops.  With everyone just sharing their own information with one another, it was rather interesting to how some people still use some of the same techniques today.  Basically during the early times people were just starting to work with the land and animals because they didn't know any better.  But thanks to everyone helping each other and through trial and error, we were able to survive and improve many of the foods that we grew in the past.

Chapter One: The need for water in ancient societies

This chapter mainly talks about how many early civilizations started out near rivers.  How they were able to control and irrigate the land and control the water of the rivers.  By being able to control the water, it was able to make their lives a whole lot easier because now they could make trenches, aqueducts, and canals to help them move the water to their crops and whatever else they needed.  Water is the base of all life, so by being able to master the way of the river they could being on expanding in life because they were then able to grow crops for food, obtain drinking water, and even use the water for pluming. People in the early civilizations were also able to advance in technology and build machines in order to help them move water from place to place, some examples of their early technology were the shaduf, saqiya, square-pallet chanin pump, and noria just to name a few of their inventions.
     Even in the early time people needed law and rules to keep things in order and thats why they followed certain rules and laws to keep everything in order.  People followed rules from the Code of Hammurabi which was a Babylonian legal code dating from 1750 B.C.E.
      The chapter pretty much just talked about how early civilizations started to flourish and how they started to develop over time.

Im here

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