Topic08:
Write a composition on the ancient Phoenician civilization.
Typical Essay:
Another great race of people descended from the Babylonian or Semitic stock were the Phoenicians. They inherited the intellectual and adventurous side of Babylonian life, and through them the use of the alphabet, or written ********, was spread abroad over all the world.
The Phoenicians were earth's first-known sailors and explorers. In tiny barks, such as we of today would think scarcely safe for navigating a river, they coasted the entire Mediterranean Sea and even ventured far along the shores of the tempestuous Atlantic. They went not as traders in the ordinary sense, but as bold adventurers, eager to see new things, resolute to confront and conquer whatever sudden, unknown danger leaped upon them.
Their home lay along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, adjoining Palestine, the home of the Hebrews. There they built mighty cities--Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, celebrated in song and story, the richest, most strongly guarded towns of their day. From these, the daring little ships sped forth ready to traffic or to plunder--for the Phoenicians were ever pirates where piracy seemed most profitable--ready to turn miners and dig in the tin mines of England, or become herders and raise flocks in the fertile valleys of Spain. They were, as the Greeks called them, a "red people," ruddy of face and probably of hair. The whole world knew and liked and feared these red Phoenicians, these first ready-witted searchers of the globe.
Topic09:
Write a composition on the achievements of the ancient Indus valley civilization in architecture and art.
Typical Essay:
The earliest big buildings in India were built by the Harappan people in the Indus River valley, about 2500 BC. The Harappan buildings included high brick walls around their cities to keep out enemies. Most of the buildings were ordinary houses, with rooms arranged around a small courtyard. Probably some families owned a whole house (and lived in it with their slaves), while others rented only one room in a house, and the whole family lived together in the one room. The rulers built bigger buildings, like this public bathing house and a town warehouse for storing wheat and barley, also out of mud-brick and baked brick. Like the houses, these bigger buildings were square or rectangular, with small courtyards in the middle. They used arches, but, like the Sumerians and the Egyptians, they only used them underground, as drains or foundations for buildings.
The major themes of Indian art seem to begin emerging as early as the Harappan period, about 2500 BC. Although we're still not sure, some Harappan images look like later images of Vishnu and Shiva, and the tradition may start this early. With the arrival of the Indo-Europeans (or Aryans) around 1500 BC, came new artistic ideas.
Around 500 BC, the conversion to Buddhism of a large part of the population of India brought with it some new artistic themes. But at first nobody made images of the Buddha - only stupas (STOO-pahs), symbolic representations that didn't look like a person.
Then the conquests of Alexander the Great, in the 320's BC, also had an important impact on Indian art. Alexander left colonies of Greek veteran soldiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and these soldiers attracted Greek sculptors (maybe some of the soldiers were sculptors). Their Greek-style carvings attracted attention in India - the first life-size stone statues in India date to the 200's BC, just after Alexander. During the Guptan period, about 500 AD, the great cave temples of Ajanta and Ellora were carved. Scenes from the life of the Buddha became popular, and statues of the Buddha.
Finally, the arrival of the Islamic faith and Islamic conquerors about 1000 AD brought iconoclasm to India, and a love of varied and complex patterning derived from Arabic and Persian models. This affected even Hindu artists who had not converted to Islam. Small Persian-style miniature paintings also became popular.
Topic10:
Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Indus valley civilization?
Typical Essay:
From the time of the Harappans to the time of the Islamic conquests, Indian scientists and mathematicians were leaders in many different fields. They especially stood out in mathematics and engineering.
The Harappans in 2500 BC had a sewage system at their city of Mohenjo-Daro, and carefully laid out, straight streets. So even though we can't read their writing, we know that the Harappans understood a lot of geometry.
A severe climate change halted development at Harappa around 2000 BC. The Aryan invasion of 1500 BC also seems to have stopped scientific advances for a while, but it did bring military advances to India in the form of horse-drawn war chariots. Around 800 BC, when the Aryans in northern India learned to smelt iron from the Assyrians in West Asia, this gave them another military advantage.
Around 500 BC, thanks to Persian influence, the city of Taxila (in modern Pakistan) became a great scientific center. Atreya, a great botanist (plant specialist) and doctor, was working at Taxila about this time. Around the 300's BC, Indian farmers seem to have been using water wheels to lift water for irrigation - the earliest water wheels in the world.
By 250 or 200 BC, under Mauryan rule, Indian scientists were the first in the world to be smelting iron with carbon to make steel.
In the 600's AD, Indian mathematicians may have been responsible for inventing the numeral zero, and the decimal (or place) system (or it is possible that they got this idea from Chinese mathematicians). This made it a lot easier to add and multiply than it had been before. Indian mathematical ideas soon spread to West Asia and from there to Africa and Europe.
Indian advances in iron-working led to some new ideas in the 1000's and 1100's AD. First, Indian architects were the first to use iron beams to replace wooden beams for building big temples. Second, Indian blacksmiths discovered a kind of iron that made a very strong and flexible kind of steel, called wootz steel.
Topic11:
Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the Roman civilization?
Typical Essay:
Roman scientific achievements are mostly in the areas of medicine and engineering. The Romans invented a lot of new ways to mine for ****ls like silver and gold and lead. They developed water mills as well for grinding grain. And they were the first people to really use concrete for major building projects. The use of concrete helped them to develop the dome and the barrel vault and the cross vault. They used their vaults to build aqueducts to carry fresh water to towns, and they used their engineering skills to build sewage systems to keep their towns clean and healthy.
Roman subjects in Phoenicia also invented blown glass, and mold-made pottery and oil lamps were also first made in the Roman period.
In medicine, Galen wrote during the Roman Empire, and he was the first to describe many symptoms and treatments. His medical textbook was the standard for over a thousand years. The Romans didn't do that much work in mathematics, but they did develop their own way of writing numbers.
Topic12:
Write a composition on the achievements of the Roman civilization in architecture?
Typical Essay:
One of the things the Romans are most famous for is their architecture. The Romans brought a lot of new ideas to architecture, of which the three most important are the arch, the baked brick, and the use of cement and concrete.
Around 700 BC the Etruscans brought West Asian ideas about architecture to Italy, and they taught these ideas to the Romans. We don't have much Etruscan architecture left, but a lot of their underground tombs do survive, and some traces of their temples.
In the Republican period, the Romans built temples and basilicas, but also they made a lot of improvements to their city: aqueducts and roads and sewers. The Forum began to take shape. Outside of Rome, people began to build stone amphitheaters for gladiatorial games.
The first Roman emperor, Augustus, made more changes: he built a lot of brick and marble buildings, including a big Altar of Peace and a big tomb for his family, and a big stone theater for plays. Augustus' stepson Tiberius rebuilt the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman forum. Augustus' great-great-grandson Nero also did a lot of building in Rome, including his Golden House.
Then in 69 AD Vespasian tore down some of the Golden House to build the Colosseum. Vespasian's son Titus built a great triumphal arch, and his other son Domitian built a great palace for himself on the Palatine hill.
Even though Domitian was assassinated in 96 AD, later architects continued to use the techniques that had been developed for his palace, just as later emperors continued to live in Domitian’s palace. Trajan’s architect used brick and concrete arches to build a new forum with a big column in it and an elaborate market building that is the source of modern shopping malls. Trajan also built the first major public bath building in Rome. It may have been the same architect who later designed Hadrian’s Pantheon, a temple to all the gods, which used brick and concrete to build a huge dome. Nobody would build a bigger dome for more than a thousand years.
https://www.historyforkids.org/learn/...re/romarch.htm
Topic13:
Write a composition on the ancient Roman system of government.
Typical Essay:
From 500 BC to nearly 1500 AD, for two thousand years, Roman government had more or less the same system. Of course there were some changes over that time too.
When the Roman Republic was first set up, in 500 BC, the people in charge were two men called consuls. The consuls controlled the army, and they decided whether to start a war and how much taxes to collect and what the laws were. There were also prefects in Rome, whose job was to run the city – some heard court cases, some ran the vegetable markets or the meat markets or the port. Finally, there was also an Assembly of all the men (not women) who were grownup and free and had Roman citizenship.
Once the Romans began conquering other places, far away from the city of Rome, they also had a system of provincial governors – men who took charge of a province of the Empire, and who heard court cases there. They were also in charge of the army while it was conquering places.
By about 50 BC, the time of Julius Caesar, these generals had begun to take over the government and not pay any attention to the consuls or the Senate anymore, and just do as they pleased. They could do that, because they had the army with them.
Augustus, in 31 BC, was one of these generals. But he realized that people didn’t like this pushing people around, and so he set up a different system keeping the Senate and the consuls This system kept on going for the next 1500 years, more or less.
Topic14:
Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Chinese civilization.
Typical Essay:
In early and medieval China, as in the Roman Empire, science seems to have been oriented mainly towards engineering and practical inventions, and not so much towards theoretical ideas about how the natural world worked. It was in Han Dynasty China that paper was first invented, and about the same time that the magnetic compass, for telling north from south, was also invented there. Scientists in China also invented gunpowder.
Chinese scholars also conducted scientific observations of plants and animals, and also of astronomy (the stars and planets). The many detailed and careful drawings of flowers and other plants, and star charts, from China show this interest.
The influence of Confucius made China a place where logical thought was also highly valued. Mathematics was taught in the schools, through the use of a math textbook called the Nine Chapters, which may have been written as early as the Han Dynasty in the 200's AD (but nobody knows for sure).
By around 850 AD, under the Tang Dynasty, Chinese printers were experimenting with block printing, and around the year 1000 they invented moveable type.
Topic15:
Write a composition on the ancient Islamic civilization.
Typical Essay:
People first came to the Arabian Peninsula probably about 150,000 BC, in the Old Stone Age. They were hunters and gatherers. By 2000 BC (or possibly earlier) Semitic-speaking people had moved into the Arabian Peninsula, also coming from the north. They were nomads when they arrived, who travelled around with their sheep and goats pasturing them in different pastures at different times of year. And they stayed nomads: many of them are nomads today.
In the southern part of the peninsula, on the other hand, the people were farmers. Nobody is sure where they came from, but the Queen of Sheba mentioned in the Bible may be one of these people.
By the time of Alexander the Great, we start to know a little more about the Arabs, because the Greeks were trading with them. The Romans also traded with the Arabs, who got spices and other things from India and sold them to the Romans for gold.
In the long war between the Sassanids and the Romans, different tribes of Arabs fought on each side. In this Late Antique period, the kingdom of Saba (Sheba) fell apart.
The Prophet Mohammed was born in the northern Arabian trading city of Mecca between 570 and 580 AD. When he was forty years old, he heard the angel Gabriel speaking to him and telling Mohammed that he was a prophet in the line of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, who would continue the faith those prophets had started. Mohammed's faith was called Islam (iz-LAMM). After a slow start, Mohammed made a lot of converts to his religion, and after he won some military battles, most of the other Arabic tribes also converted to Islam. After they had done that, Mohammed's successors attacked first the Romans and then the Sassanids to convert them. By 640 (after the death of Mohammed) the Arabs controlled most of West Asia, and soon after that, under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs, they conquered Egypt. By 711, the Umayyads controlled all of Western Asia except Turkey (which was still part of the Roman Empire), and all of the southern Mediterranean: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and most of Spain.
Topic16:
Write a composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Islamic civilization.
Typical Essay:
Because West Asia was such an economic crossroads in the medieval Islamic period - because of the Silk Road that connected China and India in the east to Europe and Africa in the West - there were always lots of new scientific ideas coming through West Asia too. Educated West Asian scholars were able to make use of these foreign ideas to develop new scientific theories and approaches.
One example from the East is the use of "Arabic" numbers, which really came from India, about 630 AD. The Arabic word for numbers, in fact, is hindsah, which means "from India". Arab scientists, especially the Persian Mohammed Al-Khwarizmi, were able to make use of the new numbers (and possibly the work of Greek mathematicians like Diophantus of Alexandria) to develop algebra around 830 AD (The English word "algorithm" comes from Al-Khwarizmi). (Ordinary people, however, kept on using the Greek system of numbers; only mathematicians used Arabic numbers).
In the 800's AD, the great schools at Cordoba in Spain, under Umayyad rule, inspired many scholars to investigate new scientific ideas. Among them was a man of Berber origin, Ibn Firnas, who designed the first glider, which he successfully used in 875, when he was 65 years old, to fly down from a cliff near Cordoba (though he hurt his back when he landed). This was the first controlled human flight.
A more successful invention also from Islamic Spain was the glass mirror, invented around 1000 AD. Even earlier, in the 900's, Ibn Sahl and others made curved glass mirrors that concentrated sunlight to focus heat.
About 1000 AD, West Asian blacksmiths also learned how to make steel from India, and then they developed the idea further to produce the very high quality Damascus steel that was used in fighting the Crusades.
Another example from the East is the use of paper, which the Arabs learned from the Chinese about 750 AD. The magnetic compass also came to West Asia from China, about 1100 AD.
From the West, Arabic scholars were able to read the books of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, and they translated these books into Arabic. They were especially interested in Aristotle and Pliny's studies of plants and animals, and produced many new studies like that of their own, often with beautifully detailed and accurate illustrations. This led to the classification and description of many new species of plants and animals, and also to advances in medicine. All through the Middle Ages, everyone knew that the best doctors, men like Ibn Sina or Maimonides, lived in the Islamic kingdoms.
Topic17:
Write a composition on the achievements of the Islamic civilization in architecture.
Typical Essay:
The first buildings that were built in the Islamic Empire were designed by Greek architects who had already been living in the area when the Arabs conquered it. Because of that, these buildings look a lot like earlier buildings in the area - Late Roman Empire buildings. But because they were now building Islamic mosques and not Christian churches, these Greek architects were able to experiment with some new forms, developing a new Islamic style. One of the earliest mosques is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, from the 600's AD. It's octagonal, like Hadrian's Pantheon, instead of being cross-shaped like a Christian church. In the late 700's AD, the new Arab rulers of North Africa marked their new territory by building great mosques like the one at Kairouan (modern Tunisia) and the one at Cordoba in Spain.
In the Abbasid period, beginning about 800 AD, the capital of the Islamic empire moved further east, to Baghdad, and so the caliphs needed a lot of new beautiful palaces and mosques built in Baghdad. Because Baghdad was in the old Sassanian Empire, the architects who lived there followed Sassanian architectural traditions, and these buildings, like the mosque at Samarra, looked very different from the ones built by the Greek architects.
In the end, though, the Islamic Empire made it so easy to travel around that all the architects got to know each other's styles, and there got to be one main style of building all across the Islamic Empire. As the empire broke down into a lot of smaller kingdoms, the ruler of each kingdom needed to show how important he was, so he built mosques and palaces in his own capital. The Fatimids, for example, built the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo in the 900's AD. In Spain in the late 1200's AD, the Almohads, built their own palace at Granada, the Alhambra.
The Ottoman sultan built the last great Islamic building before 1500 AD - his palace in Istanbul, which he built in the late 1400's AD.
Topic18:
Write a composition on the achievements of the Islamic civilization in art.
Typical Essay:
For the earliest years of the Islamic Empire, under the Umayyad dynasty, we don't have very much art surviving. The best of it is the elaborate mosaics on the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem and on the Great Mosque in Damascus. These mosaics are done in a Roman style, probably by Roman craftsmen.
But already we can see one big difference between Roman art and Islamic art: the followers of Islam, like the Jews, took seriously the idea that you should not make graven images, and although these mosaics show plants and buildings they do not show people or animals.
By the Abbasid period, even plants and buildings were frowned on. Most of the art was geometric designs. A lot of these designs seem to be from fabric patterns. The Arabs, because they were nomadic, had always relied on carpets and hangings for decoration. Now that they lived in buildings, they used those same familiar patterns only in stone or tile. They often used calligraphy (beautiful writing) of verses from the Koran to decorate buildings, plates, and vases.
In this period, also, the focus of the Islamic Empire shifted from Damascus and the old Roman territory east to Baghdad and the old Sassanian territory. So the art also became more Persian and less Roman.
By about 1000 AD, the Islamic empire was breaking up into smaller states, and each state developed its own art style. There are individual styles for Spain, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia.
In some of these places, the iconoclastic rules against using pictures of things or people were relaxed as time went on. In Persia (modern Iran), painters made beautiful little miniature paintings of people at court, and of famous people from history.
The arrival of paper from China in 751 AD let artists do a lot more painting, because paper was so much cheaper than papyrus or parchment.
After the Mongols conquered Persia and China in the 1200's AD, many Chinese motifs started to show up in Persian painting and vases.