starożytność: Mesopotamia

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. It corresponds roughly to the territory of modern Iraq. Just beyond it lies southwestern Iran, where the region transitions into the Iranian plateau, marking the shift from the Arab world to Iran. Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC. It has been identified as having "inspired some of the most important developments in human history, including the invention of the wheel, the planting of the first cereal crops, the development of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 72

The Uruk period (c. 4000/3900 to 3300/3100 BC; also known as Protoliterate period) is a period of the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East. It follows the Ubaid period and precedes the Jemdet Nasr period (although that is often considered a final stage of the Late Uruk period). In the broadest sense, this period coincides with the 4th millennium BC. Uruk culture is also used to refer to the culture originating in Lower Mesopotamia during this period. Named after the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, this period saw a set of major innovations that lay the foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. It is the period of the appearanc…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 72

The history of construction traces the changes in building tools, methods, techniques and systems used in the field of construction. It explains the evolution of how humans created shelter and other structures that comprises the entire built environment. It covers several fields including structural engineering, civil engineering, city growth and population growth, which are relatives to branches of technology, science, history, and architecture. The fields allow both modern and ancient construction to be analyzed, as well as the structures, building materials, and tools used. Construction is an ancient human activity that began at around 4000 BC as a response to the human need for shelter.…

Evidence: 34 • authority: 92

Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus.. Chemical analyses of ancient organic compounds absorbed into the pottery fabrics from sites in Georgia in the South Caucasus region, dating to the early Neolithic period (ca. 6,000-5,000 BC), provide the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine and viniculture from the Near East, at ca. 6,000-5,800 BC. The chemical findings are corroborated by climatic and environmental reconstruction, together with archaeobotanical evidence, including grape pollen, starch, and epidermal remains associated with a jar of similar type and date. The very large-capacity jars, some of the earliest pottery made in the Near East, probably…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales. From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for taxation, commerce, trade, and in astronomy, to record time and formulate calendars. The earliest mathematical texts available are from Mesopotamia and Egypt – Plimpton 322 (Babylonian c. 2000 – 1900 BC), the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period in Afro-Eurasia from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an increasingly large population possible. These settled communities permitted humans to observe and experiment with plants, learning how they grew and developed. This new knowledge led to the domestication of plants into crops. Archaeological data indicate that the domestication of various types of plants and animals happened in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene 11,700 years ago, after the e…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

A cereal is a grass (family Poaceae) cultivated for its edible grain. Cereals are the world's largest crops, and are therefore staple foods. They include rice, wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, and maize (US: corn). Edible grains from other plant families, such as amaranth, buckwheat and quinoa, are pseudocereals. Most cereals are annuals, producing one crop from each planting, though rice is sometimes grown as a perennial. Winter varieties are hardy enough to be planted in the autumn, becoming dormant in the winter, and harvested in spring or early summer; spring varieties are planted in spring and harvested in late summer. The term cereal is derived from the name of the Roman goddess of g…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Agriculture was the main economic activity in ancient Mesopotamia. Operating under tough constraints, notably the arid climate, the Mesopotamian farmers developed effective strategies that enabled them to support the development of the first known empires, under the supervision of the institutions which dominated the economy: the royal and provincial palaces, the temples, and the domains of the elites. They focused above all on the cultivation of cereals (particularly barley) and sheep farming, but also farmed legumes, as well as date palms in the south and grapes in the north. There were two types of Mesopotamian agriculture, corresponding to the two main ecological domains, which largely…

Evidence: — • authority: 92

A tale of two agricultural revolutions: crop introductions in the long 1st millennium ce southern Levant.. This paper aims to provide a robust regional synthesis of crop diffusion in the southern Levant, with the objective of ascertaining the significance of 1st millennium ce introductions, including those associated with Roman Agricultural Diffusion (RAD) and the Islamic Green Revolution (IGR). It does so by integrating published archaeobotanical data and written evidence from multiple periods to identify the earliest attestations of crop taxa. We present the earliest evidence for 80 crops in the region from the Neolithic until the Late Medieval period, focusing on 'the long 1st millennium…

Evidence: — • authority: 92

State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing.. The invention of agriculture is widely thought to have spurred the emergence of large-scale human societies. It has since been argued that only intensive agriculture can provide enough surplus for emerging states. Others have proposed it was the taxation potential of cereal grains that enabled the formation of states, making writing a critical development for recording those taxes. Here we test these hypotheses by mapping trait data from 868 cultures worldwide onto a language tree representing the relationships between cultures globally. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses indicate that intensive…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

human history, including the invention of the wheel, the planting of the first cereal crops , the development of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Generalized Safety First and the Planting of Crops. Heady (1952) suggests that farm managers seek the allocation of crops that best minimizes the probability of realizing a disastrous harvest. I use this intuitive idea to construct a normative model of land allocation that is more robust to distributional assumptions and utility specifications than existing rules. In particular, the new rule discriminates between candidate allocations by considering moments of higher order, such as skewness, in addition to mean and variance; this allows the decision maker to distinguish between crops with upside potential and those with downside risk. The rule is demonstrated using the data from Lence and H…