Word: sumer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...locate all the violence and related mischief on the men's side of the campfire: no blood on our hands! But there are other reasons to doubt the eternal equation of masculinity with aggression and violence, femininity with gentleness and a taste for green salads. In ancient Greece and Sumer the deities of the hunt, Artemis and Ninhursag, were female--extremely female, if you will, since these were also the goddesses who presided over childbirth. Even more striking is the association of ancient goddesses with nature's original hunters, the predatory animals. In Anatolia, the predator goddess was Kybele, known...
...surrounding countryside, newly developed irrigation systems nourished the barley, wheat, flax and other crops that fed the growing cities. Period drawings from Sumer, part of Mesopotamia, provide the earliest known evidence of wheels -- essentially wooden planks rounded at the ends and fitted together in a circle -- which were used on ox-drawn carts and, later, chariots. Sailing ships embarked on distant trading missions. By 3000 B.C., the world's first written language, cuneiform, had appeared on small clay tablets, replacing the strings of marked clay tokens that merchants had previously used to keep track of their transactions. And at least...
...history in volume two, "Sticks and Stones. Homo Erectus, Neanderthal and the more advanced Cro-Magnon human of the Stone Age give way to the Homo Sapiens of the first post-ice age settlements of 12,000 years ago. Volume two ends with the founding of cities in Sumer, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Four billion years in 100 pages. Not bad for a comic book...
Volume three describes the rise of the first civilizations in Sumer and Egypt and uses the first written texts as a guide through early history, including the origins of Judaism with the migration of Abraham from Hammurabi's Ur. Gonick then moves from the earliest bible texts to the conquest of Saddam Husseun's idol Nebuchadrezzar to the rise of the Greeks, devoting the last two volumes more extensively to Athenian life (with much cribbing from Herodotus...