Harappan civilization: Did you mean...?

In part six of his nine part lecture on the Near East, Dr. Neiman discusses the importance of Sumer's influence on Egypt. Further, he details how the building of the temple towers, named "Ziggurat" lead to the development of the Egyptian...

In this third segment from Dr. David Neiman's lecture series, he describes how humans first developed the concept of the written word in Mesopotamia.

EPISODE 1: THE REVOLUTION The first part tells the story of the troubled birth of the world's first democracy, ancient Athens, through the life of an Athenian nobleman, Cleisthenes. In the brutal world of the 5th century BC, the Athenians...

Part one of Dr. David Neiman's nine-part lecture outlines the rise of the earliest civilizations in the Near East geographically and with reference to the development of writing.

Dr. Neiman continues his nine-part lecture, discussing the agricultural revolution that leads to a sedentary lifestyle for human beings and the growth of the first cities in the Tigris and Euphrates valley.

The Babylonians developed a calendar based on the moon and sun cycles. The Lunar calendar was designed to work in conjunction with the solar cycle by adding leap months known an "intercalary" months.

Dr. David Neiman discusses the development of hieroglyphs and the use of papyrus and ink in Egypt. Further, he describes how the Phoenicians revolutionized writing with the invention of the alphabet, and that even though the scribes resisted...

King Hammurabi of Babylon practices the art of diplomacy and war. In the second installment of lecture two, Dr. Neiman reads through the "Year List" which catalogs Hammurabi's accomplishments.

In the fourth part of his lecture, Dr. Neiman explains that writing is invented in the Mesopotamian region of Sumer. He describes that once a writing style is developed, literature flourishes. He then describes the first (probably) literary...

The Predynastic Period in Ancient Egypt is the time before recorded history from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic Age and on to the rise of the First Dynasty and is generally recognized as spanning the era from c. 6000-3150 BCE (though physical...