The Ancient World
This is the time when collections of people really "got it together". They developed fairly complex societies (the Egyptians quarried 70-ton granite blocks!) with writing and cities and multi-level institutions.
Here are the Historical Videos for the Ancient World
My videos will be going mostly in chronological order. I cannot hit every society from everywhere, there's no time for that in a one-semester schedule! But I do hit the societies that have impacted the world the most, be it for better or worse.
Sometimes videos will be embedded on this site, such as The Intro (Themes) Video, sometimes there will be links to YouTube. It's just that some videos I put together cannot be shown on YouTube (because I use cinema and television clips and music, event though I'm not going for monetization and these are educational videos- what a guy!)
The Ancient World:
The word "Mesopotamia" ringing any bells? This is when large scale cities and written communication came about in the River Civilizations. Learn about The First Civilizations (click that underlined part to watch the video). This video goes up through The Persian Empire, right along those ancient places were the Egyptians, Indus River Valley (Indian) and Chinese Civilizations whose videos are below:
Well, these are the First Civilizations that we know of at least. Are there others out there somewhere? Maybe? Who knows what's lying under the sand somewhere, or buried off the coastlines.
Highly Funnable Reviews!
If you need to study up here are two exercises for you.
The top one is full of terms, you want to divide your paper into
8 squares. Label the squares with the Ancient World societies
that are in bold. Do that for three pieces of paper. Now, using
your notes, take the terms and put them in the appropriate
squares for your first page.
Now, without your notes this time, try the same thing on the
next page! Immediately! (that part is important- it needs to be fresh!)
When you do as many as you can, use your first page to fill in what you couldn't.
Once you have that second page filled put away the first page and repeat this for the third page! This is by far the most successful exercise according to my AP students (there's is a slightly different version but same concept).
The bottom exercise is a Madlibs! Madlibs is an old game for traveling in cars before electronic distractions! It's a fun and goofy way to review your work, it works great with more than one person, too! The instructions are on the document- but click here if you want to see an example of the game.
Your next unit of study should be the Classical World Page!
For AP students!
On the First Civilization videos here are some clever things to note and study:
1) The religions, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism
2) The 3 Chinese "isms", Tao-ism, Confucianism and Legalism.
3) The impact of religion and trade (monopolies)
