Jose Alvarez Avina

The document that I found most interesting was the one of the Persians. First of all looking at their religious beliefs, the did believe in gods but they still believed that no one had power like humans. So no matter how powerful a god was he was never going to have as much power as a human could. They also didn't believe in building altars or shrines, and did do sacrifices but not to the same extent as other people. Persians also really only celebrated one thing and that was their birthday. The wealthy would serve all types of animals, the poor would usually only serve cattle but they would still serve plenty of food. One thing that Persians did was enjoy luxuries and they were quick to adapt. If they saw a technology from another region they would quickly adapt and buy whatever the new thing was. The main thing that they focused on was manliness and mostly on the battle field. When a man had a son he wouldn't meet him until he was 5 so he would not get emotionally attached if...

In this reading I really got to see how different all of the civilizations were. Starting out with the Persian empire we saw a gigantic empire that had millions in it population. We saw how to conquered a lot of land. What was really surprising however was how they were really nice towards the people they took over, they would still let them practice their religions. One thing about them was they had one leader and that leader got the upmost respect and power. He was feared so he could do anything. Next we saw the Greek empire which was very different from the Persian empire. First it was different in size, the Greek empire was only 5 or 6 million. Another major thing was the government, instead of having on ruler the Greek empire operated in smaller but more city states. What was crazy was when these two clashed and the Greek empires being the underdog was able to defeat the Persians. Now we couldn't talk about civilizations without talking about the Roman Empire. Which really wen...

The way the elite could have taken advantage of the seals is to regulate merchandise, or to keep track of what merchandise was there whenever they had to move it. The seal could have also acted as a signature, maybe if the seal had something unique on it that only the owners seal had. They could have also used it for like branding. I also think the seals were used to distinguish people. I don't think you would see an official or landowner with the same seal as a worker. So in a way these could have seen as a sign of power. You could think of it as a police badge, it just gave people authority. One thing that the writing pointed out is that even if you didn't speak a language you would still be able to understand a seal because it was just a picture. So they were very versatile.

Again like I said in my last post it is crazy how much the early people advanced. They went from being gatherers and hunters and not having any food stability to growing their own food and domesticating animals to have a more stable food source. They also went from being nomadic to staying in a single place. The more time they stayed in a single place the better technologies they developed. With civilizations we see a rise in democracies in some of the first 7. They were getting so big they had to rely on someone to lead them and govern them. Not only that but also to think of ideas for them especially for stuff like irrigation. One of the most important things though is the development of written language. With this they could advance their ideas even further and advance their technologies.

I liked seeing both the pros and cons of people going from gatherers and hunters to growing crops and having cattle and livestock. Some of the pros were that they were able to sustain a lot more people so the population increased dramatically. They didn't have to constantly move around so it gave them more time which led them to develop a lot more technologies. But some cons were that they still relied on nature for rain and soil conditions so there would still be times where the food would be scarce. Living next to animals put them more vulnerable of getting diseases. Agriculture was also a lot more harsh on their bodies because it required a lot more physical labor. It was also interesting to see the more time they settled the closer and closer they got to forming democracies.