Khoisan painting at Springfontein, Zimbabwe Nomads are people who travel around from place to place without having one settled place where they live. Many are hunters and gatherers like the [...]
Monarchy definition: Narmer Palette, Ancient Egypt (about 3100 BC) What is a monarchy? A monarchy is a government where one person is in charge. That person can be a king [...]
Code of Hammurabi - an early law code from the 1700s BC The first people didn't need any government, because there were so few people. Mostly people lived just with [...]
What is an empire? The Akkadian Empire: Stele of Naram-Sin (about 2200 BC) Definition of an empire What is an empire? An empire is like a state, only with one [...]
Nalanda University, India The first schools were all private schools. Your parents had to pay for you to go there, the way your parents pay for music lessons or dance [...]
The Lion Gate, Mycenae (ca. 1500 BC) As we get on into the Middle Bronze Age (the century varies depending on where you are) villages just kept on getting bigger [...]
Building at Gobekli Tepe (ca. 9000 BC) By about 9000 BC, in some places in West Asia and Egypt, towns were getting too big to be ruled by "big men". [...]
Why people fall into debt: Sumerian man plowing on a cylinder seal Cancellation of debts The three demands that poor people made whenever they were able to make demands were [...]
A vase from Neolithic Sesklo, in Greece (5000 BC) Neolithic government As places got more crowded, in the Neolithic or New Stone Age period, some people began to live in [...]
Egyptian inheritance: an Egyptian land register in demotic writing (200s BC), now at Duke University Egyptian inheritance law As in other parts of Africa, ancient Egyptian law said that every [...]
