four essay questions on Western History

The Mesopotamian Civilization and Ancient Egypt

This land of Ancient Iraq , called Mesopotamia and what we know of the fantastical history of Ancient Egypt never ceases to catch the imagination of scholars specializing in world history and the B .C anthropology , so to speak . Both Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt make up huge narrations in history books , depicting the grandeur and glory of their times . With the continuous discovery of archeological evidence about these two civilizations , it still leaves us speculating about the details of their rise to power , their administration , superior culture

br and eventual demise . What made these civilizations linger into unfading social memory is the force behind the people who built these societies These forces reside upon their great rulers and we clearly remember them respectively as Akhenaten and Hammurabi

These leaders ' can be rightly called pioneers ' of world history for they were one of the first ever recorded who produced the earliest marvels or breakthroughs of human history , which is a triumph of human will to adapt and change his /her environment . Both were real firsts in their own right , even though each one lived around 500 years apart from each other . Their lives in these interesting time zones show a will of continuous progress by ancient societies

Akhenaten (d . 1336 ) can be called a pioneer even though he was not the first leader of Ancient Egypt . He did not even belong to the first ruling dynasty : according to Encyclopedia Brittanica (1991 , he belonged to the eighteenth ruling dynasty . Assuming there were much Egyptian technology and progress done before his time , there was vast room for his own contributions . This was in the field of Egyptian Philosophy Some Egypt Scholars may intertwine this with Egyptian Religion , and he was more famous for this not just because he was the husband of the infamous Nefertiti (WorldBook , 1994 . Wikipedia states that he is noted for the implementation of the worship for Aten , thus the first recorded acts of a monotheistic religion . This was a considerable breakthrough knowing that the historical contexts of their neighboring societies started out as pagans ' or polytheists (ibid . It seems that monotheism was something new and extraordinary when Akhenaten imposed it , thus reflecting his administration style of centralizing power to his office and focusing worship to one supreme deity . The Sun God Egyptian image , popularized through Hollywood movies like The Mummy and Scorpion King may have traced its roots to the worship of Aten , for Brittanica further discusses that Akhenaten derived a monotheistic deity from the sun god Amon-Ra , already familiar among Egyptians before his reign

If Akhenaten was a pioneer of a new kind of religion , Hammurabi can be considered the pioneer of social and recordkeeping . Already famous for the first written codes of law (the Hamurabi Code , he is also famous for numerous contract tablets and personal letters attributed to him (Wikipedia . As the first person to implement recorded communication , he was able to make a binding agreement with his subjects in the...