Page 95 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

Review

• Ancient civilizations were based in fertile river valleys. Keep these rivers (and their
attendant civilizations) in mind: Tigris & Euphrates (Sumer, Babylon, Assyria); Nile (Pharaoh
Menes's Egyptian empire); Yellow River (Shang and Zhou Dynasties); Indus (ancient Indian
civilization)
• The Sumerians created the first great civilization in Mesopotamia; they invented writing
(cuneiform) and their most powerful city-state was Ur.
• The Egyptian Pharaoh Menes unified the regions along the Nile to create the Egyptian
empire. Memphis was its capital.
• China’s Shang Dynasty (1750–1040 BC) left examples of intricate metalwork and early
written Chinese.

Ethics, Law, and Religion

Lesson Objective

In the coming pages, we’ll look at some of the legal and intellectual contributions of these early
civilizations. We’ll then turn our attention to some of the great empires of the Middle East and the pre-
Columbian Americas.

Previously Covered

In the preceding lesson, we quickly reviewed some of the major civilizations centered in the Middle East.
We also examined some of China’s dynasties, specifically the Shang Dynasty and its advancements in
metalworking and writing.

Few ancient cultures followed a black-letter code of law. Ancient Egyptians relied on ma’at and the
ancient Chinese on the T’ien ming, or Mandate of Heaven. The Babylonian king Hammurabi produced the
Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known example of written law, around 1700 BC. Carved into a stele, the
laws covered a wide range of offenses: theft, women's rights, injury, and murder. The image below is from
the top of the stele, which was discovered in the early twentieth century.

The Code of Hammurabi

As civilizations developed, moral and ethical traditions evolved closely with religion. Early Judaism
produced an oral Torah that began to make standards of ethics clear to the people who followed the