Agricultural Revolutions		The Religion derived from Jesus Christ, based on the Bible as a sacred scripture, and professed by Eastern, Roman Catholic, and Protestant bodies.
Bantu		Semitic-speaking Canaanites living on the coast of modern Lebanon and Syria in the first millennium B.C.E.
Buddhism		An empire extending from western Iran to Syria-Palestine, conquered by the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia between the tenth and seventh centuries B.C.E.
Carthage		City on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt founded by Alexander. It became the capital of the Hellenistic kingdom of the Ptolemies.
Chavin		The change from food gathering to food production that occurred between ca. 8000 and 2000 B.C.E. Also known as the Neolithic Revolution.
Christianity		People who support themselves by hunting wild animals and gathering wild edible plants and insects.
City-State		A small independent state consisting of an urban center and the surrounding agricultural territory. A characteristic political form in early Mesopotamia, Archaic and Classical Greece, Phoenicia, and early Italy.
Confucianism		A heavily armored Greek infantryman of the Archaic and Classical periods who fought in the close-packed phalanx formation.
Cuneiform		Chinese political philosophy that emphasized the unruliness of human nature and justified state coercion and control. The Qin ruling class invoked it to validate the authoritarian nature of their regime and its profligate expenditure of subjects' lives and labor.
Daoism		A system of writing in which pictorial symbols represented sounds, syllables, or concepts. It was used for official and monumental inscriptions in ancient Egypt. Because of the long period of study required to master this system, literacy in hieroglyphics was confined to a relatively small group of scribes and administrators.
Diaspora		He came from a Greek community in Anatolia and traveled extensively, collecting information in western Asia and the Mediterranean lands. He traced the antecedents of and chronicled the Persian Wars between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, thus originating the Western tradition of historical writing.
Foragers		Greek word meaning "dispersal, used to describe the communities of a given ethnic group living outside their homeland. Jews, for example, spread from Israel to western Asia and Mediterranean lands in antiquity and today can be found throughout the world.
Hieroglyphics		The first major urban civilization in South America (900-250 B.C.E.). Its capital, Chavín de Huántar, was located high in the Andes Mountains of Peru.
Israel		Site of a fortified palace complex in southern Greece that controlled a Late Bronze Age kingdom.
Linear B		A belief system of eastern and central Asia that believes suffering is inherent in life and that one can be liberated from it by mental and moral self purification.
Legalism		A set of syllabic symbols, derived from the writing system of Minoan Crete, used in the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age to write an early form of Greek.
Mandate of Heaven		The belief in multiple gods.
Mesoamerica		King of Macedonia in northern Greece. Between 334 and 323 B.C.E. he conquered the Persian Empire, reached the Indus Valley, founded many Greek-style cities, and spread Greek culture across the Middle East.
Mesopotamia		Third ruler of the Persian Empire (r. 521-486 B.C.E.).
Minoans		The herder of animals
Monotheism		Collective name of a large group of sub-Saharan African languages and of the peoples speaking these languages.
Mycenae		A religion originating in ancient Iran with the prophet Zoroaster. It centered on a single benevolent deity who engaged in a twelve-thousand-year struggle with demonic forces before prevailing and restoring a pristine world.
Neo-Assyrian Empire		A reed that grows along the banks of the Nile River in Egypt. From it was produced a coarse, paperlike writing medium used by the Egyptians and many other peoples in the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.
Neolithic		A system of government in which all "citizens (however defined) have equal political and legal rights, privileges, and protections, as in the Greek city-state of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.
Olmec		Conflicts between Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, ranging from the Ionian Revolt (499-494 B.C.E.) through Darius's punitive expedition that failed at Marathon (490 B.C.E.) and the defeat of Xerxes' massive invasion of Greece by the Spartan-led Hellenic League (480-479 B.C.E.).
Papyrus		System of ethics, education, and statesmanship, stressing love for humanity, ancestor worship, reverence for parents, and harmony in thought and conduct.
Pastoralists		Belief in the existence of a single divine entity.
Pharaoh		The area extending approximately from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua in which diverse pro-Columbian civilizations flourished.
Phoenicians		Chinese religious and political ideology developed by the Zhou, according to which it was the prerogative of Heaven, the chief deity, to grant power to the ruler of China and to take away that power if the ruler failed to conduct himself justly and in the best interests of his subjects.
Polytheism		Chinese school of thought, originating in the Warring States Period with Laozi (604-531 B.C.E.). Offered an alternative to the Confucian emphasis on hierarchy and duty.
Darius I		The central figure in the ancient Egyptian state. Believed to be an earthly manifestation of the gods, he used his absolute power to maintain the safety and prosperity of Egypt.
Zoroastrianism		An acienct region in West Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Hopolite		Historians' term for the era, usually dated 323-30 B.C.E., in which Greek culture spread across western Asia and northeastern Africa after the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Democracy		The land between the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, occupied by the Israelites from the early second millennium B.C.E.
Herodotus		Prosperous civilization on the Aegean island of Crete in the second millennium B.C.E. Engaged in far-flung commerce around the Mediterranean and exerted powerful cultural influences on the early Greeks.
Persian Wars		The period of the Stone Age associated with the ancient Agricultural Revolution(s).
Socrates		A system of writing in which wedge-shaped symbols represented words or syllables. It originated in Mesopotamia and was used initially for Sumerian and Akkadian but later was adapted to represent other languages of western Asia.
Hellenistic Age		Athenian philosopher (ca. 470-399 B.C.E.) who shifted the emphasis of philosophical investigation from questions of natural science to ethics and human behavior.
Alexandria		The first Mesoamerican civilization. Between ca. 1200 and 400 B.C.E.
Alexander		City located in present-day Tunisia, founded by Phoenicians ca. 800 B.C.E. It became a major commercial center and naval power in the western Mediterranean until defeated by Rome in the third century B.C.E.