ABRAHAM’S HOME Ur of the Chaldees, as the Bible calls it, was the home of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham. The  mosaic at left, on a wooden box thought to have been part of a musical instuments, shows a kinjg of Ur at ease with a drink. The box was made in about 2800-2700 B.C.

COLLAPSIBLE BOATS

Traders in ancient  Sumeria, in southern Mesopotamia, devised   a simple but ingenious way to make the best use of river transport. Upstream they built boats of hides stretched over light wooden frames. The boats were loaded with whatever cargo was to be shipped with the current to their destination.

Once the cargo was unloaded, the boat was knocked apart, and its wooden parts were sold to the timber-poor cities of the south. The crew then loaded the hides onto the donkey and walked back, having saved themselves all the  problems of propelling a boat upriver against  the current. At the other end they built a new frame, covered  it with the old hides, and were ready to set off again.

A relief carved on the wall of a palace built at Nineveh in the 7th century B.C. for the Assyrian king Sennacherib shows one of these leather boats carrying stone down the river Tigris. Even today, similarly made boats are still used on the Euphrates.

EARLIEST LIBRARIES

Records of commercial transactions, religious practices, political history, popular legends, government accounts, and mathematical and astronomical discoveries are by no means isolated survivals from ancient Mesopotamian civilization. Hundreds of thousands of  clay tablets-all covered with the wedge-shaped  writing known as cuneiform-have survived to the present day, partly because the Sumerians and Babylonians wrote down a great deal and also because dry, sun-baked clay is almost imperishable.

Several collections of tablets, so numerous that they can only be called libraries, have come to light. Excavations begun in 1933, at a site called Tell Hariri, in eastern Syria, uncovered the archives of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Mari.

The archives contained 23,600 tablets, coveringn a period of 530 years, between 2285 and 1755 B.C. Another library, compiled for the Assyrian king Assurbanipal in the 7th century B.C. contained specially commissioned Sumerian and Assyrian grammars and dictionaries, which have provided scholars with an invaluable key to these ancient languages.

Mesopotamia : gift of two rivers

BABES IN THE WOOD

The life of a Babylonian princess named Sammuramat, the most powerful woman in Mesopotamian history, is also the source of a touching children’s tale,”Babes in the Wood.” As told by the Greek historian Herodotus, Sammu-ramat, who was born in the 9th century B.C., married Shamshi-Adad V, king  of Assyria. When her husband died in 812 B.C., she became regent for her son and helped  to establish close political and  economic ties between Assyria and the neighbouring kingdom of Babylon.

According to a Babylonian myth that grew up later around her life, Sammu-ramat was the child of divine parents, who abandoned her, and she was fed by doves until a shepherd found her and took her in. Modern scholars believe that the myth is the direct ancestor of the European fairy tale about the two infants abandoned in a wood.

FIRST ARCHEOLOGIST

Nabonidus, the king of Babylonia (556-539 B.C.), was one of the world’s first archeologists, Centuries before the modern discipline was invented, he excavated  ruined shrines and temples near Babylon and restored the great ziggurat (tower) of Ur.Nabonidus left  inscribed cylinders in the foundations for posterity. His daughter, Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna, found southern Mesopotamia a rich source of antiques. She stored them in a temple at Ur, creating the world’s first known museum.

TOP MARKS, TOP JOBS

Written examinations were being used to select Chinese civil  servants as far back as the 2nd century B.C.- at a time when government jobs elsewhere in the world were largely filled by the relatives or proteges of those in power.

By the time of the Tang dynasty (A.D.618-906) this principle of selecting public officials on the basis of merit had developed into a system of centralized public examinations open to all. A Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, who arrived in China in 1583, described how the system worked.

EXams lasted several dats, he said, and candidates could work nonstop through each day  to write their answers. Ricci also reported that the Chinese took enormous trouble to avoid even the possibility of favoritism affecting  the examiners’ grades. When the exams were over, he said, all the completed papers had to be copied out by another hand  in order to conceal the candidates’ identity from the examiners.

JADE PRINCESS A burial suit made of 2,160 pieces of jade, tied together  with gold wire, was intended tp preserve forever the body of the Han princess Dou Wan. The princess was the principal wife of Liu Sheng, son of the fifth Han dynasty emperor Jing Di.She died in about 125 B.C., at a time when jade was believed to be an infallible preservative because of its hardness. The prince, who died in about 113B.C., had a suit even more elaborate than his wife’s; it contained 2,690 polished discs of teh highly prized stone. His brother, known as Wu Ti, reigned as the sixth Han emperor (141-87 B.C). The jade suits were uncoverd at Mancheng, about 70 miles southwest of the capital, Bejijng (Peking), in 1968.

FIRST HISTORY BOOK

ancient-china-chinese-coin

China’s oldest comprehensive written history dates from about 90 B.C. known as the Shih Chi(also Shi Ji and other variant spellings), which translates as “Historical Memoirs,” it was compiled nu Ssu-ma Ch’ien (Sima Qian in pinyin), a court scholar and scribe who also gave the Chinese calender its modern form. The Shih Chi represents the history of mann according to Chinese records  from about 1500 to 90 B.C. The 130-chapter book became the model for a series of 26 standard histories that continued in unbroken succession down to 1912, when Hsuan T’ung (or P’u-i), the last Manchu emperor, abdicated.

EMPEROR WHO PRESCRIBED DEATH

When the young daughter of the Tang dynasty emperor Yizong (who reigned from A.D. 860 to 874) was struck down by fever, 20 leading physicians of China were summoned to the imperial capital, Changan, to minister to her. Each doctor prescribed a remedy, but none was successful, and the princess died. Consumed with grief and frustration, the emperor had the unfortuinate experts beheaded.

FROM CHINA TO ROME

Ancient China traded with imperial Rome, but the Chines and the Romans never met. The only link between the two civilizations was the silk Road, which ran overland around the northern edge of the Himalayas from China to the eastern Mediterranean coast, with a branch leading south into India. During the 2nd century B.C., camel caravans laden with silk, then a Chinese monopoly, began to move regularly along this arduous 7,000-mile route. The Chinese themselves did not pass their own frontiers, however.

Instead they transferred their bales of merchandise at a point near the Afghanistan border to other traders, often from Persia or central Asia. These merchants in turn sold the silk to Syrians and Greeks near the western end of the route, and from there the silk was shipped to Rome.

BREATH OF LIFE

Ephedrine, a drug derived from the horsetail  plant, has been used to treat asthma in the West since the 1920s. But Chinese doctors were using the drug nearly 1,700 years earlier. Its use was being advocated by a doctor called Zhang Zhongjing as early as the 2nd century A.D.

Zhang, who lived from about A.D. 152 to 219, wrote a massive compendium of all the medical knowledge then available in China. In addition, he compiled a detailed list of techniques that doctors could use to diagnose  a patient;s illness.

China: behind the Great Wall

TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT

China’s first emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who died in 2010 B.C., wanted to make sure that he would not be disturbed in his final resting place. So he had booby traps positioned around his huge burial mound at Mount Li in northwestern China. According to the historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien (Sima Qian), the emperor ordered hair-trigger crossbows to be loaded and set up in the passages leading to his tomb and in the under growth around the mound.

There was much that needed protecting. Ssu-ma Ch’ien also recorded that more than 700,000 men had been conscripted to build the mound and tomb in a project that took 36 years to complete. The imperial treasures buried with the emperor were so valuable that workers who helped to move the riches into thetomb were buried alive to ensure that no details leaked out.

In 1974 a group of astonished peasants sinking a well near Mount Li discovered a number of life-size terra-cotta soldiers. These later proved to be part of a buried army of more than 7,000 clay figures. Since Emperor Shih Huang Ti had been interred, they had maintained their vigil close to the imperial burial mound. Standingin battle formation, complete with life-size models of chariots and horses, the clay men were wearing armor denoting their different ranks, and carrying real weapons. Incredibly, after 2,000 years in the ground, one of the swords was still sharp enough to split a hair.

HOW CHINA GOT ITS NAME

China, the world’s oldest surviving civilization, acquired its name in the 3rd century B.C. In 221 Cheng,ruler of the small state of Ch’in, from which the country’s modern name comes, annexed the last of six rival kingdoms and took the title of Ch’in Shih Huang Ti,meaning”First August Emperor of Ch’in”.

The Anglicized form of Chinese names has changed since the introduction in 1957 of pinyin, a new system for transliterating Chinese characters into Roman letters. In pinyin Cheng became Zheng,Ch’in became Qin, and his title became  Qin Shi Huangdi. China itself in pinyin is Zhong Guo.