Prehistory is said to end in the last centuries of the fourth millennium B.C. with the establishment of the first civilization by the city-states of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. As such, Mesopotamian culture has left a deep imprint across the entire course of Western Civilization. By the second millennium B.C., the Sumerians were conquered by their neighbors to the north, first the Akkadians and then the Babylonians. However, a unified Mesopotamian culture, primarily Sumerian in form, remained. Why are the Mesopotamians considered the first civilization? This module looks at their most important advance, the invention of written language, in detail and presents other significant aspects of the rise of civilized man: urbanization, social hierarchy, organized religion, rational thought, large-scale political unification, literature, and legal justice. From a twenty-first-century standpoint, the Mesopotamians may appear rather alien, yet a close examination of the records that they have left us reveals that, in many ways, human nature hasn’t changed since the dawn of history.

Few peoples of the ancient world have the capacity to captivate the modern imagination the way the Egyptians do. While most of their kingdom was desert, the Egyptians managed to transform the arable Nile alluvial plain into a fertile agricultural resource; as such, the Egyptians put tremendous, mystical store in the powers of the river that provided them a livelihood. "They are religious to excess, far beyond any other race of men," wrote the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus. Indeed, the Egyptians fashioned an elaborate religious culture for themselves. Their pantheon of gods was extensive, as were their thoughts on death and afterlife. The Egyptian pharaoh, or king, was considered divine. The pyramids the pharaohs built were meant to act as "resurrection machines," cocoons in which the kings of Egypt would, after death, be spiritually transformed and prepared for immortality. In addition to the remains of their awesome architectural feats, Egyptians' unique contributions to art, religion, and science continue to be a source of wonder, speculation, and even contention today.

No text has been more significant to the development of Western Civilization than the sacred history of the covenant of God with his chosen people assembled by the Hebrews in the first millennium B.C. Also known as the Ancient Israelites, the Hebrews are the first people we know of to have written a single national history book: the Hebrew Bible. Also known as the "Old Testament," it traces the Hebrews from the late second millennium B.C. through their settlement in Palestine in the thirteenth century B.C. and the establishment of the monarchy in Israel around 1000 B.C. Since the Bible contains so many myths and legends, it is problematic as a historical source. Through a combination of biblical narrative and archaeological evidence, however, scholars have been able to accurately trace Israelite history after 1200 B.C. Only a small, militarily inconsequential people, the Ancient Israelites believed that human achievement was meaningless in relation to the power of the one true god, who had revealed himself not to the powerful Assyrians, but to the Hebrews. The exceptional endurance of the Hebrews' faith and their Bible ultimately gave rise to Christianity, Islam, and, of course, modern Judaism.