Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Ancient World

Kalahari of Africa, and another was along the east coast from the Blemmye to herders south of the kingdom of Kush through grassl ...

and animal remains). Th e more distant the sites are from the fl oodplain and agricultural villages, the more likely that they a ...

Some of the earliest evidence for nomadic pastoralism in the region comes from the central Zagros Mountains (in modern-day Iran) ...

ranging from fully nomadic camel breeding to semino- madic sheep and goat herding mixed with farming. Some of these societies, s ...

Th ey probably moved into Harappan territory looking for pasture for their cattle about 1500 b.c.e. Th ey esteemed war- riors ov ...

grazing land. Th e hunter-gatherers who inhabited Europe until the appearance of agriculture between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago c ...

Earlier research suggested that nomadism developed directly from the hunting of wild herd animals that eventu- ally became domes ...

Daily life in these societies revolved around animal husbandry and the fulfi llment of basic needs, such as the preservation of ...

no dramatic change in lifestyle practiced by pastoralists any- where aft er the advent of Roman political domination. Th e lone ...

ciety. At one site, Danger Cave in Utah, millstones used for grinding grain, seeds, and nuts, along with some of the earli- est ...

good example is the cubit, a unit of length from a person’s el- bow and the tip of the middle fi nger. Sometimes, these units va ...

a major tool for understanding nature and existence. Ancient Africans used the reality of mathematics to make inferences from ge ...

in modern writing we showed the number 149 by this combi- nation of symbols: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 10 10 10 10 100. Moreover, the in ...

utes in an hour and partially in the number of degrees for an equilateral triangle and in the 360 degrees in a circle. Th e Baby ...

numbers up to powers of 10^80 , but such numbers were limited to ritual use. Th e Chinese common or standard numeral sys- tem an ...

Th e Druids, Celtic spiritual leaders, became quite adept at the mathematical computations required to keep the cal- endar in or ...

use of letters to list items in order (the Iliad was divided into 24 books, which were given consecutive letters of the alpha- b ...

their sum is a square”), but their solutions lack general ap- plication or formal proof. Mathematics came to hold tremendous sym ...

developments, in turn, forced indigenous groups to pay atten- tion to the passage of seasons and to develop systems of keep- ing ...

807  ▶ occupations introduction Th e earliest modern humans probably had only one occu- pation: survival. In most of the world ...