Humanism was a restoration of true civilization after the Dark Age that had set in after the fall of the Roman Empire.

1. Humanism stressed on the individual skills. A person with many skills and interests have been referred to as the Renaissance man. The emerging belief in individual potential helped to identify a town by its citizens.

2. The Humanist thought had a very different idea of history. According to this thought only humanism could revive the long past true civilisation. This revival would enable to end the Dark Age that Europe was then passing through.

3. The establishment of the New Age would mark an end to the period of the supremacy of the Church. The basis of humanism is naturalism, which is antithetical to the beliefs of Christianity.

4. Humanism revived the classical Greek literature. The works of Aristotle and Plato were translated. Along with these subjects modern faculties such as chemistry, mathematics, natural science and astronomy also became a part of the college curriculum.

5. Not only formal education but also art, architecture and books were effective mediums of transmitting humanist ideas. Drawing realistic paintings and sculpting perfectly proportioned figures of men and women were expressions of humanism. Painters and sculptors started to rely on anatomy, geometry and physics to recreate reality.

The Italian city-states were a political phenomenon of small independent states mostly in the central and northern Italian Peninsula between the 9th and the 15th centuries.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, urban settlements in Italy generally enjoyed a greater continuity than in the rest of western Europe. Many of these towns were survivors of earlier Etruscan, Umbrian and Roman towns which had existed within the Roman Empire. The republican institutions of Rome had also survived. Some feudal lords existed with a servile labour force and huge tracts of land, but by the 11th century, many cities, including Venice, Milan, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Cremona, Siena, Città di Castello, Perugia, and many others, had become large trading metropoles, able to obtain independence from their formal sovereigns.

Invention of Machines in Cotton Industry:

•  The flying shuttle loom invented by John Kay in 1733 revolutionsed the textile industry.
•  The spinning jenny
•  The water frame
•  The mule
•  Powerloom

The Mesopotamian tablets contained only symbols and numbers. These tablets contained the signs/symbols of fish, bread, leaves and were written around 3200 BCE.

Early settlers began to build temples at selected spots in their villages. The earliest known temple was a small shrine made of unbaked bricks. These early temples were much like a house because they were small in size. There used to be an open courtyard around which rooms were constructed. Temples were the residence of various gods. Temples also had their outer wall going in and out at regular intervals, which no ordinary building ever had.

Mesopotamia important to Europeans because:

• Mesopotamia has good fertile land and it is considered to be ancestors' land.

• It is very important to Europeans because many inventions and developments started from here only.

• Mesopotamia is important to Europeans because it has Tigris and Euphrates rivers that's why Mesopotamia land is a fertile crescent and the soil is also nutrient-rich.

• This is one of the important reason Mesopotamia is so valuable to Europeans.

Mesopotamia important to Europeans because:

• Mesopotamia has good fertile land and it is considered to be ancestors' land.

• It is very important to Europeans because many inventions and developments started from here only.

• Mesopotamia is important to Europeans because it has Tigris and Euphrates rivers that's why Mesopotamia land is a fertile crescent and the soil is also nutrient-rich.

• This is one of the important reason Mesopotamia is so valuable to Europeans.

Steinkeller (1999) assumes that in early Mesopotamia kings drew their power from being priests for female deities. After a male deities became more prominent in the pantheon a split of secular and sacred power took place which led to the invention of the military leader who assumed secular power and became the king. The earliest kings were likely war chiefs who managed to leverage their control of these parties to gain power. These early kings ruled through their own charisma and control of the parties, however in order to institutionalise their power and create dynasties they crafted a specific ideology.

Scribes were very important people. They were trained to write cuneiform and record many of the languages spoken in Mesopotamia. Without scribes, letters would not have been written or read, royal monuments would not have been carved with cuneiform, and stories would have been told and then forgotten. Over thousands of years, Mesopotamian scribes recorded daily events, trade, astronomy, and literature on clay tablets. Cuneiform was used by people throughout the ancient Near East to write several different languages.

Large expansion of Roman territory was in a less advanced state. Transhumance was spread in the countryside of Numidia. These pastoral and semi-nomadic communities were often on the move, carrying their oven-shaped huts (called mapalia). 

Humanism:

1. It means the service of humanity irrespective of caste, colour or creed.

2. The writers of the Renaissance age took up their subjects from the Bible. But their aim was the welfare of all mankind.

3. The power of reasoning of man is very fine; His inner faculties are unlimited. His body is the temple of living God. He is supreme among God's creations.

• Agriculture began between 7000 and 6000 BCE.
• Soil was very fertile here but agriculture was threatened because of natural causes.
• Ur, Lagash, Kish, Uruk and Mari were some of its important cities.

Characteristics of Civilization

All civilizations have certain characteristics. These include:

(1) large population centers

(2) monumental architecture and unique art styles

(3) shared communication strategies

(4) systems for administering territories

(5) a complex division of labor

(6) the division of people into social and economic classes.

Urban Areas

Large population centers, or urban areas (1), allow civilizations to develop, although people who live outside these urban centers are still part of that region’s civilization. Rural residents of civilizations may include farmers, fishers, and traders, who regularly sell their goods and services to urban residents.

1. Agriculture and animal rearing were carried out close to each other in this region. Some communities in the kingdom of Mari had both farmers and pastoralists, but most of its territory was used for pasturing sheep and goats.

2. Herders need to exchange young animals, cheese, leather and meat in return for grain, metal tools, etc., and the manure of a penned flock is also of great use to a farmer. Yet, at the same time, there may be conflict.

3. A shepherd may take his flock to water across a sown field, to the ruin of the crop. Herdsmen being mobile can raid agricultural villages and seize their stored goods. For their part, settled groups may deny pastoralists access to river and canal water along a certain set of paths.

The traditional religious culture:

(i) The traditional religious culture of the classical world, both Greek and Roman, had been polytheist . That is, it involved a multiplicity of cults that included both Roman/Italian gods like Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Mars, as well as numerous Greek and eastern deities worshipped in thousands of temples, shrines and sanctuaries throughout the empire.

(ii) Polytheists had no common name or label to describe themselves. The other great religious tradition in the empire was Judaism. But Judaism was not a monolith either, and there was a great deal of diversity within the Jewish communities of late antiquity.

(iii) Thus, the ‘Christianisation, of the empire in the fourth and fifth centuries was a gradual and complex process. Polytheism did not disappear overnight, especially in the western provinces, where the Christian bishops waged a running battle against beliefs and practices they condemned more than the Christian laity did.

(iv) The boundaries between religious communities were much more fluid in the fourth century than they would become thanks to the repeated efforts of religious leaders, the powerful bishops who now led the Church, to rein in their followers and enforce a more rigid set of beliefs and practices.