TExES History 7-12 (233)

This section follows the structure of the framework. Chapters 1.1 through 1.4 are chronological: ancient civilizations (competency 001), the era from about 600 to 1450 C.E. (002), the era from 1450 to the mid-eighteenth century (003), and the mid-eighteenth century to the present (004). Chapters 1.5 through 1.7 are thematic and cut across all eras: geography and culture, including religions, philosophies and the arts (005); government and citizenship, including political documents and philosophers (006); and economics, science and technology (007). When a chronological chapter mentions a religion, a legal code or an invention only briefly, the full treatment is in the matching thematic chapter.

This chapter covers competency 001: the geography, agriculture and diffusion that shaped early and classical civilizations, and the political, economic and social developments of ancient Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South and East Asia, Mesoamerica and the Andes. The exam expects you to know where each civilization was, how it was governed, what it produced and how it interacted with its neighbors. The Neolithic agricultural revolution itself and the science and mathematics of these societies are treated in Chapter 1.7; their religions and philosophies are treated in Chapter 1.5.

The shift from foraging to farming, which began in Southwest Asia more than ten thousand years ago and arose independently elsewhere, made permanent settlement and food surpluses possible. Historians call a society a civilization when it shows most of these features: cities, specialized labor, social classes, organized government and religion, monumental building, and record keeping or writing.

The earliest civilizations grew up in river valleys: the Tigris and Euphrates (Mesopotamia), the Nile (Egypt), the Indus (South Asia) and the Huang He, or Yellow River (China). Rivers supplied water for irrigation, silt that renewed the soil, and highways for trade. They also posed risks. Floods in Mesopotamia were violent and unpredictable, while the Nile flooded on a regular yearly schedule. This difference shaped worldview: Mesopotamian literature often portrays the gods as moody and the world as dangerous, while Egyptian thought stressed order, stability and continuity.

Major River Valley Civilizations Compared

Exam Tip: When a question asks why one river civilization was more often invaded than another, look for geography. Mesopotamia's open plains invited conquest; Egypt's surrounding deserts protected it. Distractors often offer religion or technology instead of geography.

Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia, was home to the world's first cities, such as Uruk and Ur. Each Sumerian city-state had its own ruler and patron god and was centered on a ziggurat, a stepped temple platform. Priests and later kings managed irrigation and stored surplus grain. Sumerians developed cuneiform, wedge-shaped writing pressed into clay, first to record trade and taxes.

Because Sumerian city-states fought constantly over water and land, they were vulnerable. Around the twenty-fourth century B.C.E., Sargon of Akkad conquered them and created what is often called the first empire: a single state ruling many peoples and cities.

Babylon rose later under Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B.C.E. Hammurabi unified much of Mesopotamia and issued his famous law code, carved on a stone stele. The code's content and its principle of written, public law are examined in Chapter 1.6; for this competency, remember that it was a tool of a centralizing king who wanted uniform rules across conquered cities.

The Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia built the largest empire the region had yet seen, reaching its height in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. with its capital at Nineveh. Assyria's power rested on a professional standing army, iron weapons, siege engines, cavalry and a reputation for terror. The Assyrians deliberately deported conquered peoples and resettled them far from their homelands to break local resistance; the northern kingdom of Israel suffered this fate.

Assyria fell when subject peoples, including the Medes and the Chaldeans, joined against it. The Chaldeans created the Neo-Babylonian Empire, whose king Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt Babylon on a grand scale, destroyed Jerusalem and carried many of its people into exile in Babylon.

The Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century B.C.E., soon became the largest empire in the world to that time, stretching from Egypt and Anatolia to the Indus. Persian rule differed sharply from Assyrian rule:

Cyrus allowed deported peoples, including the Jews exiled in Babylon, to return home and rebuild their temples.

Darius I divided the empire into provinces called satrapies, each with a governor (satrap), plus royal inspectors known as "the eyes and ears of the king."

The Royal Road, with relay stations, linked Sardis in Anatolia to Susa in Persia.

Persia issued standardized coins and weights, encouraged trade and let local peoples keep their languages, laws and religions as long as they paid tribute and supplied soldiers.

Persia's attempt to subdue the Greek city-states failed in the Persian Wars, and the empire was eventually conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E.

Assyrian and Persian Imperial Methods Compared

Common Trap: Candidates sometimes attribute Cyrus's return of exiles to the Babylonians or treat Assyrian and Persian rule as interchangeable. If a source describes forced resettlement, think Assyria (or Neo-Babylon); if it describes freeing exiles and respecting local gods, think Persia.

The Phoenicians lived in city-states such as Tyre, Sidon and Byblos along the coast of present-day Lebanon. They became the leading sea traders of the Mediterranean, famous for a costly purple dye. They founded colonies across North Africa and the western Mediterranean; the most important was Carthage. Their greatest contribution was a phonetic alphabet of about two dozen consonant symbols. It was far easier to learn than cuneiform or hieroglyphs, and the Greeks adapted it (adding vowels), passing it to the Romans and eventually to most Western languages.

The Israelites' main contribution was ethical monotheism (Chapter 1.5). Politically, they formed a united kingdom under Saul, David and Solomon, with Jerusalem and its Temple at the center, which then split into Israel and Judah. Assyria conquered Israel; the Neo-Babylonians conquered Judah and exiled many of its people until Cyrus let them return. Roman destruction of the Second Temple in the first century C.E. accelerated the diaspora, the scattering of Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Memory Aid: For the Phoenicians, think "the three A's": alphabet, Atlantic-reaching sailors, and Carthage as an African colony. For the Israelites, think "one God, two kingdoms, two exiles."

Egypt was "the gift of the Nile." The river's predictable flood deposited rich silt, and the narrow green strip along the river was flanked by desert that discouraged invasion. Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt were unified around the thirty-first century B.C.E., traditionally by a king named Menes or Narmer.

Historians divide Egyptian history into three kingdoms separated by intermediate periods of disunity:

New Kingdom: after expelling the Hyksos, Egypt built an empire reaching into Syria and Nubia. Notable rulers include Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who sponsored trade expeditions to Punt; Thutmose III, a great conqueror; Akhenaten, who tried to center worship on the sun disk Aten; and Ramses II, who fought the Hittites at Kadesh and later concluded one of the earliest known peace treaties with them.

Egyptian society was a pyramid with the pharaoh at the top, priests, nobles and scribes below him, and peasant farmers making up most of the population. Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs, built monumental temples and tombs, practiced mummification and developed a solar calendar.

South of Egypt, along the middle Nile in present-day Sudan, lay Nubia. The kingdom of Kush grew rich from gold, ivory, ebony and trade routes into the African interior. Its relationship with Egypt swung between trade, Egyptian conquest and Kushite conquest.

Aksum, in the highlands of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, rose in the first centuries C.E. Through its Red Sea port of Adulis, Aksum traded ivory, gold and incense with the Roman Empire, Arabia, Persia and India. Aksum minted its own gold, silver and bronze coins, often inscribed in Greek, the commercial language of the Red Sea trade. In the fourth century C.E., King Ezana converted to Christianity, making Aksum one of the earliest Christian states. Aksum declined after the rise of Islam shifted Red Sea trade, but its Christian tradition survived in the Ethiopian highlands.

Egypt, Kush and Aksum Compared

Common Trap: A distractor may claim that Kush brought Christianity to Egypt. Christianity's early African kingdom in this group was Aksum, and its conversion came centuries after Kush ruled Egypt.

The Indus Valley civilization flourished in the third millennium B.C.E. in present-day Pakistan and northwest India. Its best-known cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were laid out on grid plans with baked-brick houses, covered drains, wells and a large public bath. Bricks and weights were standardized across hundreds of miles, and

Because the Indus script has not been deciphered, historians rely on archaeology. The absence of grand palaces or royal tombs puzzles scholars: the uniformity of planning suggests strong coordination, but the form of government is unknown. The civilization declined gradually after about the nineteenth century B.C.E., probably because of shifting rivers, climate change and possibly overuse of land, rather than the sudden invasion once proposed.

Exam Tip: If a stimulus describes city planning and standardization but stresses that the writing cannot be read, it points to the Indus civilization. Answers that confidently name its kings or laws are unsupported.

China's early civilization developed along the Huang He, whose fertile loess soil and dangerous floods (it was called "China's sorrow") required large-scale water control.

Shang dynasty: known from archaeology at Anyang. Kings consulted ancestors through oracle bones, cracked animal bones and shells inscribed with questions, which preserve the earliest Chinese writing. The Shang were masters of bronze casting.

Zhou dynasty: overthrew the Shang and justified it with the Mandate of Heaven, the idea that heaven grants the right to rule to a just ruler and withdraws it from a corrupt one (Chapter 1.6 treats the concept). The Zhou ruled through a decentralized system in which relatives and nobles governed territories in return for loyalty. As those lords grew powerful, Zhou authority collapsed into the Warring States period, a time of chaos that also produced Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism (Chapter 1.5).

Qin dynasty: the state of Qin conquered its rivals, and its king became Qin Shi Huangdi, the "first emperor." Guided by Legalism, he replaced feudal lords with centrally appointed officials, standardized writing, weights, measures, coinage and axle widths, linked earlier walls into an early Great Wall, burned books he considered dangerous and was buried with the terracotta army. Harsh labor demands provoked revolts, and the Qin fell soon after his death.

Han dynasty: kept Qin centralization but softened it. Under Emperor Wudi, Confucian scholars were favored, an imperial academy trained officials, and the empire expanded into Central Asia, Korea and Vietnam. The envoy Zhang Qian's travels west helped open the Silk Road. Late Han China suffered from powerful landowning families, court intrigue, peasant uprisings such as the Yellow Turbans, and pressure from nomads, and it split apart in the third century C.E.

Memory Aid: "Shang bones, Zhou mandate, Qin standardizes, Han stabilizes."

The Mauryan Empire was founded by Chandragupta Maurya in the late fourth century B.C.E., soon after Alexander the Great's army withdrew from the Indus. It ruled most of the subcontinent from its capital at Pataliputra with a large army, a bureaucracy, a spy network and heavy taxes. Its most famous ruler, Ashoka, conquered Kalinga in a bloody war, then turned to Buddhism. His edicts, carved on rocks and pillars across the empire, urged nonviolence, tolerance, care for the sick and fair treatment of subjects, and he sent missionaries who helped Buddhism spread to Sri Lanka and beyond. The empire fragmented within decades of his death.

The Gupta Empire arose in the fourth century C.E. in northern India. It was smaller and more decentralized than the Maurya, relying on local rulers who acknowledged Gupta supremacy. The Gupta era is called India's classical or golden age: Sanskrit literature flourished (Kalidasa), Hindu temple building expanded, and scholars made advances in mathematics and astronomy, including the decimal place-value system and the concept of zero (Chapter 1.7).

Maurya and Gupta Empires Compared

Common Trap: The names Chandragupta Maurya and Chandra Gupta are easy to confuse. The Maurya founder came first and was centralizing; the Gupta rulers came about six centuries later and governed more loosely.

Greece's mountains and many islands divided the land into small valleys, which encouraged independent city-states (poleis) rather than a single kingdom. Poor soil and long coastlines pushed Greeks to the sea for trade and colonization;

Athens and Sparta represent two very different poleis:

Sparta was a militarized society. Spartan citizens trained as soldiers from childhood, while a large population of state-owned laborers called helots farmed the land. Fear of helot revolt shaped Spartan life. Sparta had two kings, a council of elders and an assembly; Spartan women had relatively high status and could own land because men were often away at war.

Athens developed a democracy in which adult male citizens voted directly in the assembly. Women, enslaved people and resident foreigners (metics) were excluded. Athens built its wealth on trade and sea power. (The development of Athenian democracy is examined in Chapter 1.6.)

Key events:

Athens and Sparta Compared

Rome grew from a small city on the Tiber River in central Italy. Its location near the middle of the Italian peninsula and the middle of the Mediterranean made it a natural hub.

The Roman Republic replaced kingship around the end of the sixth century B.C.E. Two consuls elected annually led the government and army, the Senate of aristocrats advised and controlled finances, and assemblies of citizens voted on laws and officials. A long struggle of the orders between patricians (aristocrats) and plebeians (commoners) won plebeians their own tribunes, who could veto actions, and the publication of written law in the Twelve Tables (Chapter 1.6).

Rome conquered Italy and then fought Carthage, the great Phoenician colony of North Africa, in the Punic Wars for control of the western Mediterranean. During the second war, the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants and won major battles in Italy, but Rome survived and prevailed.

Expansion transformed the Republic:

Wealthy senators built large estates (latifundia) worked by enslaved captives, while small farmers, away on long campaigns, lost their land and drifted to Rome.

The Gracchi brothers proposed land reform and were killed by senatorial opponents, beginning an era of political violence.

Marius recruited landless volunteers who looked to their generals rather than the state for rewards, creating personal armies.

Julius Caesar used his army to seize power, crossing the Rubicon and becoming dictator for life, and was assassinated by senators.

His adopted heir Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra and became Augustus, the first emperor, while keeping the outward forms of the Republic.

The Pax Romana, about two centuries of relative peace beginning with Augustus, saw trade flourish across a unified Mediterranean linked by roads, aqueducts and Latin. Christianity began in Roman Judea and spread along Roman roads despite periodic persecution.

In the third century C.E., the empire suffered civil war, inflation from debased coins, plague and invasions. Diocletian split administration between east and west; Constantine legalized Christianity and founded Constantinople; Theodosius made Christianity the official religion. The western empire, poorer and more exposed, gradually fell to Germanic peoples such as the Visigoths, Vandals and Ostrogoths; the deposition of the last western emperor in 476 C.E. is the conventional end date. The eastern half survived for nearly another thousand years as the Byzantine Empire (Chapter 1.2).

The Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire Compared

Exam Tip: The most common Han-Rome question asks for similarities. Both empires were large, centralized and connected by roads; both promoted a unifying elite culture; both struggled with frontier pressures and powerful landowners. The key difference is aftermath: China was reunified under a similar imperial model, while the western Roman Empire never was.

Mesoamerica stretches from central Mexico through Central America. Its farmers domesticated maize, beans and squash, which became the foundation of every civilization in the region.

Olmec: flourished on the Gulf Coast of Mexico (present-day Veracruz and Tabasco) from about the fifteenth to the fourth century B.C.E. The Olmec carved colossal stone heads, likely portraits of rulers, built ceremonial centers such as San Lorenzo and La Venta, traded jade and obsidian, and developed a jaguar-centered religious art. Many later Mesoamerican traditions, such as the ballgame, ceremonial centers and the calendar, appear first or early among the Olmec, which is why they are often called a "mother culture."

Teotihuacan: a huge city in the Valley of Mexico that reached its peak around the middle of the first millennium C.E., with perhaps 100,000 or more residents. It was laid out along the Avenue of the Dead with the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. The city controlled obsidian workshops, housed residents from distant regions in apartment compounds and spread its influence through trade and diplomacy, reaching as far as the Maya city of Tikal.

Maya: a civilization of city-states in southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, with its Classic period lasting from about 250 to 900 C.E. Cities such as Tikal, Copán, Palenque and Calakmul were ruled by divine kings and fought one another for prestige and captives. The Maya developed the most complete writing system in the Americas, a Long Count calendar, a numbering system that used zero, and precise astronomical observation. Many southern lowland cities were abandoned in the ninth century, probably because of drought, warfare, overpopulation and environmental strain; northern cities such as Chichén Itzá continued.

Early Civilizations of the Americas Compared

Common Trap: Teotihuacan was not built by the Aztecs. It flourished and declined centuries before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico. Likewise, Chavín, Moche and Nazca all predate the Inca by more than a thousand years.

Ideas, goods and technologies spread through trade, migration and conquest. Bantu-speaking farmers migrated over many centuries from West-Central Africa toward the east and south, spreading agriculture, ironworking and related languages across much of sub-Saharan Africa. The Phoenician alphabet spread through Mediterranean trade, Buddhism along Asian trade routes. The Silk Road linked Han China with Parthia and Rome, while Indian Ocean monsoon routes linked East Africa, Arabia, India and Southeast Asia. Alexander's conquests produced the blended Hellenistic culture. The technical side of diffusion (metallurgy, mathematics, writing technologies) is covered in Chapter 1.7.

Exam Tip: Diffusion questions usually ask how something spread, not who invented it. The best answer typically names the route or mechanism (trade, missionary activity, migration, conquest) that fits the time and place in the stimulus.

River valleys supported the first civilizations; geography explains differences such as Mesopotamia's frequent invasions and Egypt's long stability.

Empires used different strategies: Assyrian terror and deportation versus Persian tolerance and satrapies; Qin harshness versus Han Confucian administration; Maurya centralization versus Gupta decentralization.

African civilizations were interconnected: Kush absorbed Egyptian culture and ruled Egypt, Meroë smelted iron, and Aksum became a Red Sea trading power and an early Christian state.

Greek geography produced independent city-states; Rome's expansion transformed its Republic into an empire, and the western empire fell while the eastern survived.

Mesoamerican (Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya) and Andean (Chavín, Moche, Nazca) civilizations developed independently, with distinctive achievements and all well before the Aztecs and Inca.