dressed as Venus in a picture

“[Cleopatra met Antony] in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all alone, under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. The perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes, part following the galley up the river on either bank, part running out of the city to see the sight.”

—Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives; Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

The Britons Dye Their Bodies With Woad

“All the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and the upper lip.”

—Julius Caesar, on British soldiers, 55 B.C.; Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

the Twelve Tables

“[In 450 B.C., t]he Twelve Tables . . . were written out on wood and set in the Forum, where all could see them. . . . [T]hey were . . . the foundation of Roman law. Unfortunately the Tables were lost; what we know of them is assembled from quotes in various Roman documents.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

Etruscan

“To the northwest [of Rome], Etruscan cities controlled the copper, iron, and silver mines in the so-called Metal-Bearing Hills. This metal was traded to the Greek colonies along the Italian coast, and contact with the Greek trading cities brought the Etruscans face-to-face with the Greek writing system. The Etruscans began to use the Greek alphabet to label their own goods, using their own language written in Greek characters. Despite the recognizable letters, the language itself remains a puzzle: it appears almost entirely in brief inscriptions which have not been decoded.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

Phoenician

“There was no country called Phoenicia, nor was there a Phoenician high king. The independent cities along the coast were united by a shared culture and language; their writing system was the first to incorporate an alphabet.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

composite ideograms

“Chinese script seems to have developed in complete independence from writing elsewhere in the ancient world. The earliest Yellow river signs were pictures, but the writing of China was the first to move beyond the pictorial by combining pictures: putting pictorial signs (called “ideograms”) together into “composite ideograms” which represented abstractions and ideas.

By the time of the Shang court’s establishment at Yin, these “composite ideograms” were sophisticated enough to record divine answers to questions. . . . A man or woman who sought guidance went to the Shang court to pose a question to the priests there. The priests brought out the cleaned and dried shoulder bones of cows or sheep (or, occasionally, a turtle shell), carved with patterns or marked with an inscription, and then touched the bone or shell with a heated metal point. When the bone cracked, the path of the crack through he pattern or inscription was “read” by the priests and interpreted as a message, sent by ancestors who now passed their wisdom back to the living. The priest carved the results of the inquiry into the bone or shell, in signs cut by a knife and filled with paint.

The oracle bones show that the questions, no matter who asked them, were always posed in the name of the king.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

streamlined pictographic script

“The Minoans . . . evolved their own distinct script, following the old pattern that had developed thousands of years before: from seals on goods to pictograms, from pictograms to streamlined pictographic script. The earliest form of this script survives on a scattering of tablets and stone engravings across Crete, and is generally called “Linear A” to distinguish it from its more sophisticated descendent: “Linear B,” the version of Minoan script which spread north to the Mycenaeans.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

a black stone stele

“[A]ll of the old Sumerian cities . . . were part of the empire centered at Babylon. . . .

This was no unruly empire; it was ruled by law. Hammurabi managed his growing conquests, in part, by enforcing the same code over the entire extent of it. The only surviving copy of this code was discovered centuries later in Susa, carved onto a black stone stele. Clearly the laws were intended to embody a divine code of justice (the top of the stele shows the god of justice, bestowing his authority on Hammurabi), but their showy presence in conquered cities also kept control over the conquered people. According to the stele itself, the laws were observed faithfully in Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Isin, Kish, Mari, and other cities.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

the white city

“According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Menes/Narmer celebrated his victory by building a brand new capital at Memphis, the central point of his brand new kingdom. Memphis means “White Walls”; the walls were plastered so that they shone in the sun. From the white city, the ruler of united Egypt could control both the southern valley and the northern delta.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

black was the color of life and resurrection

“The Egyptians gave their country two different names. The land where the yearly flood laid down its silt was Kemet, the Black Land; black was the color of life and resurrection. But beyond the Black Land lay Deshret, the deathly Red Land. The line between life and death was so distinct that a man could bend over and place one hand in fertile black earth, the other on red, sun-baked desert.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.