Mesopotamia Crossword Puzzle by Nadia Gaydos

Archaeologists believe that the oldest C_____z___n on earth began in Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia was located in the eastern part of the “Fertile Crescent”an arch of fertile land that stretched from the M_d_________n Sea to the Persian Gulf.
The southern part of Mesopotamia was called “Sumer” after the Sumerian nomads who settled in the valleys of the T_g__s and Euphrates rivers.
Early farming villages grew into 12 “city-states,” each consisting of a C_t_ and it’s surrounding farmlands.
The Sumerians, like many other ancient civilizations, believed in “polytheism”-the worship of many g__s.
To please the gods, a T__p_e with a massive step-tower called a “ziggurat”-was erected in the center of each city.
It is believed that the Sumerians were the first people on earth to invent a system of W____n_.
They also invented the arch to support heavy walls over doorways and windows, and they made the world’s first p___ to prepare their fields for planting.
The Sumerians divided a circle into 360 degrees, an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 ___o___.
There were three social classes in Sumer: (1) Priests, government officials, and wealthy nobles (2) merchants and artisans (3) peasants and Sl___s.
In the method of cuneiform writing, about 600 different symbols were drawn on soft ___y tablets which eventually became hard.
The Sumerians wrote on clay because they didn’t know how to make __p__.
In Sumer most people were F_____s.
The farmers grew grain, vegetables, and dates, and raised cows, sheep, and ___ts.
Houses were made out of sun-dried B____s.
Only upper class B___ received an education.
Each of the C___-S____s of Sumer were thought to belong to a different god or gods.
The Sumerians feared their gods because they believed that the gods had the power to destroy their cities with Fl____.
Individual city-states sometimes fought ___s against each other.
Weakened by lack of unity,the city-states of Sumer were conquered by Hammurabi and other invaders who periodically swept into Me________a.
Rather than destroying the early civilization of Mesopotamia,begun by the _u__r___s,the invaders adopted Sumerian ways and build upon them in years which followed.