| A | B |
|---|
| Menes | King who united Upper and Lower Egypt and used the Nile River as a highway for trade |
| Ptah-hotep | a vizier (chief minister) who took an interest in training young government officials |
| Giza | city in Egypt where the pyramids were built |
| Hatshepsut | female monarch of the New Kingdom in Egypt; encouraged trade in Mediterranean and Africa |
| Ramses II | most powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom; expanded the Egyptian empire |
| Osiris | God of the Nile who Egyptians believed controlled the annual flood that made land fertile |
| Isis | Egyptian goddess; wife of Osiris; she promised the faithful they would have life after death |
| Amon-Re | the sun god; chief Egyptian god |
| Akhenaton | pharoah who tried to get rid of worshipping all gods except for the god, Aton |
| Tutankhamen | "King Tut"; minor king whose tomb was discovered by British archaeologist, Howard Carter, in 1922 |
| Jean Champollion | French scholar who decoded the Rosetta Stone and figured out the meaning of heiroglyphics |
| Rosetta Stone | flat, black stone with the same message carved in heiroglyphics, demotic and Greek |
| The Tale of Sinuhe | a folktale that tells us how the Egyptians viewed themselves and the people of the surrounding desert |
| Fertile Crescent | an arc-shaped area of fertile land that curves from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean coast |
| The Epic of Gilgamesh | Sumerian epic poem with themes of the unpredictability of the Gods and the inevitability of death |
| Sargon | ruler of Akkad who conquered Sumer |
| Hammurabi | king of Babylon who published a set of laws |
| Assurbanipal | King of the Assyrians who founded the first library |
| Nebuchadnezzar | Babylonian king who expanded the empire, rebuilt canals, temples, walls and palaces. |
| Cyrus the Great | leader of the Persians who conquered Babylon |
| Darius | emperor who united the many peoples of Persia |
| Zoroaster | Persian religious thinker who rejected old Persian gods in favor of a single, wise God. |
