Primary source question 2.1
1. What sorts of materials are listed in this document, and how do you imagine they would be used for the construction of boats?
2. What does the form of the document suggest about its context? What kind of document does this appear to be?
3. What do the form and contents of the document suggest about the purpose of at least this example of Sumerian writing in the cuneiform script?
Primary source question 2.2
1. What gods are mentioned and for what purpose? What materials are mentioned in the text, and how are they used? What repetition do you see in this text?
2. How are the gods, materials, and repetition suggestive of a ritual, or religious, the context for the writing?
3. Why would ideas like these be inscribed on the walls inside a pyramid?
Primary source question 2.3
1. What figures can you make out on the seals? What other
notations do you see that are suggestive of writing?
2. How do you think scholars go about deciphering these figures
and notations?
3. The only evidence of writing in the mid-third-millennium BCE
Indus Valley is these seal stamps and a few other short
inscriptions (like the one at Dholavira). What does this fact
suggest to you about their Harappan context?
Primary source question 2.4
1. About what topic is this oracle bone attempting to divine an
answer? How do you know?
2. What is the ritual process of which this writing seems to be a
part?
3. What does the process of which this writer is a part and the topic
about which it inquires suggest to you about the context for
writing when it first appeared in East Asia, more than a
millennium after its development in Mesopotamia and Egypt?
Primary source question 2.5
1. Who and what are mentioned in this text, and what does this
suggest about the text’s purpose?
2. What evidence for the economic context at Pylos in mainland
Mycenaean Greece does the text offer?
3. How does the fragmentary nature of the text affect your reading of it?
