Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Time Traveler's essay

Project Description

The assignment was about learning about one particular aspect of a civilization, then to write a research report on what we had learned.
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Process

The steps that it took to get to the final product were to:
1: First, start off doing research and write a rough draft of your research paper.
2. Correct it and write a first draft, correcting as many general mistakes as you saw.
3. Get a few peers to correct the draft, then rewrite your draft for a second draft.
3. Next, attempt to get a teacher's revision ideas and use them to create a (hopefully close to perfect) final draft.
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Reflection

1. From this work, I learned about a way to write a research paper, complete with a bibliography.
2. A challenge I encountered was the writing itself, mainly because i was never really good at typing or writing anything.
3. The next time I do this, I will change the way that I may describe the art and architecture, ot make it seem a little more realistic.
4. This will help me later because I will know how to write a research report correctly.
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Artifact
As a start, I would like to introduce the purpose of civilization. It's role is to help people come together as a whole, to help each other and boost others when needed. A civilization is like a society in many ways. Art and architecture fit into this civilization by forms of religious monuments, such as the Gate of Ishtar, one of their goddesses, the hanging gardens of babylon, the tower of babel, and other religious statues. They also built ziggurats, or large stone temples, so I would say they had a pretty heavy emphasis on religion in their time.

Many things were quite interesting and unique in the babylonian empire. For instance, They built ziggurats, huge mudbrick temples that could reach past three to six stories tall, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a giant ziggurat that had an amazing amount of flora growing on it. From a distance, it could look like the palace of a god. It's history went as far back as the 17th century BC, to the 3rd century BC, where they were conquered and a new city was founded, the materials from babylon, leaving it in the dust and leaving it forgotten for centuries, until it was eventually excavated in the 20th century.1

At my specific pillar, art and architecture, the Babylonians were quite successful at. As I stated earlier in the text, they built the Ishtar Gate, The hanging gardens of Babylon, and the tower of Babel. Either that took them forever to come up with, or they were really experienced with architecture. Not only those, but the ziggurats that I mentioned earlier were also feats of architecture.

Some of the downfalls in their art had dealt with well, the fact that only some, strike that, a few of their art pieces are in museums today. One of their art pieces, a lion, was actually able to survive the weathering and weight of the sands and deserts on top of them. Also, their architecture was made by mudbrick. Although it solidified and turned into a stone when dried, it could not stand up against the metal weapons the other civilizations had, and used to attack them.

The civilization which I chose to compare to was Assyria. I chose this civilization because it was in the same region of the world that Babylon was located in. Both civilizations were located in the Fertile Crescent, both of them believed in probably close gods, and both had similar architecture. Both had these lead them to a success, because their cities were preserved and art kept safe for future civilizations to study.

The art and architecture of Babylon had really helped to contribute to their society, and actually
kept them alive behind sturdy walls, so I would say that the architecture really helped to keep their society alive. Then their art, I would presume, had an amount of vibrancy that would surpass an average drawing and really show 2their ideals in a really solidified form, so on those two pieces of information, I believe that my pillar actually supported their civilization.

So, as I stated earlier, art and architecture I would say had a big emphasis on religion in their time. I know this by their means of architecture and buildings, because the hanging gardens were built for their deities, the Ishtar gates were built for Ishtar, and ziggurats were built for their religious purposes. This is why I think that art and architecture were really emphasized by the amount of religious buildings they had built.3

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