Middle Bronze Age in the context of Bronze

Ancient Egypt was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower Egypt were amalgamated by Menes, who is believed by the majority of Egyptologists to have been the same person as Narmer. The history of ancient Egypt unfolded as a series of stable kingdoms interspersed by the "Intermediate Periods" of relative instability. These stable kingdoms existed in one of three periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age; the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age; or the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

The pinnacle of ancient Egyptian power was achieved during the New Kingdom, which extended its rule to much of Nubia and a considerable portion of the Levant. After this period, Egypt entered an era of slow decline. Over the course of its history, it was invaded or conquered by a number of foreign civilizations, including the Hyksos, the Kushites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks and then the Romans. The end of ancient Egypt is variously defined as occurring with the end of the Late Period during the Wars of Alexander the Great in 332 BC or with the end of the Greek-ruled Ptolemaic Kingdom during the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. In AD 642, the Arab conquest of Egypt brought an end to the region's millennium-long Greco-Roman period.

In classical antiquity and Greco-Roman geography, Colchis (/ˈkɒlkɪs/; Ancient Greek: Κολχίς) was an exonym for the Georgian polity of Egrisi (Georgian: ეგრისი) located on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, centered in present-day western Georgia also including the region of Abkhazia.

Its population, the Colchians, are generally believed to have been primarily early Zan-speaking tribes, ancestral to the modern Laz and Mingrelian peoples. According to David Marshall Lang: "one of the most important elements in the modern Georgian nation, the Colchians were probably established in the Caucasus by the Middle Bronze Age."

The north and south celestial poles are the two points in the sky where Earth's axis of rotation, indefinitely extended, intersects the celestial sphere. The north and south celestial poles appear permanently directly overhead to observers at Earth's North Pole and South Pole, respectively. As Earth spins on its axis, the two celestial poles remain fixed in the sky, and all other celestial points appear to rotate around them, completing one circuit per day (strictly, per sidereal day).

The celestial poles are also the poles of the celestial equatorial coordinate system, meaning they have declinations of +90 degrees and −90 degrees (for the north and south celestial poles, respectively). Despite their apparently fixed positions, the celestial poles in the long term do not actually remain permanently fixed against the background of the stars. Because of a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, the poles trace out circles on the celestial sphere, with a period of about 25,700 years. The Earth's axis is also subject to other complex motions which cause the celestial poles to shift slightly over cycles of varying lengths (see nutation, polar motion and axial tilt). Finally, over very long periods the positions of the stars themselves change, because of the stars' proper motions. To take into account such movement, celestial pole definitions come with an epoch to specify the date of the rotation axis; J2000.0 is the current standard.

The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30–40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of the Hebrew, the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet and, subsequently, the Latin alphabet. According to common theory, Israelites, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script.

The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC.

Bull-leaping (Ancient Greek: ταυροκαθάψια, taurokathapsia) is a term for various types of non-violent bull fighting. Some are based on an ancient ritual from the Minoan civilization involving an acrobat leaping over the back of a charging bull (or cow). As a sport it survives in Spain, with bulls, as recortes; in modern France, usually with cows rather than bulls, as course landaise; and in Tamil Nadu, India with bulls as Jallikattu.

Ritual leaping over bulls is a motif in Middle Bronze Age figurative art, especially in Minoan art, and what are probably Minoan objects found in Mycenaean Greece, but it is also sometimes found in Hittite Anatolia, the Levant, Bactria and the Indus Valley. It is often interpreted as a depiction of a rite performed in connection with bull worship.

A menhir (/ˈmɛnhɪər/; from Brittonic languages: maen or men, "stone" and hir or hîr, "long"), standing stone, orthostat, or lith is a large upright stone, emplaced in the ground by humans, typically dating from the European middle Bronze Age. They can be found individually as monoliths, or as part of a group of similar stones. Menhirs' size can vary considerably, but they often taper toward the top.

Menhirs are found across Europe, Africa, and Asia, with a concentration in Western Europe, notably in Ireland, Great Britain, and Brittany. Theories concerning their purpose remain speculative, with hypotheses ranging from druidic rituals to territorial markers or elements of an ideological system. Some menhirs feature engravings, including anthropomorphic figures and symbols, and are often associated with ancient religious ceremonies and burial chambers.

Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by Sutean and the Canaanite languages (Hebrew, Phoenician/Punic, Edomite and Moabite).

The term was coined by Carl Brockelmann in 1908, who separated Fritz Hommel's 1883 classification of Semitic languages into Northwest (Canaanite and Aramaic), East Semitic (Akkadian, its Assyrian and Babylonian dialects, Eblaite) and Southwest (Arabic, Old South Arabian languages and Abyssinian).

Acre (/ˈɑːkər, ˈeɪkər/ AH-kər, AY-kər), known in Hebrew as Akko (Hebrew: עַכּוֹ, ʻAkkō, IPA: [ˈako]) and in Arabic as Akka (Arabic: عكّا, ʻAkkā, IPA: [ˈʕak.ka]), is a city in the coastal plain region of the Northern District of Israel.

The city occupies a strategic location, sitting in a natural harbour at the extremity of Haifa Bay on the coast of the Mediterranean's Levantine Sea. Aside from coastal trading, it was an important waypoint on the region's coastal road and the road cutting inland along the Jezreel Valley. The first settlement during the Early Bronze Age was abandoned after a few centuries but a large town was established during the Middle Bronze Age. Continuously inhabited since then, it is among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on Earth. It has, however, been subject to conquest and destruction several times and survived as little more than a large village for centuries at a time.

The City of David (Hebrew: עיר דוד, romanized: ʿĪr Davīd), known locally mostly as Wadi Hilweh (Arabic: وادي حلوة, romanized: Wādī Ḥulwah), is the name given to an archaeological site considered by most scholars to be the original settlement core of Jerusalem during the Bronze and Iron Ages. It is situated on southern part of the eastern ridge of ancient Jerusalem, west of the Kidron Valley and east of the Tyropoeon Valley, to the immediate south of the Temple Mount and separated from it by the so-called Ophel saddle.

The City of David is an important site of biblical archeology. Remains of a defensive network dating back to the Middle Bronze Age were found around the Gihon Spring; they continued to remain in use throughout subsequent periods. Two monumental Iron Age structures, known as the Large Stone Structure and the Stepped Stone Structure, were discovered at the site. Scholars debate if these may be identified with David or date to a later period. The site is also home to the Siloam Tunnel, which, according to a common hypothesis, was built by Hezekiah during the late 8th century BCE in preparation for an Assyrian siege. However, recent excavations at the site suggested an earlier origin in the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. Remains from the early Roman period include the Pool of Siloam and the Stepped Street, which stretched from the pool to the Temple Mount.

The Harappan language, also known as the Indus language, is the unknown language or languages of the Bronze Age (c. 3300 to 1300 BC) Harappan civilization (Indus Valley civilization, or IVC). The Harappan script is yet undeciphered, indeed it has not even been demonstrated to be a writing system, and therefore the language remains unknown. The language being yet unattested in readable contemporary sources, hypotheses regarding its nature are based on possible loanwords, the substratum in Vedic Sanskrit, and some terms recorded in Sumerian cuneiform (such as Meluhha), in conjunction with analyses of the Harappan script.

There are some possible loanwords from the language of the Indus Valley civilization. Meluḫḫa or Melukhkha (Sumerian: 𒈨𒈛𒄩𒆠 Me-luḫ-ḫa) is the Sumerian name of a prominent trading partner of Sumer during the Middle Bronze Age. Its identification remains an open question, but most scholars associate it with the Indus Valley Civilisation. Asko Parpola identifies Proto-Dravidians with the Harappan Culture and the Meluhhan people mentioned in Sumerian records. In his book Deciphering the Indus Script, Parpola states that the Brahui people of Pakistan are remnants of the Harappan culture. According to him, the word "Meluhha" derives from the Dravidian words mel ("elevated") and akam ("place"). Parpola also relates Meluhha with Balochistan, which he calls the "Proto-Dravidian homeland". He also relates Meluhha with the transient word Mleccha, a Vedic word used to mean "barbarian" and used by the incoming Aryan speaking population for the native Harappan population.

Sumerian literature constitutes the earliest known corpus of recorded literature, including the religious writings and other traditional stories maintained by the Sumerian civilization and largely preserved by the later Akkadian and Babylonian empires. These records were written in the Sumerian language in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC during the Middle Bronze Age.

The Sumerians invented one of the first writing systems, developing Sumerian cuneiform writing out of earlier proto-writing systems by about the 30th century BC.The Sumerian language remained in official and literary use in the Akkadian and Babylonian empires, even after the spoken language disappeared from the population; literacy was widespread, and the Sumerian texts that students copied heavily influenced later Babylonian literature. The basic genres of Sumerian literature were literary catalogues, narrative/mythological compositions, historical compositions, letters and legal documents, disputation poems, proverbs, and other texts which do not belong to these prior categories.