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Lesson · Grade 7 · Social Studies

How Ancient Peoples Adapted to Their Land

  • Grade 7
  • Social Studies
  • 1 min 21 s
  • British Columbia
  • BC7-SS-06

Three small maps side by side show how Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece each faced a different land: little rain but two rivers, desert with a yearly Nile flood, and rocky mountains beside the sea. Under each map the land's challenge or opportunity appears in amber and the people's response in green, canals, farms on the flood strip, olives and ships and separate city-states, ending on the recap that ancient peoples adapted to their land.

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In one sentence

The question this lesson answers

How did ancient peoples adapt to the very different lands they lived on?

Every land brought a challenge or an opportunity, and each people found a response that fitted their land.

Transcript

What the lesson says

How did ancient peoples adapt to the very different lands they lived on?

Every land brought a challenge or an opportunity, and each people found a response that fitted their land.

Mesopotamia was hot and dry with little rain, but two big rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flowed through it.

So its farmers dug canals that carried river water out to their fields.

In Egypt, desert lay on both sides of the Nile, but every year the river flooded and left behind a strip of rich black soil.

Egyptians farmed that strip and planned their whole year around the flood, with a season for flooding, one for growing and one for harvest.

Greece was rocky and mountainous, with little flat land to farm, and the sea was never far away.

So Greeks grew olives and grapes on the hillsides, and sailed out to fish and to trade.

The mountains also kept communities apart, so Greece became many small, separate city-states.

Different lands led to different ways of life, but the idea was the same everywhere.

Ancient peoples adapted to their land, using what it offered and working around what it lacked.

Curriculum

Where this fits

British Columbia, Grade 7

Social Studies, Ancient world to the 7th century: human responses to particular geographic challenges and opportunitiesBC7-SS-06

Previous: Why the First Civilizations Grew Beside RiversNext: What Makes a Civilization

The outcomes and strands follow the British Columbia curriculum.

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