1. What do these four pictures have in common?
Find as many links as you can?
What’s the same about each one?
What’s different about them?
These are four different masks made by four different ancient civilisations / cultures. They are: Ancient Chinese Mask (top left), Sutton Hoo (top right), Death Mask of Tutankhamun (left bottom), Aztec Death Mask (right bottom). There are no right or wrong answers to this exercise, just see what the children spot. Due to the size of the images, you may wish to print this slide out.

2. What do these four pictures have in common?
Find as many links as you can?
What’s the same about each one?
What’s different about them?
These are four different pyramids made by four different ancient civilisations / cultures. They are: Ancient Egyptian Pyramid (top left), Aztec Pyramid (top right), Pyramid of the Moon (left bottom), Sudanese Pyramid(right bottom). There are no right or wrong answers to this exercise, just see what the children spot. Due to the size of the images, you may wish to print this slide out. You may wish to ask pupils why this shape was so popular as it ‘pops-up’ in a number of different cultures.

3. What do these four pictures have in common?
Find as many links as you can?
What’s the same about each one?
What’s different about them?
These are four different coins made by four different ancient civilisations / cultures. They are: Ancient Athens Coin (top left), Roman Coin (top right), Solid Gold Aztec Coin (left bottom), Ancient Chinese Coin (right bottom). There are no right or wrong answers to this exercise, just see what the children spot. Due to the size of the images, you may wish to print this slide out. It may be worth pointing out that the idea of money and currency came from the ancient world.

4. They share technology, wealth and experience with each other.
A civilisation is a big group of people who work together to build a society.
They share technology, wealth and experience with each other.
They work together as a whole to make life as good as possible for all members of the civilisation.
This is just a general information slide to explain the key terms.
The term ancient means that it is something that occurred a long time ago, way back in history.

5. Some of the Ancient Civilisations
This is just a slide that shows some of the more well known groups considered to be an ancient civilisation. Ask pupils if they already know anything about any of these groups (they should at the very least be able to tell you about the Ancient Greeks).

7. Look at some of the achievements of these civilisations
Stonehenge
Machu Picchu
The Parthenon
Sphinx and The Pyramids
The Roman Coliseum
Aztec Pyramids (14th Century)
These are just pictures of some of the more magnificent ancient monuments from around the world. It may be nice to tell pupils a little bit about some of them as you show the photographs (particularly Macau Pitchu). It worth stressing to the pupils that these were built often years ago. There were no machines to help with lifting, all of the stone would have been cut by hand, all built just on people power. You could ask pupils to estimate how long they think they took to build and how they managed to lift blocks of stone to such great heights. Ask them how, despite being ancient civilisations, there monuments and buildings have survived for so long when modern buildings are often destroyed or fall apart. What does this tell us about the abilities of these ancient civilisations?

11. Tigris and Euphrates valley Site of the world’s first civilisation.
Mesopotamia
A Greek word which means “between two rivers and it’s a region in southwest Asia.
Tigris and Euphrates valley
Site of the world’s first civilisation.
Silt
A mixture of fertile soil and
tiny rocks that makes land ideal for farming.
One of the earliest known systems of writing invented in ancient Iraq.
Cuneiform
Political, religious , cultural and economic centres of civilisations.
Cities
Large arc of rich farm land that extends from the the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean sea.
Fertile Crescent
Type of an arrangement in which each worker specializes in a particular job or task.
Division of labour

13. The Tomb of Mausolus
This was a massive white marble tomb that was built by the widow of an ancient king. It was built in what is modern day Turkey. It was built in 353BC and was just over 40m .high.

14. Colossus of Rhodes
This was a massive bronze statue of the god Apollo . It was built in 280BC and was about 32m high. It stood either at the entrance to or astride the entrance to the port at Rhodes

15. Statue of Zeus at Olympia
This was a massive statue of the god Zeus and was over 12m tall. It was made of marble, inlaid with ivory and gold.

16. The light house of Alexandria.
This was a watchtower / lighthouse that stood on the island of Pharos. It was built in 250BC and was made of white marble. It is estimated to have been somewhere between 60m and 180m high.

17. Temple of Ephesus
This was a great white marble temple dedicated to the goddess Diana. It was built about 480BC.

18. Hanging Gardens of Babylon
These were terraced gardens that were built near modern day Bagdad. They were built around 600BC and was 120m square at the base and 25m tall. They were watered by tanks of water on the top level.

19. Pyramids of Giza
These were royal tombs built between 3000BC and 1800BC. The biggest is the great pyramid and is 147m high and 230m square at the base.

20. Activity One
Look at the hand out you have been given. Find the line of information that tells you about the date each civilisation started on. Try to put the civilisations in order starting with the earliest and finishing with the most modern.
This activity to try to get pupils to have some understanding of the chronology involved in these ancient civilisations. This is the most complicated of the three tasks they will do with these cards (which is why it’s first whilst their fresh). You will have to spend a little time explaining how the dates work and that it is not as simple as the highest date is the most modern civilisation.
3000BC
2000BC
1000BC
1000AD
Earliest
Modern

21. How many of the civilisations lasted for more than 1000 Years?
Activity Two
Look at the hand out you have been given. Find the line of information that tells you about how long each civilisation was in existence for. Use the information to answer the following questions.
How many of the civilisations lasted for more than 1000 Years?
This task is designed to show pupils that some ancient civilisations were in existence for a very long time. To help then grasp the time scales involved, you could link it to ‘modern times’ (maybe taking 1066 as the start of modern Britain – approx years ago). If time you could talk about how why pupils think that these very powerful civilisations with millions of ‘subjects’ do eventually come to an end. Has anything similar to this happened in recent times (World Wars?) ?
Which ancient civilisation existed for the longest amount of time?
Which ancient civilisation existed for the shortest amount of time?

22. Which civilisation had the biggest population size?
Activity Three
Look at the hand out you have been given. Find the line of information that tells you about how big civilisations were (the population). Use the information to answer the following questions.
Which civilisation had the biggest population size?
Why don’t we know the size of some of the ancient civilisations?
This task is about comparing the civilisations and to give pupils an idea of their size relative to each other. If time it is worth exploring with them a couple of questions:
Why don’t we know the estimated sizes if some of the civilisations on the cards?
If you click on the computer icon in the bottom right hand corner, this will take you to a chart of the Worlds population at different points in history. You could work out the percentage of the planets population that was said to be part of a given civilisation. Some are very high and show just how important they were in the world at that time.
The numbers seem very low compared to modern numbers (almost all civilisations have a population of less than the modern day U.K). They are not so small when compared to the worlds population of that that time.
To help you compare the sizes...
… the current population of the U.K is 65,000,000 people
… the current population of the World is 7 billion people

23. Plenary What is a ancient civilisation?
Where was the earliest civilisation?
can you…
…name at least six ancient civilisations?
…name at least 4 of the seven Ancient Wonders of the World?

24. Start Year ~ The approximate date the civilisation was formed.
End Year ~ The approximate date the civilisation stopped.
Length of Time ~ The number of years that the civilisation existed for.
Where ~ The place in the current world where the civilisation was.
Population ~ The maximum size of the civilisation.
Having completed the three previous tasks, pupils should now have become familiar with the values written on the different top trump cards. I would suggest that pupils now work in threes or fours and play mini games of top trumps. Pupils can use the values on the cards for Start Year, End Year, Length of Time and Population.
Rules of Top Trumps – The cards get shared between the players as evenly as possible. Taking it in turns, the player looks at the card they have on top of their ‘pack’. They pick a value (for example population) and read out the value. All of the other players do the same using the category selected. The person with the highest value then takes all of the cards from the other players (if the value on the card says ‘unknown’ – this counts as 0 for a score). The winner of the game is the player that eventually collects all of the cards from the other players.