The Mayas were very intelligent and had amazing minds. They intended to improve everything that could, or was possible. The Mayan calender is used by some still today. Many people study these things.

People tend to expose their prejudices and other biases when answering questions of this type.

Remember that we don't always know with certainty which culture invented a thing first.

Many cultures reinvented items that were invented earlier or at about the same time.

Numerous inventions are disputed. Here are some of the least controversial ones.

The Sumerians gave us time and angles. There are 60 seconds in a minute (not 10) and 60 minutes in an hour (not 10). A circle is 360 degrees (=60*60) (not 10*10) degrees. They gave us the first writing, the first types of laws, bread, biscuits and cakes, beer, bricks, the wheel, the chariot, the modern plough, the zodiac (of star constellations), sail boats and (probably also) glass.

Egyptians gave us pyramids and scary mummies. However they also invented wigs, the first locks, the first bellows, and the first large dam. They were very talented builders of monuments and they greatly advanced the skills of furniture-making, ship-building, jewellery-making and glass-making. In addition they made the first modern-style cosmetics.

Ancient Indians (Indus valley) offered us advances in mathematics, astrology, literature, medicine, dance and food technologies. They developed several irrigation and drainage systems. They gave us cotton. At about the same time as the Sumerians and Egyptians they gave us bricks, granarys and assembly halls.

The Greeks left us with democracy and the idea of freedom, justice including trial by jury, history as distinct from propaganda, the idea of proof, modern medicine, philosophy, sciences such as physics and biology and modern literature and theater. They provided great advances in poetry and art, architecture, and mathematics. They gave us the first real understanding of music and several popular sports as well as beginning the Olympic games.

The ancient Chinese gave us paper, pasta and noodles, fast food, simple printing, silk, gunpowder, concrete, wheelbarrows, flame throwers, toilet roll, paper money and football (yes they invented a game very similar to modern soccer more than 2000 years ago).

The ancient people of South America and Central America gave us chocolate, vanilla, potatoes, popcorn, peanuts and many other foods. They gave us rubber, chewing gum, terrace farming, freeze-dried food, hydroponics, cable cars, suspension bridges and obsidian knives. They reinvented beer and concrete. They gave us many types of medicines (including the world's first contraceptive pills) and some dangerous drugs (such as cocaine). Also they were great architects, builders, artists and artisans.

1880 b.C.

Sumerian cuneiform has been found and radiocarbon dated to 3500-3200 BCE.

This civilization, Sumer existed more or less where Iraq is now, and used to be called Mesopotamia. The writing is ideogramic. In 1998, people discovered what (appears to be) Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) script radiocarbon dated to 5500 BCE in South India and Sri Lanka. No one has ever successfully translated IVC script, nor accepted it to be writing, as opposed to proto-writing. Interestingly, IVC script has also been found in Mesopotamia. In 2008, people discovered carvings on tortoise shells radiocarbon dated to 8600-6600 BCE in Jiahu, China. The inscriptions resemble letters used during the Shang dynasty, but it is unlikely that these inscriptions will ever be considered as other than proto-writing. Interestingly, bone flutes were also found at the same site, which one can play Shang dynasty-era music with. So, to summarize, the current academic consensus is that Sumerian cuneiform is the oldest writing that has ever been found, but this could change. It might also be worth noting that Sumerian is a "language isolate", whereas, to quote Wikipedia: "Indic scripts are used by languages of several linguistic families.

Writing systems, specifically an early stage in the development an alphabetic writing system. i

Hieroglyphic writing is somewhat phonetic.

Symbols stand for certain sounds (unlike the English alphabet where some letters have many sounds or can be silent). Let's start out with an example, the word freight. While the F, R, and T sound the "normal" way, the G and H are silent and the E and I make one sound (long A). There are 7 letters in the word, but only 4 sounds (F, R, long A, and T) are heard. So to spell freight with hieroglyphs, you'd use the symbols for those 4 sounds: Four different sounds are used to say "freight," so four symbols-- no more, no less-- are needed to write it the Egyptian way.

Our spelling is more complicated than it needs to be. Like, why do we spell phone with a PH when we have a perfectly good F just going to waste? And why bother with C when we already have K and S? Why have double letters (like the M's in rummy) when we only pronounce it once? And then there are words like knight, technique, and phlegm! When you use hieroglyphs, you spell your words phonetically (the way it sounds), so you leave out silent letters: height the E,G, and second H are silent maybe A and E are long, the Y is silent hey the EY sounds like a long A Christmas the CH sounds like K, the T is pretty much silent, and the A sounds more like a short I rogue the U and E are silent saxophone the X is really a KS sound, the PH is an F sound, and the E is silent Alone or in pairs, vowels stand for lots of different sounds.

And sometimes they're silent. When any English letter (whether it's a vowel or a consonant) is silent, don't include a hieroglyph for it. Some English sounds weren't spoken in ancient Egypt... English and ancient Egyptian aren't from the same language family, so some of the sounds they said don't exist in our alphabet. And some of the sounds we make did not exist in Egyptian. For example, they didn't need a hieroglyph for the TH sound because they didn't say any words containing that sound. You'll notice in the chart at the bottom that some sounds (like F and V) that are different to us weren't distinguished by the ancient Egyptians, so we have to use the same hieroglyph. Why F and V? Because these two sounds are articulated in roughly the same place in your mouth. Try saying "ffffff" and then change it to "vvvvvv." See how changing the flow of air in your mouth makes a subtle difference in the sound? Vowels were often left out... The Egyptians often used only hieroglyphs for consonant sounds to write their words. Thus, you can spell freight like this: F-R-T.

they buried the person with its posessions thinking that the person could take these things with it into the after life. and once it came back from the dead it would have its possesions and the rapped the person in cloth and sprayed some sort of perfume on the body and then put a emerald on the mummys head

Schools did not exist until the Romans invaded and Cleopatra was on the throne. However those wealthy enough to pay those who could already read and write to teach their children would.

1. boogers
2. used toilet paper
3. butt hole scratcher

Written in hieroglyphs on coffins, walls and canopic chests as well as papyrus theses spells were there to help the dead protect themselves against traps, snares and unearthly creatures. Many of these verses were later transfered to the book of the dead. Whist they are refereed to as spells they are not as we would expect of Harry Potter and the like. They were more like a prayer of protection.

Shortly after ascending the throne in 2589BC, Pharaoh Khufu commands his nephew Hemiunu the royal overseer of works, to prepare a burial place in keeping with his status as a god-king, a pyramid tomb far grander than anything that had been built before or since. A site was chosen on the Giza plateau west of the Nile not far from his capital at Memphis. Great care was taken in orientating the site to the four points of the compass and in levelling the site to provide a foundation for Khufu's Great Pyramid. When the slaves had cleared away the sand and cut the site roughly to shape highly skilled masons were called in to level the foundations. This was done by cutting a grid of channels and filling them with water. The rock was then cut back to the water level to make it perfectly flat. Finally the water was drained away and the channels filled with rubble.

At any one time as many as 20,000 workers may have been involved on this massive project. Some of them were free men doing particular tasks such as masons, tool makers, carpenters, scribes and slave overseers. The remainder and by far the majority were slaves, naked slaves too low in status to wear clothes.

Through Khufu's reign, the construction site teemed with workers of all kinds hard pressed to complete the monument before the king's death. Day after day, year after year, the quarries buzzed with activity. Through the dust the sun baked bodies of the quarry slaves stand out dark against the yellow limestone. Gangs of slaves bore holes using primitive drill bits and sand which acted as an abrasive. After they had drilled cores deep enough to define a block on one side, they packed the holes with pieces of porous wood and then doused it with water. The wood expands so fast that the block splits out with a crack. After the stone blocks are extracted from the quarry face they are strapped onto sledges. A mark is made on the stone by a scribe. This aided them to place the blocks in the pyramid just as they came out of the quarry ensuring a good fit without further finishing.

From dawn to dusk, gangs drag the sledges loaded with stones each weighing about 2.5 tons to staging areas at the base of the pyramid. Most of the stone blocks proceed up the ramp without future handling. Only a fraction of the stone blocks needed to be cut to precise dimensions by the masons. The slaves begin hauling the loaded sledges slowly up the clay and rubble ramp that spiralled around the emerging structure. The noise here is one of chanting slaves and the rumble of heavy sledges. Naked under the burning sun and streaming with sweat, the slaves bend to their thankless task.

At the working level teams of slaves called setters, using nothing more than primitive levers, brute force and experience from hard labour, shift the blocks from the sledges into their designated positions. Once the stones are delivered the hauling gang would make their way down the ramp carrying their sledge, in order to make the same back breaking journey up as they would several times a day. Toiling below were the support workers and guards under the watchful eyes of the Pharaoh's project managers, the scribes.

Other slaves are employed in maintaining and extending the ramps as the pyramid grew. These ramps are made of rubble, bound together with desert tafla (a type of clay) and laid with planks to ease the passage of the ramps. Rows of slave labourers are seen breaking up waste material from the quarries, mixing them with the desert tafla clay and loading the finished mixture into baskets. Individual baskets are loaded onto the shoulders of slaves for delivery to the ramp builders on the pyramid.

Boats made from reeds deliver brilliant white limestone from Tura just across the river. Here the slaves, in light provided by primitive lamps, toil in manmade caves to obtain the best stone. This stone will be used for the outer case of the pyramid. Once put in place and polished the effect will be awe inspiring.

Giant reed barges brought granite from Aswan over 400 miles upriver. Some of the granite stones from Aswan weigh 70 tons. Copper chisels used for quarrying limestone could not be used, a harder material was required. Balls of dolerite, a hard, black igneous rock, are used in the quarries of Aswan to extract the hard granite. These dolerite "pounders" were used to pulverize the stone around the edge of the granite block that needed to be extracted. To achieve this, a team of naked slaves would pound out the stone over a period of several days. At the bottom, they ram wooden pegs into slots they have cut, and fill the slots with water. The pegs will expand and split the rock with a resounding crack much more impressive than anything heard with the softer limestone. Then with hundreds of slaves hauling on ropes the great blocks are lowered onto long sledges. Long lines slaves, their bodies gleaming with sweat; drag the blocks to the river where they are loaded onto the barges.

He didn't "discover hieroglyphs", since they were all over Egypt on monuments and tombs and people had known about them for thousands of years before he was born. He helped to translate hieroglyphs, which is not the same thing.

Hieroglyphics became extinct because no one could understand it. Also Egypt was taken over by Rome so they lost their hieroglyphic language and spoke what the romans did.

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The Romans spoke Latin.

You might be surprised to learn that there was more than one. The stock answer would be hieroglyphics, but they were used by priests mostly and not by ordinary Egyptians for their daily activities. It's possible that they were more widely known during the earlier days of their development. In later dynasties, even the priests had forgotten most of the hieroglypics and how to read them. But there was at least one 'cursive' script (similar to modern longhand writing) that was used for purposes of general business and communication. The situation was not unlike the current understanding of church Latin. You can easily find examples of it, but it is more difficult to find people who know and use it.

They wore collars made of precious gems and gold. They also wore headdresses. They wore the white cloth like a short skirt around there waist

The Rosetta Stone led to the ability to decode hieroglyphics
Archaeologists found the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone had many languages on it including hieroglyphics.Later on college students figured out the secret of hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta stone found by some person, and deciphered 24 years later. it was writen in three different languages. Hieroglythics, greek and something else.

During the 1600's toys consisted of dolls, hoops, hobby horses, small animals, ceramic toys, noisemakers, puppets, pinwheels, spinning tops, small boats, horses, and knights. Many of these toys were also popular at earlier times.

No, but they used something similar to it though.

The Egyptians actually used papyrus from the Cyperus Papyrus plant which grew along the Nile in shallow marshes and pools. The papyrus flower was used for garlands at the temples; roots were used for fuel and utensils; and the stems were the raw material for sails, mats, cloth, rope, sandals, and most importantly, papyrus.

they used it to help communicate to others since written words weren't invented yet

I think that the Romans learned to read and write by using a system called the Roman numerals.

Roman numerals were and are a method of representing numbers only. The lack of a zero made it clumsy in anything other than basic calculations.