I'm doing my readings for just an intro to World History gen ed course...and am having trouble understanding what regions, city-states, etc are where and which ones overlap.

If I am reading correctly...

Mesopotamia is describing the whole area of Southwest Asia around the Fertile Crescent where farming/living was actually possible for the first complex societies to be developed.

Then city-states like Ur, Uruk Nineveh, are then all in Mesopatamia.

Then I get confused as to what/where Sumer is. Is Sumer just a region of city-states inside Mesopotamia? Then also, what is Babylon? I looked on a map and it seems to be the same area in which Sumer and Mesopatamia are.

Just wanted to make sure I know where everything is taking place and that I am on the right page about where all these places are. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Read more, and from what I read...Babylon is a territorial state along with Hittite, Egypt, etc.

Did it happen? I'm currently reading two books on the 14th century - Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror and Ian Mortimer's Edward III: The Perfect King - with Ms. Tuchman implying that it probably happened and Mr. Mortimer saying:

Hence we may be confident that the rape story was a piece of propaganda invented by one of Edward’s enemies on the Continent.

As a non-historian, it looks like there's not enough information to confirm either view.

Were patron/client relationships something that only the wealthy participated in? Or did common, uneducated folk have these relationships as well?

I realize there are a lot of questions here, so I guess an ideal answer would be a snapshot of your average Marcus Mediocris in the city of Rome, focusing on how his client/patron relationship(s) played out practically in his daily life. I'd also be interested to know what aspects of that experience were unique to a particular time in Roman history, and which were relatively preserved across the centuries before the fall of the western empire.

I've been reading an article about about the Serrata of the Great Council of Venice and came upon this:

Presented for the third time on 28 February 1296 Venetian blackberries (corresponding to 28 February 1297 in the calendar of the rest of Europe), the law was finally approved.

I vaguely remember seeing different dates being mentioned in connection to Venice before, but I can't find anything about a different calendar being used in Venice or about "Venetian blackberries".

Anybody here familiar with this?

Was their a relationship between the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico (the Aztecs, Maya, etc) and the Native American groups of North America? If so, what was the nature of the relationship?

The post before about the same question was removed because of inappropriate wording so I repost it. Thanks!

As an extension of this, was there ever a time when British nations considered themselves truly "of Europe" and didn't put a divide between themselves and the mainland European nations?

I noticed in doing research for a dissertation that not a single Sultan of Ottoman Turkey during their golden age made the Hajj, not even when the 2 holy cities fell into Turkish possession after their conquest of Egypt.

I was just wondering how common this is for an Islamic ruler, because obviously the Ottomans did a lot of things differently, and I need to know if this is one of those. Did many rulers decide the Hajj was too far away or too much of a hassle? Or were the Turks just really pragmatic?

Thanks in advance.

I mean, sure, we have historians that document the years and everything that happened, but do we know if, in actual fact, the events may have happened a slightly different way? Or if they may have actually occurred months or even years before documented?

Just curious.

Thank you.

A complete history of the world.

I'm really interested in European history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the High Middle Ages, but I always hear the idea that the Dark Ages is a really unfitting misnomer and leads people to believe more in technological stagnancy. I heard that the Dark Ages merely means that the history of the time isn't recorded well, making it 'dark' and unknown.

So, I'd like to know, what technological developments were made during this time that disprove the idea of stagnancy?