- Categorized as the earliest of all civilizations as people formed permanent settlements
- Mesopotamia is a Greek word that means “between the rivers”
- Specifically, the area between the Tigris River and Euphrates River (present day Iraq)
- Mesopotamia is not within the “Fertile crescent“, it is in the more desert area that the “Fertile crescent” arcs
around
Geographic Conditions
- Little rainfall for crops
- Hot and dry climate in the summers
- Winters brought fierce windstorms leaving muddy river valleys
- Springs brought catastrophic flooding of the rivers
- Arid soil containing little minerals
- No stone or timber resources
Then why live in Mesopotamia?
- NATURAL LEVEES: embankments produced by build-up of sediment over thousands of years of flooding
Natural Levee
- create a high and safe flood plains
- make irrigation and canal construction easy
- provide protection
- the surrounding swamps were full of fish & waterfowl
- reeds provided food for sheep / goats
- reeds also were used as building resources
History of Mesopotamia
- Over the centuries, many different people lived in this area creating a collection of independent states
- Sumer- southern part (3500-2000 BCE)
- Akkad- northern part (2340 – 2180 BCE)
- Babylonia- these two regions were unified (1830-1500 BCE and 650-500 BCE)
- Assyria- Assyrian Empire (1100 -612 BCE)
Religion
- Position of King was enhanced and supported
- Kingship believed to be created by gods and the king’s power was divinely ordained
- Polytheistic religion consisting of over 3600 gods and demigods
- Shows diversity of religion from different regions
- Yet all of Mesopotamia shared the same religion and the same prominent gods
Ziggurats
- Important for gods to be honoured by religious ceremonies
- Ceremonies performed by priests in sacred temples
- Temples created from mud brick and placed on platforms due to constant flooding
- Temples evolved to ziggurats- a stack of 1-7 platforms decreasing in size from bottom to top
- Famous ziggurat was Tower of Babel (over 100m above ground and 91m base)
- Political structure an early form of democracy
- Frequent wars led to the emergence of warriors as leaders
- Eventually rise of monarchial
Sumerians
- Established the social, economic and intellectual basis of Mesopotamia
- First to develop writing in the form of cuneiform
- Sumerians are credited to have invented the wheel
- Became the first city of the world
- However, the Sumerians were not successful in uniting lower Mesopotamia
Akkadians
- Leader: Sargon the Great
- Sargon’s greatest achievement was the unification of lower Mesopotamia (after conquering Sumerians in 2331 BCE)
- Established capital at Akkad
- Spread Mesopotamian culture throughout Fertile Crescent
- Yet dynasty established by Sargon was short-lived… Akkadians were conquered by the invading barbarians by 2200 BCE
Babylonians
- Babylonians reunited Mesopotamia in 1830 BCE
- Used their central location to dominate trade and establish control over all of Mesopotamia
- KING HAMMURABI – conquered Akkad and Assyria and gained control of north and south
- Hammurabi’s Legacy: law code
- YET AGAIN, Mesopotamia was not unified for long…
- 10th century BCE, Assyria emerged as dominant force
- Assyrian reunited Mesopotamia and established the first true empire
- Assyrian army was most feared due to their brutal, bloodthirsty & terrorizing tactics and use of iron weapons, battering rams, chariots
- Assyrian Empire stretched from Persian Gulf north and West to Syria, Palestine and Egypt
- However, states began to revolt and ONCE AGAIN, Assyrian Empire collapsed by late 7th century BCE
- By 539 BCE, Mesopotamia part of the vast Persian Empire (led by Cyrus the Great)
- Persian Empire dominated for 800 years until Alexander the Great
Code of Hammurabi
- Code of 282 laws inscribed on a stone pillar placed in the public hall for all to see
- Hammurabi Stone depicts Hammurabi as receiving his authority from god Shamash
- Set of divinely inspired laws; as well as societal laws
- Punishments were designed to fit the crimes as people must be responsible for own actions
- Hammurabi Code was an origin to the concept of “eye for an eye…” ie. If a son struck his father, the son’s hand would be cut off
- Consequences for crimes depended on rank in society (ie. only fines for nobility)
Writing
- Greatest contribution of Mesopotamia to western civilization was the invention of writing
- allowed the transmission of knowledge, the codification of laws, records to facilitate trade
- First written communication was PICTOGRAMS
- As society evolved, the first form of writing was developed called CUNEIFORM (meaning “wedge shaped”), dating to 3500 BCE
- Cuneiform spread to Persia and Egypt and became the vehicle for the growth and spread of civilization and the exchange of ideas among cultures
Development of Writing
- Gilgamesh is an ancient story or epic written in Mesopotamia more than 4000 thousand years ago
- Gilgamesh is the first known work of great literature and epic poem
- Epic mentions a great flood
- Gilgamesh parallels the Nippur Tablet, a six-columned tablet telling the story of the creation of humans and animals, the cities and their rulers, and the great flood
- Gilgamesh and the Nippur tablet both parallel the story of Noah and the Ark (great flood) in the Old Testament of the Jewish and Christian holy books
- Modern science argues an increase in the sea levels about 6,000 years ago (end of ice age)
- the melting ice drained to the oceans causing the sea level to rise more than ten feet in one century
- From 1922 to 1934, an archaeologist named C. Leonard Woolley excavated the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur
- City famed in Bible as the home of patriarch Abraham
- many great discoveries such as extravagant jewelry of gold, cups of gold and silver, bowls of alabaster, and extraordinary objects of art and culture
- opened the world’s eyes to the full glory of ancient Sumerian culture
Great Death Pit
- Found at Ur was a mass grave containing the bodies of 6 guards and 68 court ladies (servants of kings and queens)
- servants walked down into the grave in a great funeral procession
- they drank a poisoned drink and fell asleep never to wake again, choosing to accompany the kings and queens in the afterlife
Legacies of Mesopotamia
- Revolutionary innovations emerged in Mesopotamia such as:
- codified laws
- the concept of kinship and the city-state
- the building of places of worship (ziggurats)
- the birthplace of writing (cuneiform)
- Invention of the wheel
- Oldest written records of a story of creation date back to Mesopotamia
- First civilization to make a prosperous living based on large scale agriculture
