Mesopotamia

Ancient Middle East

Prehistory • Mesopotamia, an ancient Greek term meaning "the land between rivers,"

is considered to be the cradle of civilization because this is where we find the origins of agriculture, written language, and cities. Mesopotamia now present-day Iraq…A prehistoric hand axe stained with human blood has provided scientists with valuable information about humans living over 100,000 years ago!The settlement of humans in the Near East began with the movement of Homo erectus off the African continent roughly 2 million years ago during the Paleolithic period. Over the course of several thousand years, Homo erectus spread rapidly throughout the Near East and then into Europe and Southeast Asia.The first three phases of the Paleolithic period (Lower, Middle, and Upper) extend from roughly 2.5 million years BC through 14,000 BC and 9000 BC, humans lived in circular or semi-circular structures called pit houses. These houses often had hearths and plaster floors and sometimes several pits were linked together to form various rooms.

• Plants and animals were domesticated in the Near East roughly between 11,000 and 6500 BC. By 9000 BC, modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) were living in settled communities throughout the Near East.

• To the left is a model of a section of a house found at the archaeological site of Jarmo, Iraq. The settlement of Jarmo dates from the pre-pottery Neolithic period, between 9000 and 7000 BC. It is believed that Jarmo had a population of 150-200 people who lived in 20-30 houses like this one, spread over an area of 3.2 acres.

Fertile Cresent

• Between 6000 and 4000 BC, farming communities of increasing size and complexity developed throughout the Tigris-Euphrates valley with a few central towns of perhaps 2000 inhabitants.

• By 5800 BC, people were living in the southern plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The land in this region was exceptionally fertile, but the rainfall was insufficient to grow crops. The rivers were undependable, drying up in the searing heat of the summer. Irrigation was the solution to these problems. Over time, ditches laced the fields near the rivers, making the land a maze of artificial waterways.

The First Cities

• For the ancient Mesopotamians, their cities were the centers of life. When they looked back to the beginning of time, they did not see a Garden of Eden, but rather an ancient site called Eridu, which they believed was the first city ever to be created. Ancient Mesopotamia is where the world's first cities appeared around 4000 - 3500 BC.

Development of cities

• No one knows for sure why urbanization began in Mesopotamia. The development of cities could have occurred due to environmental conditions. Lack of rainfall might have been the inspiration for people to organize themselves in a common effort to build canals for the irrigation of farmland. Another reason may have been the need for protection on the open plain, which could have led people to gather together to create walled enclaves. Whatever the reasons, this was the first time in history that humankind channeled its energies towards addressing the needs of a community as a whole.

Religion • The cultures of Mesopotamia had a polytheistic belief system, which means that the

people believed in multiple gods instead of just one. They also believed in demons created by the gods, which could be good or evil. The people of Mesopotamia worshiped these other worldly beings to keep the beings happy, because if one of these powerful beings was angered then the people of Mesopotamia would, in some way, be punished for that unhappiness. They believed that when something bad happened, whether a natural disaster or not, it was because the correlating god was angry at them, so they did their best to keep the gods happy.

• Each city had its own patron deity, some of which were connected to specialized occupations. There were also gods and goddess, the rulers of the sky, air, and more, which received more attention from worshipers. To worship the gods and goddesses, the people of Mesopotamia built large structures, called Ziggurats that served as temples. Inside the worshiping area of the Ziggurat people would place carved stone human figures with wide eyes and clasped hands, praying on behalf of the people of Mesopotamia. This area was also where people could make offerings to please the deities or regain their favor.

City-state

• he Sumerians were the first people to migrate to Mesopotamia, they created a great civilization. Beginning around 5,500 years ago, the Sumerians built cities along the rivers in Lower Mesopotamia, specialized, cooperated, and made many advances in technology. The wheel, plow, and writing (a system which we call cuneiform) are examples of their achievements. The farmers in Sumer created levees to hold back the floods from their fields and cut canals to channel river water to the fields. The use of levees and canals is called irrigation, another Sumerian invention. A typical Sumerian city-state, notice the ziggurat, the tallest building in the city.

City-state

• The Sumerians had a common language and believed in the same gods and goddesses. The belief in more than one god is called polytheism. There were seven great city-states, each with its own king and a building called a ziggurat, a large pyramid-shaped building with a temple at the top, dedicated to a Sumerian deity. Although the Sumerian city-states had much in common, they fought for control of the river water, a valuable resource. Each city-state needed an army to protect itself from its neighbors.

• Around 2,300 BC, the independent city-states of Sumer were conquered by a man called Sargon the Great of Akkad, who had once ruled the city-state of Kish. Sargon was an Akkadian, a Semitic group of desert nomads who eventually settled in Mesopotamia just north of Sumer. The Sumerian king, Lugal-Zaggisi, tried to form a coalition of Sumerian city-states against Sargon, but he was defeated by the Akkadian. Sargon is considered the first empire builder. Sargon made Agade the capital city of his empire.

• Sargon's daughter, Enheduanna, was first world's first credited author because she signed her name to a set of poems she wrote about her gods and goddesses. Sargon's son and grandson ruled after him, but eventually the Akkadian Empire fell, and was replaced by the Old Babylonian Empire.

Map of Mesopotamia

Writing • The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly the

same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship suggests that Mesopotamia’s writing appeared first. That writing system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. At first, this writing was representational: a bull might be represented by a picture of a bull, and a pictograph of barley signified the word barley. Though writing began as pictures, this system was inconvenient for conveying anything other than simple nouns, and it became increasingly abstract as it evolved to encompass more abstract concepts, eventually taking form in the world’s earliest writing: cuneiform. An increasingly complex civilization encouraged the development of an increasingly sophisticated form of writing. Cuneiform came to function both phonetically (representing a sound) and semantically (representing a meaning such as an object or concept) rather than only representing objects directly as a picture

Code of Hammurabi

• One of the earliest and most complete ancient legal codes was proclaimed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, who reigned from 1792 to 1750 B.C. Hammurabi expanded the city-state of Babylon along the Euphrates River to unite all of southern Mesopotamia. His code, a collection of 282 laws and standards, stipulated rules for commercial interactions and set fines and punishments to meet the requirements of justice. Hammurabi’s Code was proclaimed at the end of his reign and carved onto a massive, finger-shaped black stone stela (pillar) that was looted by later invaders and rediscovered in 1901 by a French archaeological team in present-day Iran.

The code• The black stone stela containing Hammurabi’s Code was carved from a single, four-ton

slab of diorite, a durable but incredibly difficult stone for carving. At its top is a two-and-a-half-foot relief carving of a standing Hammurabi receiving the law—symbolized by a measuring rod and tape—from the seated Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice. The rest of the seven-foot-five-inch monument is covered with columns of chiseled cuneiform script.

• The text, compiled at the end of Hammurabi’s reign, is less a proclamation of legal principles than a collection of precedents set between prose celebrations of Hammurabi’s just and pious rule. The 282 edicts are all written in if-then form. For example, if a man steals an ox, he must pay back 30 times its value. The edicts range from family law to professional contracts and administrative law, often outlining different standards of justice for the three classes of Babylonian society—the propertied class, freedmen, and slaves. A doctor’s fee for curing a severe wound would be 10 silver shekels for a gentleman, 5 shekels for a freedman and two shekels for a slave. Penalties for malpractice followed the same scheme: a doctor who killed a rich patient would have his hands cut off, while only financial restitution was required if the victim was a slave. Hammurabi’s Code provides some of the earliest examples of the doctrine of “An eye for an eye.”