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Ancient Mesopotamia - an overview. Study at Cambridge Undergraduate Graduate International students Continuing education Executive and professional education Courses in education. About research at Cambridge. Near the rivers themselves, the soil is extremely fertile.
It is made up of rich mud brought down by the rivers from the mountains, and deposited over a wide area during the spring floods. When watered by means of irrigation channels, it makes some of the best farmland in the world. The marshy land near the sea also makes very productive farmland, once it had been drained.
Here, the diet is enriched by the plentiful supply of fish to had from the lagoons and ponds. It is this geography which gave rise to the earliest civilization in world history.
Agriculture is only possible in the dry climate of Mesopotamia by means of irrigation. With irrigation, however, farming is very productive indeed. A dense population grew up here along the Tigris and Euphrates and their branches in the centuries after BC. By BC, cities had appeared. The surplus food grown in this fertile landscape enabled the farming societies to feed a class of people who did not need to devote their lives to agriculture.
These were the craftsmen, priests, scribes, administrators, rulers and soldiers who made civilization possible. At the time when civilization first arose in Mesopotamia, the population was divided into two distinct groups: those who spoke Sumerian a language unrelated to any modern language , and those who spoke Semitic dialects related to modern Arabic and Hebrew. It was the Sumerian-speakers who lived near the great rivers, and it was they who built the first cities. Their language therefore became the first to be written down in world history.
They first appeared around BCE. By BCE the pictograms of which there were more than a thousand had become highly stylized, and were losing their original meanings. This was written by means of triangular-tipped stylus tools being pressed onto wet clay, and the symbols which had been reduced to a more manageable or so were highly stylized and abstract.
Early Mesopotamian writing The Schoyen Collection. Learning to write in cuneiform was a long and rigorous process, and literacy was confined to a small elite of priests and officials. Click here for more on the historical context in which writing first developed. Cuneiform was at first written in the Sumerian language. For more than a millennium Sumerian retained importance as the language of administration, religion and high culture.
However, in the centuries after BCE, it increasingly fell out of everyday use. The waxing and waning of these languages reflected population movements within Mesopotamia, and to the rise and fall of ruling kingdoms and empires with which they were linked. As each language fell into decline in everyday use, it retained its usage amongst the conservative temple priests — much like Latin was used in the monasteries of Medieval Europe long after the rest of society had moved on.
The cuneiform script, first developed by the Sumerians, remained in use, adapted for each successive language. One of the most remarkable things about Mesopotamian civilization is that here, right at the dawn of recorded history, we find states which organized their populations more tightly than all but a very few in subsequent ages.
Politically, the each Sumerian city formed its own city-state , composed of the city itself and the farmland for several miles around. These city-states were fiercely independent from one another, and warfare between them was frequent.
In early Sumerian cities, the temple stood at the very center of public life, both political and religious. The god of the city was held to own the city; in practice, this translated into the temple controlling the productive land of the city-state.
If this is correct, then we have here as near a communist state as we ever get in history. Whatever the true situation and it probably varied from city to city the temple acted as a major center of distribution: receiving, storing and disbursing the food and other goods, such as seed and agricultural implements as needed, and keeping back stocks for years of poor harvest or floods.
In these circumstances the first bureaucracies in history emerged. Scribes and accountants were needed to keep track of what was being brought into and sent out of the temple store houses. They left behind them thousands and thousands of documents on clay tablets, the majority of them as yet unstudied.
The temple would also have employed a large number of menial laborers, as well as skilled craftsmen, and probably even traders who were dispatched to barter with peoples further afield for much needed building materials and other products. The remains of the ancient ziggurat temple at the great Mesopotamian city of Ur Photo: Hardnfast.
By the mid-third millennium, the political dominance of the temple was seriously modified by the rise of kingship in all the Mesopotamian city-states. Exactly how this first came about is unknown, but it seems likely that this development was linked to the endemic warfare that set in between city-states at this time attested by the appearance of city walls.
It may have been that the high priests of the temples — who, in an age when politics and religion were deeply entwined would always have been highly political figures — became more and more important as the people of the city looked to them for military leadership; or it may have been that gifted war-leaders were given or seized pre-eminent power in the states. In any event, during the early third millennium BCE kingship arose in all the city-states, and in subsequent centuries became gathered more and more power and status to themselves judging by the ever-larger palaces that they built.
Accompanying this process was the alienation of land away from the temples, with the growth of large estates in the hands of rulers, and later of private individuals. Other aspects of economic life, such as trade and craftwork, followed a similar course. Hammurabi enthroned as king of Babylon by the god, Shamash The Louvre. The king was held to be the earthly representative of the patron god of the city. He was a sacred being, and to disobey him was to disobey the god.
His primary duty was to ensure that the people served their god properly. Because the people believed themselves to be the slaves of their god, they were also viewed as being slaves of the king. However, the king was also seen as the shepherd of his people, and his duty was not simply to ensure their obedience; it was also to provide justice and order, to protect property, and of course to defend the people from attack.
From time to time, one of these city-states would succeed in conquering its neighbors, with the conquering ruler becoming acknowledged by other kings as their overlord, or high king. Extensive states would thus be formed temporarily, enduring for a generation or two. However, holding such conquests together was hard, in the face of invasions from the surrounding mountains or deserts, or from rebellions from within. Mesopotamia would soon fall back into its normal patchwork of small states.
As time went by, however, the independence of the city-states was gradually undermined as more enduring states covering many cities arose. From the early 2nd millennium, southern Mesopotamia was usually unified under the control of various dynasties, ruling from the large city of Babylon. As a result, this region came to be called Babylonia. Some time later, northern Mesopotamia came to be dominated by the Assyrians. Mesopotamian rulers had wide duties. Not only had they to maintain law and order, but they had to ensure that the canals and irrigation systems were in proper working order, so that agriculture could thrive.
As a result, much of the bureaucratic apparatus that had grown up to serve the temple was now under the orders of the king, to assist him in fulfilling his awesome responsibilities. The Sumerian city-states had a complex hierarchy of scribes and officials to look after the complex workings of the temple and royal government.
Most notably, Ur, at the height of its power under Shulgi reigned BCE , had a large and elaborate bureaucracy to administer the remarkably centralized state it had built up.
A few centuries later, Hammurabi , king of Babylon BCE also had a large organization of officials to assist him rule his empire. By this date, Mesopotamian states also had a regular postal system at their service. To sustain the state apparatus, Mesopotamian landowners had to pay the king a portion of the crops they grew. Also, the king owned large estates from which he could draw income.
The individual cities were also responsible for the upkeep of their local irrigation systems, and could raise their own labor for this. To meet their local government needs, the subordinate cities could impose their own taxes and dues, as well as levy duties on local trade. One of the major contributions of ancient Mesopotamia to government practice was the development of written law codes.
However, this code drew on earlier codes going back to the Sumerian city-states of the 3rd millennium BCE. From them, we know a great deal about the Mesopotamian legal system. Cases were heard by judges appointed by the king; in important cases, a panel of judges was appointed. Appeals could be made to the king. Indeed, it seems that one of the reasons for Hammurabi issuing his Code was to make it clear to all his subjects who would have been accustomed to different laws in different places on what basis decisions would be arrived at if appeals were made to the royal court.
A person could not be convicted unless there was clear evidence of his or her guilt. By modern standards, punishments could be harsh — many crimes carried the death penalty with sentences ranging from hanging to burning. Flogging was used for various crimes, but fines were the most common punishment. As well as criminal law, there was a well-developed body of civil law.
Contracts, deeds and agreements had to be written on a clay tablet, witnessed on oath and placed in the temple archives, so that in case of dispute they could be referred to later.
Warfare was endemic in early Mesopotamian society, as cities quarreled over land and water rights. The Sumerian city-states organized the first true armies as opposed to warrior bands in history. We know very little about how these armies were composed or organized.
Their elite soldiers were armed with bronze armor and weapons, and less-well armed but more mobile troops were deployed slings and bows and arrows. In the 2nd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian armies adopted a new piece of military technology, the horse-drawn chariot. This was an innovation imported from the nomads of the steppes to the north.
Mastering chariot warfare demanded considerable training and practice, and the adoption of this technology must have given further impetus to the use of trained, perhaps even professional, soldiers.
Click here for the Assyrian army , which brought Mesopotamian warfare to its peak. Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic; more than 2, gods and goddesses have been identified. The chief of the gods varied from period to period. For the Sumerians, it was Enlin, the Sky God. The Babylonians worshipped Marduk above all others, and Ashur was the supreme god of the Assyrians.
Other notable gods and goddesses were Ishtar, goddess of love and fertility, Tiamat, god of the sea and chaos, and Sin, the moon god. Marduk, high god of the Babylonians the Louvre. The Mesopotamians conceived of the material world as being deeply bound up with the divine. Every household, village and city had its own god. Everything that happened on Earth had a divine dimension to it — was at least as much the result of the wishes of gods as of men and women.
The overriding purpose of man was to serve the gods. In early Mesopotamian times this meant that the entire economic life of a city-state was geared to the service of the temple. This gave religious justification for their complete authority over their subjects. Mesopotamian cosmology viewed the world as a flat disc, with a canopy of air above, and beyond that, surrounding water above and below. The universe was held to have come out of this water.
The Mesopotamians had a rich store of myths and legends. The early Mesopotamian city-state was, to a very large extent, a self-sufficient economic unit. It was viewed as being the household of the patron god — which meant, in practice, that the temple had an immense degree of control over economic activity. Craftsmen — metal-smiths, potters, spinners, weavers, carpenters — and laborers were what we would call employees of the temple.
So too were traders. Long-distance trade caravans were organized and supplied by the temple, and the traders were temple servants. As time went by this situation was modified by the rising importance of the secular ruler, the king.
As he grew in power, little by little he arrogated more economic control to himself. This was achieved through taking land the primary economic asset from the temple, and diverting the work of scribes, overseers, craftsmen and workmen to his own purposes. As more time passed, the situation changed again as the king granted lands and wealth to his officials and supporters, and so created a private market for goods and services separate from either king or temple.
Traders, craftsmen and laborers increasingly worked on their own account. Nevertheless, throughout ancient Mesopotamian times, temples and palaces retained huge economic influence. The Mesopotamians grew a variety of crops, including barley, wheat, onions, turnips, grapes, apples and dates.
They kept cattle, sheep and goats; they made beer and wine. Fish were also plentiful in the rivers and canals. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and their numerous branches, made farming possible in Mesopotamia. However, they could be wild rivers, and floods were frequent. At the same time, the hot, dry climate meant that year-round irrigation was needed to grow crops. The Euphrates river runs through a hot and dry landscape in Mesopotamia. Irrigation is needed to bring the arid Mesopotamian landscape to life photo: jamesdale The Mesopotamians were the first people to attempt to control water on a large scale by the use of an integrated system of dykes, reservoirs, canals, drainage channels and aqueducts.
Maintaining, repairing and extending this system was seen as one of the prime duties of a king. The water control system was built up generation by generation, covering an ever wider area and involving an ever denser network of waterways.
As a result of the large and concentrated population which grew up in Mesopotamia, farming was carried out by peasants rather than by slaves mass slavery tends to be a response to a shortage of labor. In early times these were bound to the land as temple or royal serfs; later, some became free farmers, owning their land outright, but many farmed estates owned by kings, temples, high officials and other wealthy members of the ruling classes.
All remained liable to forced labor on irrigation projects, or on the construction and maintenance of temples, palaces and city walls.
Until the spread of the use of iron, in the first millennium BCE, farming implements were made of stone and bone — as they had been during the Stone Age. Metals such as bronze were far too expensive to use in this way, while copper was too soft for most uses. Wood was also quite rare, as there is little tree cover in the region. However, the soil of Mesopotamia, once watered, is easy to work, and agriculture was highly productive.
The plain of Mesopotamia was created in comparatively recent times from an geological point of view by the mud brought down by the rivers. This means that the region is very short of useful minerals such as stone for building, precious metals and timber. This had the effect of stimulating trade with neighboring regions, and beyond. Later, Mesopotamian merchants ventured further afield, with trading contacts being developed with peoples in Syria and Asia Minor in the west, and in Iran and the Indus civilization , in the east.
With the coming of the Bronze Age, in about BCE, an added incentive to trade was the desire to acquire the copper and tin needed to make this valuable metal. Once Mesopotamian states started to equip their soldiers with bronze armor and weapons, this hunger intensified. However, these minerals are only found in widely scattered locations, so the search for them involved developing long distance trade routes.
Trade caravans of donkeys — camels were only domesticated after BCE were organized by specialist agents, to whom merchants entrusted their goods. Overland transport was by oxen. Most bulk goods such as the timbers brought from as far away as Lebanon was transported by river. Sea-going ships were also used, with trading voyages being made to the ports of northern India. Metal coinage would not come into use until much later, but trade was based on a regulated system of exchange — a given amount of seed would be worth so many ounces of silver, for example.
It was a mud brick metropolis built on the riches brought from trade and conquest and featured public art, gigantic columns and temples. At its peak, it had a population of some 50, citizens. Sumerians are also responsible for the earliest form of written language, cuneiform, with which they kept detailed clerical records.
By B. The first king of a united Sumer is recorded as Etana of Kish. Etana was followed by Meskiaggasher, the king of the city-state Uruk. A warrior named Lugalbanda took control around B. Gilgamesh is believed to have been born in Uruk around B. The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered to be the earliest great work of literature and the inspiration for some of the stories in the Bible.
In the epic poem, Gilgamesh goes on an adventure with a friend to the Cedar Forest, the land of the Gods in Mesopotamian mythology. When his friend is slain, Gilgamesh goes on a quest to discover the secret of eternal life, finding: "Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands. The Akkadian Empire existed from B. He was at one point an officer who worked for the king of Kish, and Akkadia was a city that Sargon himself established.
When the city of Uruk invaded Kish, Sargon took Kish from Uruk and was encouraged to continue with conquest. Sargon expanded his empire through military means, conquering all of Sumer and moving into what is now Syria. Under Sargon, trade beyond Mesopotamian borders grew, and architecture became more sophisticated, notably the appearance of ziggurats, flat-topped buildings with a pyramid shape and steps. The final king of the Akkadian Empire, Shar-kali-sharri, died in B.
Among these groups were the Gutian people, barbarians from the Zagros Mountains. In B. The ruler of Ur-Namma, the king of the city of Ur, brought Sumerians back into control after Utu-hengal, the leader of the city of Uruk, defeated the Gutians.
Ur-Namma was attacked by both the Elamites and the Amorites and defeated in B. Choosing Babylon as the capital, the Amorites took control and established Babylonia. Kings were considered deities and the most famous of these was Hammurabi , who ruled — B. Hammurabi worked to expand the empire, and the Babylonians were almost continually at war. The list of laws also featured recommended punishments to ensure that every citizen had the right to the same justice. Together with the control of the Amorites, this conquest marked the end of Sumerian culture.
Smelting was a significant contribution of the Hittites, allowing for more sophisticated weaponry that lead them to expand the empire even further. Their attempts to keep the technology to themselves eventually failed, and other empires became a match for them. The Hittites pulled out shortly after sacking Babylon, and the Kassites took control of the city. Hailing from the mountains east of Mesopotamia, their period of rule saw immigrants from India and Europe arriving, and travel sped up thanks to the use of horses with chariots and carts.
The Kassites abandoned their own culture after a couple of generations of dominance, allowing themselves to be absorbed into Babylonian civilization. Reception of a victorious general of the Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia. Around B. The Assyrian Empire continued to expand over the next two centuries, moving into modern-day Palestine and Syria. Under the rule of Ashurnasirpal II in B. His son Shalmaneser spent the majority of his reign fighting off an alliance between Syria, Babylon and Egypt, and conquering Israel.
One of his sons rebelled against him, and Shalmaneser sent another son, Shamshi-Adad, to fight for him. Three years later, Shamshi-Adad ruled. A new dynasty began in B. Modeling himself on Sargon the Great, he divided the empire into provinces and kept the peace. His undoing came when the Chaldeans attempted to invade and Sargon II sought an alliance with them.
The Chaldeans made a separate alliance with the Elamites, and together they took Babylonia.
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