Mesopotamia

The World's Earliest Civilization

Britannica Educational Publishing, Kathleen Kuiper

• Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781615302086
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Celebrated for numerous developments in the areas of law, writing, religion, and mathematics, Mesopotamia has been immortalized as the cradle of civilization. Its fabled cities, including Babylon and Nineveh, spawned new cultures, traditions, and innovations in art and architecture, some of which can still be seen in present-day Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Readers will be captivated by this ancient culture's rich history and breadth of accomplishment, as they marvel at images of the magnificent temples and artifacts left behind.

CHAPTER 1
THE ORIGINS OF MESOPOTAMIAN HISTORY

Mesopotamia is the region in southwestern Asia where the world’s earliest civilization developed. The name “Mesopotamia” comes from a Greek word meaning “between rivers,” referring to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but the region can be broadly defined to include the area that is now eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and most of Iraq. This region was the centre of a culture whose influence extended throughout the Middle East and as far as the Indus Valley in the Indian subcontinent, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. This book covers the history of Mesopotamia from the prehistoric period up to the Arab conquest in the seventh century AD.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

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In the narrow sense, Mesopotamia is the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, north or northwest of the bottleneck at Baghdad, in modern Iraq; it is Al-Jazīrah (“The Island”) of the Arabs. South of this lies Babylonia, named after the city of Babylon. However, in the broader sense, the name “Mesopotamia” has come to be used for the area bounded on the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and on the southwest by the edge of the Arabian Plateau and stretching from the Persian Gulf in the southeast to the spurs of the Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northwest. Only from the latitude of Baghdad do the Euphrates and Tigris truly become twin rivers, the rāfidān of the Arabs, which have constantly changed their courses over the millennia. The low-lying plain of the Kārūn River in Persia has always been closely related to Mesopotamia, but it is not considered part of Mesopotamia as it forms its own river system.

Mesopotamia, south of Al-Ramādī (about 70 miles, or 110 kilometres, west of Baghdad) on the Euphrates and the bend of the Tigris below Sāmarrā’ (about 70 miles north-northwest of Baghdad), is flat alluvial land. Between Baghdad and the mouth of the Shaṭṭ al-‘Arab (the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, where it empties into the Persian Gulf) there is a difference in height of only about 100 feet (30 metres). As a result of the slow flow of the water, there are heavy deposits of silt, and the riverbeds are raised. Consequently, the rivers often overflow their banks (and may even change their course) when they are not protected by high dikes. In recent times they have been regulated above Baghdad by the use of escape channels with overflow reservoirs. The extreme south is a region of extensive marshes and reed swamps, hawrs, which, probably since early times, have served as an area of refuge for oppressed and displaced peoples.

The supply of water in the area is not regular. As a result of the high average temperatures and a very low annual rainfall, the ground of the plain of latitude 35° N is hard and dry and unsuitable for plant cultivation for at least eight months in the year. Consequently, agriculture without risk of crop failure, which seems to have begun in the higher rainfall zones and in the hilly borders of Mesopotamia in the 10th millennium BC, began in Mesopotamia itself, the real heart of the civilization, only after artificial irrigation had been invented, bringing water to large stretches of territory through a widely branching network of canals. Since the ground is extremely fertile and, with irrigation and the necessary drainage, will produce in abundance, southern Mesopotamia became a land of plenty that could support a considerable population. The cultural superiority of north Mesopotamia, which may have lasted until about 4000 BC, was finally overtaken by the south when the people there had responded to the challenge of their situation.

The present climatic conditions are fairly similar to those of 8,000 years ago. An English survey of ruined settlements in the area 30 miles (48 km) around ancient Hatra (180 miles [290 km] northwest of Baghdad) has shown that the southern limits of the zone in which agriculture is possible without artificial irrigation has remained unchanged since the first settlement of Al-Jazīrah.

The availability of raw materials is a historical factor of great importance, as is the dependence on those materials that had to be imported. In Mesopotamia, agricultural products and those from stock breeding, fisheries, date palm cultivation, and reed industries—in short, grain, vegetables, meat, leather, wool, horn, fish, dates, and reed and plant-fibre products—were available in plenty and could easily be produced in excess of home requirements to be exported. There are bitumen springs at Hīt (90 miles [145 km] northwest of Baghdad) on the Euphrates (the Is of Herodotus). On the other hand, wood, stone, and metal were rare or even entirely absent. The date palm—virtually the national tree of Iraq—yields a wood suitable only for rough beams and not for finer work. Stone is mostly lacking in southern Mesopotamia, although limestone is quarried in the desert about 35 miles (56 km) to the west and “Mosul marble” is found not far from the Tigris in its middle reaches. Metal can only be obtained in the mountains, and the same is true of precious and semiprecious stones. Consequently, southern Mesopotamia in particular was destined to be a land of trade from the start. Only rarely could “empires” extending over a wider area guarantee themselves imports by plundering or by subjecting neighbouring regions.

TIGRIS-EUPHRATES RIVER SYSTEM

The great river system of Southwest Asia comprises the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which have their sources within 50 miles (80 km) of each other in eastern Turkey. They travel southeast through northern Syria and Iraq to the head of the Persian Gulf. They are the rivers that define the region and provide the name for Mesopotamia, one of the cradles of civilization. The total length of the Euphrates (called in Sumerian: Buranun; Akkadian: Purattu; biblical: Perath; Arabic: Al-Furāt; Turkish: Fɩrat) is about 1,740 miles (2,800 km). The Tigris (Sumerian: Idigna; Akkadian: Idiklat; biblical: Hiddekel; Arabic: Dijlah; Turkish: Dicle) has a length of about 1,180 miles (1,900 km).

Having risen in close proximity, the Tigris and Euphrates diverge sharply in their upper courses, to a maximum distance of some 250 miles (400 km) apart near the Turkish-Syrian border. Their middle courses gradually approach each other, bounding a triangle of mainly barren limestone desert known as Al-Jazīrah (Arabic: “The Island”). There the rivers have cut deep and permanent beds in the rock, so their courses have undergone only minor changes since prehistoric times. Along the northeastern edge of Al-Jazīrah, the Tigris drains the rain-fed heart of ancient Assyria, while along the southwestern limit the Euphrates crosses true desert.

On the alluvial plain, south of Sāmarrā’ and Al-Ramādī, both rivers have undergone major shifts throughout the millennia, some as a consequence of human intervention. The 7,000 years of irrigation farming on the alluvium have created a complex landscape of natural levees, fossil meanders, abandoned canal systems, and thousands of ancient settlement sites. The location of tells, or raised mounds—under which are found the ruins of towns and cities of ancient Babylonia and Sumeria—often bears no relation to modern watercourses. In the vicinity of Al-Fallūjah and the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, the distance separating the rivers is some 30 miles (48 km), so small that, prior to its damming, floodwaters from the Euphrates often reached the capital on the Tigris. During the Sāsānian period (third century AD), an elaborate feat of engineering linked the two rivers along this narrow neck by five navigable canals (the Īsā, Ṣarṣar, Malik, Kūthā, and Shaṭṭ al-Nīl canals), allowing Euphrates water to empty into the Tigris.

South of Baghdad the rivers exhibit strongly contrasting characteristics. The Tigris, especially after its confluence with the silt-laden Diyālā, carries a greater volume than the Euphrates; cuts into the alluvium; forms tortuous meanders; and, even in modern times, has been subject to great floods and consequent natural levee building. Only below Al-Kūt does the Tigris ride high enough over the plain to permit tapping for flow irrigation. The Euphrates, by contrast, builds its bed at a level considerably above the alluvial plain and has been used throughout history as the main source of Mesopotamian irrigation.

The Gharrāf River, now a branch of the Tigris but in ancient times the main bed of that river, joins the Euphrates below Al-Nāṣiriyyah. In the southern alluvial plain, both rivers flow through marshes, and the Euphrates flows through Lake Al-Ḥammār, an open stretch of water. Finally, the Euphrates and Tigris join and flow as the Shaṭṭ al-‘Arab to the Persian Gulf.

The raw material that epitomizes Mesopotamian civilization is clay: in the almost exclusively mud-brick architecture and in the number and variety of clay figurines and pottery artifacts, Mesopotamia bears the stamp of clay as does no other civilization, and nowhere in the world but in Mesopotamia and the regions over which its influence was diffused was clay used as the vehicle for writing. Such phrases as cuneiform civilization, cuneiform literature, and cuneiform law can apply only where people had had the idea of using soft clay not only for bricks and jars and for the jar stoppers on which a seal could be impressed as a mark of ownership but also as the vehicle for impressed signs to which established meanings were assigned—an intellectual achievement that amounted to nothing less than the invention of writing.

THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE
OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

Questions as to what ancient Mesopotamian civilization did and did not accomplish, how it influenced its neighbours and successors, and what its legacy has transmitted are posed from the standpoint of 20th-century civilization and are in part coloured by ethical overtones, so that the answers can only be relative. Modern scholars assume the ability to assess the sum total of an “ancient Mesopotamian civilization”; but, since the publication of an article by the Assyriologist Benno Landsberger on “Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt” (1926; “The Distinctive Conceptuality of the Babylonian World”), it has become almost a commonplace to call attention to the necessity of viewing ancient Mesopotamia and its civilization as an independent entity.

Ancient Mesopotamia had many languages and cultures, and its history is broken up into many periods and eras. The area had no real geographic unity and, above all, no permanent capital city, so that by its very variety it stands out from other civilizations with greater uniformity, particularly that of Egypt. The script and the religious pantheon constitute the unifying factors, but in these also Mesopotamia shows its predilection for multiplicity and variety. Written documents were turned out in quantities, and there are often many copies of a single text. The pantheon consisted of more than 1,000 deities, even though many divine names may apply to different manifestations of a single god.

CUNEIFORM

The system of writing used in the ancient Middle East is called cuneiform. The name, a coinage from Latin and Middle French roots meaning “wedge-shaped,” has been the modern designation from the early 18th century onward. Cuneiform was the most widespread and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East. Its overall significance as an international graphic medium of civilization is second only to that of the Phoenician-Greek-Latin alphabet.

The origins of cuneiform may be traced back approximately to the end of the fourth millennium BC. At that time the Sumerians, a people of unknown ethnic and linguistic affinities, inhabited southern Mesopotamia and the region west of the mouth of the Euphrates known as Chaldea. It is to them that the first attested traces of cuneiform writing are conclusively assigned. The earliest written records in the Sumerian language are pictographic tablets from Erech (Uruk), evidently lists or ledgers of commodities identified by drawings of the objects and accompanied by numerals and personal names.

The Sumerian writing system was adopted by the Akkadians, Semitic invaders who established themselves in Mesopotamia about the middle of the third millennium. In adapting the script to their wholly different language, the Akkadians retained the Sumerian format for more complex notions, but pronounced them as the corresponding Akkadian words. They also kept the phonetic values, but extended them far beyond the original Sumerian inventory of simple types.

The expansion of cuneiform writing outside Mesopotamia began in the third millennium, when the country of Elam in southwestern Iran was in contact with Mesopotamian culture and adopted the system of writing. In the second millennium the Akkadian of Babylonia became a lingua franca in the entire Middle East, and cuneiform writing thus became a universal medium of written communication. Even after the fall of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, when Aramaic had become the general popular language, varieties of Late Babylonian and Assyrian survived as written languages in cuneiform almost down to the time of Christ.

During Mesopotamia’s 3,000 years of existence, each century brought a rebirth to the area. Thus classical Sumerian civilization influenced that of the Akkadians, and the Ur III empire, which itself represented a Sumero-Akkadian synthesis, exercised its influence on the first quarter of the second millennium BC. With the Hittites, large areas of Anatolia were infused with the culture of Mesopotamia from 1700 BC onward. Contacts, via Mari, with Ebla in Syria, some 30 miles (48 km) south of Aleppo, go back to the 24th century BC, so that links between Syrian and Palestinian scribal schools and Babylonian civilization during the Amarna period (14th century BC) may have had much older predecessors. At any rate, the similarity of certain themes in cuneiform literature and the Hebrew Bible, such as the story of the Flood or the motif of the righteous sufferer, is due to such early contacts and not to direct borrowing.

ACHIEVEMENTS

The world of mathematics and astronomy owes much to the Babylonians—for instance, the sexagesimal system for the calculation of time and angles, which is still practical because of the multiple divisibility of the number 60; the Greek day of 12 “double-hours”; and the zodiac and its signs. In many cases, however, the origins and routes of borrowings are obscure, as in the problem of the survival of ancient Mesopotamian legal theory.

The achievement of the civilization itself may be expressed in terms of its best points—moral, aesthetic, scientific, and, not least, literary. Legal theory flourished and was sophisticated early on, being expressed in several collections of legal decisions, the so-called codes, of which the best-known is the Code of Hammurabi. Throughout these codes recurs the concern of the ruler for the weak, the widow, and the orphan—even if, sometimes, the phrases were regrettably only literary clichés.

The aesthetics of art are too much governed by subjective values to be assessed in absolute terms, yet certain peaks stand out above the rest, notably the art of Uruk IV, the seal engraving of the Akkad period, and the relief sculpture of Ashurbanipal. Nonetheless, there is nothing in Mesopotamia to match the sophistication of Egyptian art.

Science the Mesopotamians had, of a kind, though not in the sense of Greek science. From its beginnings in Sumer before the middle of the third millennium BC, Mesopotamian science was characterized by endless, meticulous enumeration and ordering into columns and series, with the ultimate ideal of including all things in the world, but without the wish or ability to synthesize and reduce the material to a system. Not a single general scientific law has been found, and only rarely has the use of analogy been found. Never...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Origins of Mesopotamian History
• Chapter 2: Sumerian Civilization
• Chapter 3: The Old Babylonian Period
• Chapter 4: Mesopotamia to the End of the Achaemenian Period
• Chapter 5: Mesopotamia From c. 320 BC To c. AD 620
• Chapter 6: Mesopotamian Art and Architecture
• Chapter 7: Mesopotamian Religion
• Appendix A: Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses
• Appendix B: Mesopotamian Cities
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index