Mesopotamia (place)

Mesopotamia was the earliest human civilisation, and was the origin of such things as writing, numbers, ploughs, and cities. Mesopotamia was formed in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq, and gave birth to the Babylonian and Sumer civilisations. From 6000 BC towns and farms began to appear, and by 3500 BC Sumer was flourishing, and would soon provide the first form of writing known to humans.

Not far from Mesopotamia, people who lived in what would later be known as Palestine had been the first to cultivate cereals. Around 15,000 BC Kebaran hunters started eating wild cereal grasses, harvesting them with flint-bladed sickles. Cave-dwellers in the region began to make depressions in the floor to grind grain. By 12,000 BC wild cereals were essential to the diet of people in the Levant, and 2,000 years later the Natufians built small settlements in Judaea. Here they used pounders and pestles and mortars to supplement their diet with cereals. 8,000 BC saw the final transition to a farming community, as the Palestinians cleared ground, sowed seeds, and cultivated small plots.

With the rise of farming, permanent settlements began to develop, with a few hundred people living together in some settlements, which usually consisted of small mud-brick houses. Jericho was one large village which arose in these times.

Around 6,000 BC, the first town, Çatal Hüyük, grew up in central Anatolia. This large farming community had a population of several hundred in a fertile farming area near a river. The houses here were rectangular and often contained central courtyards. Ladders were used to enter the houses.

The town economy was based on some hunting, but mainly farming and cattle-breeding. Obsidian, apatite, and stalagmite were imported to the town, whose religious life centred around shrines in individual houses, and whose dead were buried beneath the floors of the houses.

Mesopotamian farmers began to settle along the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and around 6000 BC they invented the plough, which greatly increased the productivity of farm labourers. The farmers of the region also introduced irrigation schemes on a large scale, harnessing the annual floodwaters of the Euphrates to water fields some distance from the river. Dykes and ditches were also used in the Indus and Nile basins to stop flood damage. Pottery was also produced in Mesopotamia in buff colours with abstract, red-brown, painted decoration.

Sailing boats appeared on the Euphrates around 4500 BC, about the same time as they appeared in Egypt. Towns and cities began to develop around 4000-4500 BC, with each town having a temple and a royal palace. Markets for exchanging goods were also present. It is thought that the co-operation and organisation required for the irrigation schemes led to the need for larger communities. The importance of religion should not be underestimated, however, and large settlements such as Eridu in the Euphrates valley have been described as religious centres rather than genuine cities.

Around 3200 BC, the people of Uruk in Sumer (southern Mesopotamia) devised a system of signs and pictograms to record important transactions. Priests used sharp reed pens to mark clay tablets, representing numbers, objects, and ideas. These were used to keep grain accounts and records of land sales and other business matters.

This new innovation was so successful that it became obligatory for business deals to be written down to be accepted as genuine - a view we still hold today. The idea of writing was copied widely, and the Sumerian script became increasingly sophisticated. Originally pictures known as ideograms, a cuneiform script of wedge-shaped marks soon developed. These marks could stand for distinct sounds rather than just words and ideas.

It is though that a great flood took place in Mesopotamia around 2800 BC, and this may have formed the basis for parts of the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh, and the Biblical story of Noah and the ark. The Sumerians worshipped many gods, including those of the sky, love and war, air, and wisdom. Servants and family took poison in order to be buried along with their dead kings. Burial chambers of the kings were sumptuously fitted out with gold and other precious metals and jewels.

The world's first libraries were set up around 2500 BC in Shuruppak (Fara) and Eresh (Abu-Salabikh), and included proverbs of daily life. Conquest by Akkadian kings led to the development of trade: copper came from Magan (Oman), and stones and timber were brought from Syria and Iran. Trade also took place with Meluhha (Pakistan), bringing goods from the Indus valley.

By 2200 BC metalwork had grown in complexity, using gold, silver, and bronze to create finely-crafted artifacts. With the fall of Agade or Akkad and the rise of King Shulgi in Sumer, bureaucracy began to develop. Temples and monuments were constructed throughout the Sumerian empire, the calendar was reformed, and new measures for grain introduced. A network of city states was adminstered by governors, and garrisons were placed on main communication routes. Civil and temple administration were hierarchical in nature.

The Mesopotamian civilisation, then, was the origin of many of the facets of modern life we now take for granted. This period of human history saw the transition from prehistoric hunter-gatherers to a literate, complicated society similar to those of today.