Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mesopotamia was a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris-Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. It corresponds roughly to the territory of modern Iraq, and in the broader sense also includes parts of present-day Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Kuwait.
Mesopotamia comes from the ancient Greek roots mesos, meaning middle, and potamos, meaning river, and translates to the land between rivers. The two rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates, both rising in the Armenian highlands.
Mesopotamia is credited with inspiring developments including the invention of the wheel, the planting of the first cereal crops, the development of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture. Its people also invented copper-working, glass and lamp making, textile weaving, flood control, irrigation, and the earliest systems of banking and credit.
Mesopotamia is recognised as the cradle of some of the world's earliest civilizations because the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution began there around 10,000 BC. It was one of the four riverine civilizations where writing was invented, along with the Nile valley, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow River.
Important Mesopotamian leaders included Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, Sargon of Akkad, who established the Akkadian Empire, and Hammurabi, who established the Old Babylonian state. The Assyrian Empire was established by figures such as Ashur-uballit I and Tiglath-Pileser I.
The Code of Hammurabi was a set of laws created around 1780 BC by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, who codified over 200 laws. It is one of the earliest sets of laws found and one of the best-preserved examples of its type from ancient Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamian mathematics was based on a sexagesimal, or base 60, numeral system. This is the source of the 60-minute hour, the 24-hour day, and the 360-degree circle.