Mesopotamia

• 1. Introduction

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  Mesopotamia means the land between rivers, taken from the Greek words mesos for middle and potamos for river. The two rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates, both rising in the Armenian highlands and running down toward the Persian Gulf. Between them sits a historical region of West Asia that corresponds roughly to modern Iraq, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. This is the place credited with inspiring some of the most important developments in human history. The list is staggering. The wheel. The first cereal crops. Cursive script. Mathematics. Astronomy. Agriculture itself. Here, the earliest stirrings of the Neolithic Revolution began around 10,000 BC, which is why historians call this the cradle of some of the world's earliest civilizations. But a list of firsts does not explain how a strip of mud and reed between two unpredictable rivers became the engine of so much. Why did cities rise here and not elsewhere? How did a people invent banking, law, and the 60-minute hour? And what happened to the kingdoms that ruled this ground for roughly 2,000 years before they vanished into other empires? The answers begin in the soil, and in the water that both fed and drowned it.

• 2. The Logic Of Water

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  Agriculture in southern Mesopotamia is possible only with irrigation and good drainage, a fact that shaped everything that followed. The land near the Tigris and Euphrates was fertile, but ground farther from the water turned dry and largely uninhabitable. So settlers built canals, and digging canals took many hands. The need to mobilize enough labor to construct and maintain those channels pushed people together into urban settlements and, with them, centralized systems of political authority.

  The rivers gave more than water. They offered fish, used both for food and fertilizer, along with reeds and clay for building. Early farmers softened the soil with wooden plows before planting barley, onions, grapes, turnips, and apples. Mesopotamian settlers were among the first people to make beer and wine. With irrigation working, the food supply here was comparable to that of the Canadian prairies, a yield rich enough to sustain dense populations and the specialists they required.

  The same rivers that sustained life also destroyed it. Frequent floods ravaged entire cities, and the weather was unpredictable enough that crops were often ruined. Farmers kept cows and lambs as backup food sources. Over time, the southernmost parts of Sumerian Mesopotamia suffered increased salinity in the soil, which led to a slow urban decline and a shift of power northward to Akkad. The land that built civilizations could also poison itself.

• 3. Cities That Would Not Unite

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  Sumerian cities grew among rivers and streams separated by vast stretches of open desert or swamp, where nomadic tribes roamed. Communication between these isolated cities was difficult and at times dangerous. So each Sumerian city became a city-state, independent of the others and fiercely protective of its independence. The result was a political history of almost constant warfare.

  Eannatum eventually unified Sumer, but the achievement was tenuous and failed to last. Only a generation later, in 2331 BC, the Akkadians conquered Sumer. The Akkadian Empire became the first successful empire to last beyond a single generation and to see a peaceful succession of kings. Even it proved relatively short-lived, since the Babylonians conquered the Akkadians within only a few generations.

  The Mesopotamians believed their kings and queens descended from the city gods, yet unlike the ancient Egyptians they never believed their kings were actual gods. Most kings called themselves king of the universe or great king. Another common title was shepherd, since a king was expected to look after his people. When Assyria grew into an empire, it was divided into provinces named after their main cities, including Nineveh, Samaria, Damascus, and Arpad. Each had its own governor, responsible for collecting taxes, calling up soldiers, supplying temple workers, and enforcing the laws.

• 4. The First War

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  The first recording of a war occurred around 3200 BC, though warfare did not become common until about 2500 BC. With the end of the Uruk phase, walled cities grew, and many isolated Ubaid villages were abandoned, a sign of rising communal violence. An early king named Lugalbanda was said to have built the white walls around his city. As city-states expanded, their spheres of influence overlapped, and they argued, especially over land and canals.

  Gilgamesh, an Early Dynastic II king of Uruk around 2600 BC, was commended for military exploits against Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Mountain. Later poems and songs claimed he was two-thirds god and only one-third human. From the end of the Early Dynastic III period comes the Stele of the Vultures, which commemorates the victory of Eannatum of Lagash over the rival city of Umma. It is the oldest monument in the world that celebrates a massacre.

  King Sargon conquered all the cities of Sumer, took some cities in Mari, then went to war with cities in modern-day Syria. The Neo-Babylonian kings used deportation as a means of control, much as the Assyrians before them. For the Neo-Babylonian kings, war brought tribute, plunder, sought-after metals and quality wood, and prisoners who could be put to work as slaves in the temples they built. There is evidence that the city Ascalon was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II in 604 BC.

• 5. Wedges In Clay

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  Cuneiform literally means wedge-shaped, named for the triangular tip of the stylus used to press signs into wet clay. It was invented around the mid-4th millennium BC for the Sumerian language, an agglutinative language isolate. The standardized form of each sign appears to have developed from earlier pictograms. The earliest texts are 7 archaic tablets from the É, a temple dedicated to the goddess Inanna at Uruk, in a building its excavators labeled Temple C.

  The early logographic system took many years to master, so only a limited number of people were hired and trained as scribes. Literacy stayed narrow until a syllabic script was adopted under Sargon's rule, after which significant portions of the population could read and write. Massive archives have been recovered from Old Babylonian scribal schools that spread that literacy. An old Sumerian proverb warned that he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn.

  Women as well as men learned to read and write, and for the Semitic Babylonians this meant mastering the extinct Sumerian language and a complicated, extensive syllabary. Much Babylonian literature was translated from Sumerian originals, and students used vocabularies, grammars, and interlinear translations. One of the most famous works was the Epic of Gilgamesh, in twelve books, translated from the original Sumerian by a man named Sîn-lēqi-unninni and arranged on an astronomical principle. Each division tells a single adventure in Gilgamesh's career, and the whole is a composite product whose stories may have been artificially attached to its central figure.

• 6. Counting In Sixties

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  Mesopotamian mathematics rested on a sexagesimal numeral system, built on base 60. That choice still governs daily life. It is the source of the 60-minute hour, the 24-hour day, and the 360-degree circle. The Sumerian calendar was lunisolar, made of three seven-day weeks within a lunar month. The Babylonians measured the circumference of a circle as three times the diameter and its area as one-twelfth the square of the circumference, which would be correct only if pi were fixed at 3. One discovered tablet, however, uses pi as 25/8, or 3.125.

  The clay tablet YBC 7289, from around 1800 to 1600 BC, gives an approximation accurate to about six decimal digits in four sexagesimal figures. The Babylonians cared less about exact solutions than about useful approximations, often using linear interpolation to estimate intermediate values. The Plimpton 322 tablet, created around 1900 to 1600 BC, lists Pythagorean triples and represents some of the most advanced mathematics produced before Greek mathematics.

  From Sumerian times, temple priesthoods tried to link current events to the positions of planets and stars. In Assyrian times, Limmu lists recorded events year by year alongside planetary positions, and where they survive they let historians fix relative dates against absolute ones. Babylonian astronomers could predict eclipses and solstices. During the 8th and 7th centuries BC they developed a new approach, employing internal logic within their predictive planetary systems, an advance some scholars have called the first scientific revolution. The only Greek-Babylonian astronomer known to have supported a heliocentric model was Seleucus of Seleucia, born in 190 BC, who correctly theorized that tides result from the Moon's attraction.

• 7. Diagnosis And Invention

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  The most extensive Babylonian medical text is the Diagnostic Handbook, written by the ummânū, or chief scholar, Esagil-kin-apli of Borsippa, during the reign of the king Adad-apla-iddina, who ruled from 1069 to 1046 BC. The oldest Babylonian medical texts date back to the Old Babylonian period in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. Alongside contemporary Egyptian medicine, the Babylonians introduced diagnosis, prognosis, physical examination, enemas, and prescriptions.

  Esagil-kin-apli's handbook listed medical symptoms with detailed empirical observations and logical rules for combining symptoms into a diagnosis and prognosis. It rested on a set of axioms, including the strikingly modern view that examining a patient's symptoms can reveal the disease, its cause, its likely course, and the chance of recovery. He described the symptoms for many varieties of epilepsy and related ailments. Patients were treated with bandages, creams, and pills, and when a cure failed, physicians often turned to exorcism to cleanse a patient of curses.

  Mesopotamian people invented metal and copper-working, glass and lamp making, textile weaving, flood control, water storage, and irrigation. They were one of the first Bronze Age societies and moved from copper, bronze, and gold on to iron. Palaces were decorated with hundreds of kilograms of these expensive metals, and copper, bronze, and iron armed soldiers with swords, daggers, spears, and maces. According to a recent hypothesis, the Archimedes' screw may have been used by Sennacherib, King of Assyria, for the water systems at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Nineveh in the 7th century BC. Later, in the Parthian or Sasanian periods, the Baghdad Battery was created, possibly the world's first battery.

• 8. Gods, Law, And Descendants

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  The Ancient Mesopotamian religion is the first recorded religion in the world. Mesopotamians pictured the world as a flat disc, surrounded by a huge holed space, with heaven above. They believed water lay everywhere, on top, bottom, and sides, and that the universe was born from this enormous sea. Their religion was polytheistic. The Sumerian word for universe is an-ki, naming the god An and the goddess Ki, whose son Enlil, the air god, was the most powerful and chief god of the pantheon.

  Mesopotamia became more and more a patriarchal society over its history, as shown by the successive law codes of Urukagina, Lipit-Ishtar, and Hammurabi. In the earliest Sumerian period the en, or high priest of male gods, was originally a woman, and the high priest of female goddesses a man. Thorkild Jacobsen and others have suggested early society was ruled by a council of elders with men and women equally represented, until the status of women fell while that of men rose. The Code of Hammurabi, created around 1780 BC, codified over 200 laws and is one of the earliest and best-preserved law codes from ancient Mesopotamia. Examination of those laws shows a progressive weakening of women's rights and increasing severity toward slaves. Even so, women in Mesopotamia could own property and, with good reason, obtain a divorce.

  These civilizations influenced the Abrahamic religions, with their cultural values and literary influence especially evident in the Book of Genesis. The line did not end with the ancient kingdoms. Modern Assyrians remain direct descendants of the native Mesopotamians, and one study suggests that contemporary Assyrians and Yazidis from northern Iraq may carry stronger continuity with the original genetic stock that gave rise to later Near Eastern populations.