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Tigris and Euphrates River
Valley, Mesopotamia
EPISD World History Team
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Printed: September 13, 2015
AUTHOR
EPISD World History Team
www.ck12.org
C HAPTER
Chapter 1. Tigris and Euphrates River Valley, Mesopotamia
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Tigris and Euphrates River
Valley, Mesopotamia
1.5 Tigris and Euphrates River Valley, Mesopotamia
Students Learning Objectives
At the end of this section the student will be able to:
• identify the major causes and describe the major effects of the events from 8000BC to 500 BC: the development of the river valley civilizations.
• summarize the impact of the development of farming (Neolithic Revolution) on the creation of river valley
civilizations.
• identify the characteristics of a civilization.
• describe the major political, religious/philosophical, and cultural influences of Persia, India, China, Israel,
Greece, and Rome, including the development of monotheism, Judaism, and Christianity.
The Fertile Crescent: Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Ur
Mesopotamia literally means "(Land) between rivers" in ancient Greek. The oldest known occurrence of the
name Mesopotamia dates to the 4th century BC, when it was used to designate the land east of the Euphrates in
north Syria. Later it was more generally applied to all the lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris, thereby
incorporating not only parts of Syria but also almost all of Iraq and southeastern Turkey. The neighboring steppes to
the west of the Euphrates and the western part of the Zagros Mountains are also often included under the wider term
Mesopotamia.
Throughout the centuries, historians have used these powerful words to describe the Middle East.
In the ancient Middle East, many great civilizations rose and fell. The religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
each trace their origins back to this part of the world.
All of these civilizations arose in the area known as the Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent stretches from the
Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Zagros Mountains in the east. It is bordered in the north by the Taurus Mountains
and in the south by the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Desert. Its shape resembles a crescent moon.
One area within the Fertile Crescent gave rise to the region’s most powerful empires and grandest cities. This area
was Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
The Fertile Crescent is the region in which humans first began farming and herding around 8,000 B.C.E. This
dramatic change from nomadic hunting and gathering allowed early humans to settle into permanent villages and to
begin accumulating a surplus of food.
With such a surplus, early villagers could begin to focus on developing the skills associated with civilization. Some
of them became priests, scribes, merchants, artists, teachers, and government officials. They began to build cities,
and before long, they were establishing empires. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and Phoenicians
all built great empires, each of which rose to glory in the Middle East.
Because they were constantly interacting through war and trade, the societies in the Middle East borrowed from
each other. They modified newly acquired ideas and technologies to suit their own needs. Often, these changes were
improvements. Over time, many aspects of various societies throughout the ancient Middle East began to resemble
each other.
The Middle East is also the crossroads of the ancient world. It is located at the merging point of three continents:
Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many travelers who journeyed from one continent to the next passed through the Middle
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FIGURE 1.1
Map showing the extent of Mesopotamia
East, absorbing its culture and introducing new ideas to the region. Throughout the centuries, its prized location
became the source of conflict. Its goods became the source of envy.
And its ideas became the source of faith.
The Sumerians were firmly established in Mesopotamia by the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, in the archaeological Uruk period, although scholars dispute when they arrived. It is hard to tell where the Sumerians might
have come from because the Sumerian language is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language.
Their mythology includes many references to the area of Mesopotamia but little clue regarding their place of
origin, perhaps indicating that they had been there for a long time. The Sumerian language is identifiable from
its initially logographic script which arose last half of the 4th millennium BCE.
By the 3rd millennium BCE, these urban centers had developed into increasingly complex societies. Irrigation
and other means of exploiting food sources were being used to amass large surpluses. Huge building projects
were being undertaken by rulers, and political organization was becoming ever more sophisticated. Throughout the
millennium, the various city-states Kish, Uruk, Ur and Lagash vied for power and gained hegemony at various
times. Nippur and Girsu were important religious centers, as was Eridu at this point. This was also the time
of Gilgamesh, a semi-historical king of Uruk, and the subject of the famous Epic of Gilgamesh. By 2600 BCE,
the logographic script had developed into a decipherable cuneiformsyllabic script.
The chronology of this era is particularly uncertain due to difficulties in our understanding of the text, our understanding of the material culture of the Early Dynastic period and a general lack of radiocarbon dates for sites in
Iraq. Also, the multitude of city-states made for a confusing situation, as each had its own history. The Sumerian
king list is one record of the political history of the period. It starts with mythological figures with improbably long
reigns, but later rulers have been authenticated with archaeological evidence. The first of these is Enmebaragesi of
Kish, c. 2600 BC, said by the king list to have subjected neighboring Elam. However, one complication of the
Sumerian king list is that although dynasties are listed in sequential order, some of them actually ruled at the same
time over different areas.
Enshakushanna of Uruk conquered all of Sumer, Akkad, and Hamazi, followed by Eannatum of Lagash who also
conquered Sumer. His methods were force and intimidation (see the Stele of the Vultures), and soon after his death,
the cities rebelled and the empire again fell apart. Some time later, Lugal-Anne-Mundu of Adab created the first, if
short-lived, empire to extend west of Mesopotamia, at least according to historical accounts dated centuries later. The
last native Sumerian to rule over most of Sumer before Sargon of Akkad established supremacy was Lugal-Zage-Si.
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Chapter 1. Tigris and Euphrates River Valley, Mesopotamia
During the 3rd millennium BCE, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and
the Akkadians which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa)
is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological
convergence. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the 3rd millennium as a sprachbund.
Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of Mesopotamia somewhere around the turn of the
3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE (the exact dating being a matter of debate), but Sumerian continued to be used as
a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the 1st century CE.
FIGURE 1.2
More details The reconstructed facade of
the Neo-Sumerian Great Ziggurat of Ur,
near Nasiriyah, Iraq
Life in Sumer
The first writing system. The plow. The sailboat. The first lunar calendar.
These accomplishments and more were the products of the city-states of Sumer, which arose on the flood plains of
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now modern-day Iraq. The Sumerians began to build their walled cities
and make significant advances beginning around 3500 B.C.E.
Sumerians also developed high-quality crafts, evidence of which was found in the royal tombs of Ur, excavated
by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. Trade also helped the Sumerians to secure vital items such as timber from
Lebanon and luxury goods such as the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli from the Indus River Valley.
Because of the surplus grain, the government could grow in size to support numerous officials and priests. It could
also pay thousands of workers with barley while they were building canals, city walls, and ziggurats or while they
were fighting to defend their city-state or extend its influence over the region. The barley was collected as a tax from
the farmers. Farmers were also required to give some time to the government to work on projects. Slaves and hired
workers also contributed.
As the government and economy grew in size and complexity, officials and merchants required a sophisticated
writing system to record transactions. First came number markings and simple pictograms, the writing system began
to incorporate pictures representing a physical object or idea (such as a picture of the sun to represent the sun).
As trade and government activity increased, the writing system began to incorporate more abstract pictograms and
phonograms, or symbols representing sounds. These new forms provided greater flexibility and speed in writing.
They were adopted by other cultures (such as the Assyrians) who did not even speak Sumerian. Sumerian Wisdom
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The Sumerians wrote on clay tablets, using a reed pen called a stylus. Once dried, these tablets became hard and,
fortunately for today’s researchers, endured for millennia in the hot, dry climate.
Thousands of these tablets have been unearthed. Some libraries have even been discovered with over 10,000 of these
clay tablets. And although the vast majority of these tablets contain records of goods collected and distributed by the
governments and trade transactions, some contain myths, stories, and letters. These documents have provided much
information about the culture and history of the Sumerian people.
With their ingenuity, the Sumerian people developed complex irrigation system and a written language. They were
the first people to use the plow to lift the silt-laden soil of their crop fields and they invented the sailboat. They were
the first people to design a calendar based on the phase of the moon and they developed a numerical system, based
on the number 60, that is still used to measure seconds and minutes. Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh was likely an actual king of Uruk in Babylonia who lived about 2700 B.C.E.
Sumerians recorded stories and myths about Gilgamesh, which were written on clay tablets. The stories were
combined into an epic tale. Versions of this tale were translated into other langauages including Akkadian, which
was spoken by the Babylonians.
The fullest surviving version is derived from twelve stone tablets, in the Akkadian language, which were found
stored in the famous library at Nineveh of Assyrian King Assurbanipal.
The epic relates the heroic deeds of Gilgamesh, who is the king of Uruk. His father is mortal and his mother is
a goddess. Since Gilgamesh is part mortal, he knows he must die one day. However, he longs for immortality,
whether through doing great deeds or discovering the secret of eternal life. He roams the earth on this quest and
meets Utnapishtim, the only human granted eternal life by the gods. He tells Gilgamesh many stories, including one
of a great flood that covered the Earth.
What happens to Gilgamest? Read the tale and find out. The following is an excerpt from Gilgamesh.
O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubartutu: Tear down the house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek living
beings! Spurn possessions and keep alive living beings! Make all living beings go up into the boat. The boat which
you are to build, its dimensions must measure equal to each other: its length must correspond to its width. Roof it
over like the Apsu. From Tablet XI — translation by Maureen Gallery Kovacs, 1998
A culture of many firsts, the Sumerians led the way for other societies that followed them.
Hammurabi and Hammurabi’s Code
The Babylonians used the innovations of the Sumerians, added to them, and built an empire that gave the world,
among other things, codified laws, a tower that soared above the earth, and one of the Seven Wonders of the
World. Babylonian language evolved from pictographs to cuneiforms throughout the life of the civilization.
Geographically, the empire of Babylonia occupied the middle and southern part of Mesopotamia. Situated between
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, it stretched from the present-day city of Baghdad south to the Persian Gulf.
Hammurabi ruled for nearly 42 years, c. 1792 to 1750 BC according to the Middle chronology. In the preface to the
law, he states, "Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared Marduk, the patron god
of Babylon (The Human Record, Andrea & Overfield 2005), to bring about the rule in the land." On the stone slab
there are 44 columns and 28 paragraphs that contained 282 laws.
The stele was probably erected at Sippar, city of the sun god Shamash, god of justice, who is depicted handing
authority to the king in the image at the top of the stele.
In 1901, Egyptologist Gustave Jéquier, a member of an expedition headed by Jacques de Morgan, found the stele
containing the Code of Hammurabi in what is now Khūzestān, Iran (ancient Susa, Elam), where it had been taken as
plunder by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the 12th century BC.
The Code of Hammurabi was one of several sets of laws in the ancient Near East. The code of laws was arranged
in orderly groups, so that everyone who read the laws would know what was required of them. Earlier collections
of laws include the Code of Ur-Nammu, king of Ur (c. 2050 BC), the Laws of Eshnunna (c. 1930 BC) and the
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Chapter 1. Tigris and Euphrates River Valley, Mesopotamia
FIGURE 1.3
Babylonian language evolved from pictographs to cuneiforms throughout the life
of the civilization.
codex of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (c. 1870 BC), while later ones include the Hittite laws, the Assyrian laws, and Mosaic
Law. These codes come from similar cultures in a relatively small geographical area, and they have passages which
resemble each other.
The Code of Hammurabi is the longest surviving text from the Old Babylonian period. The code has been seen as an
early example of a fundamental law regulating a government — i.e., a primitive constitution. The code is also one of
the earliest examples of the idea of presumption of innocence, and it also suggests that both the accused and accuser
have the opportunity to provide evidence. The occasional nature of many provisions suggests that the Code may be
better understood as a codification of Hammurabi’s supplementary judicial decisions, and that, by memorializing his
wisdom and justice, its purpose may have been the self-glorification of Hammurabi rather than a modern legal code
or constitution. However, its copying in subsequent generations indicates that it was used as a model of legal and
judicial reasoning.
"Hammurabi, the king of righteousness, on whom Shamash has conferred the law, am I."
"An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."
This phrase, along with the idea of written laws, goes back to ancient Mesopotamian culture that prospered long
before the Bible was written or the civilizations of the Greeks or Romans flowered.
"An eye for an eye ..." is a paraphrase of Hammurabi’s Code, a collection of 282 laws inscribed on an upright stone
pillar. The code was found by French archaeologists in 1901 while excavating the ancient city of Susa, which is in
modern-day Iran.
Hammurabi is the best known and most celebrated of all Mesopotamian kings. He ruled the Babylonian Empire
from 1792-50 B.C.E. Although he was concerned with keeping order in his kingdom, this was not his only reason
for compiling the list of laws. When he began ruling the city-state of Babylon, he had control of no more than 50
square miles of territory. As he conquered other city-states and his empire grew, he saw the need to unify the various
groups he controlled. A Need for Justice
Hammurabi keenly understood that, to achieve this goal, he needed one universal set of laws for all of the diverse
peoples he conquered. Therefore, he sent legal experts throughout his kingdom to gather existing laws. These laws
were reviewed and some were changed or eliminated before compiling his final list of 282 laws. Despite what many
people believe, this code of laws was not the first. Oldest Code Known
The oldest known evidence of a law code are tablets from the ancient city Ebla (Tell Mardikh in modern-day Syria).
They date to about 2400 B.C.E. — approximately 600 years before Hammurabi put together his famous code.
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FIGURE 1.4
Code on clay tablet
The prologue or introduction to the list of laws is very enlightening. Here, Hammurabi states that he wants "to make
justice visible in the land, to destroy the wicked person and the evil-doer, that the strong might not injure the weak."
The laws themselves support this compassionate claim, and protect widows, orphans and others from being harmed
or exploited.
The phrase "an eye for an eye" represents what many people view as a harsh sense of justice based on revenge. But,
the entire code is much more complex than that one phrase. The code distinguishes among punishments for wealthy
or noble persons, lower-class persons or commoners, and slaves.
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Chapter 1. Tigris and Euphrates River Valley, Mesopotamia
(ISN) Discussion and Study Questions
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Vocabulary
Quizlet Flashcard Vocabulary for River Valley Civilizations
TABLE 1.1:
Code of Hammurabi
cuneiform
dynasty
hieroglyphics
Mesopotamia
monarchy
monotheism
polytheism
Sumerians
Theocracy
Tigris & Euphrates Rivers
Ziggurat
a law code enacted by a Babylonian king, with scaled
punishments depending on social status, including "an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
a system of writing with wedge-shaped symbols, invented by the Sumerians around 3000 B.C..
a ruling family that passes its authority and power down
through many generations.
an ancient Egyptian writing system in which pictures
were used to represent ideas and sounds.
"land between two rivers" - the region located between
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq.
a government in which power is in the hands of a single
person.
a belief in a single, all powerful god.
a belief in many gods.
A people of Mesopotamia that created the first large,
complex society in human history
a government controlled by religious leaders; a form
of government in which the ruler is viewed as a divine
figure.
Major rivers that flow through Mesopotamia. They
were critical to the development of Mesopotamian civilization.
a religious, stepped-pyramid built by the Mesopotamians
References
1. . "N-Mesopotamia and Syria english" by Goran tek-en - Own workBased on;Karte von MesopotamienMesop
otamia Syria. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:N-Mesopotamia_and_Syria_english.svg#mediaviewer/File:N-Mesopotamia_and_Syria_english.svg .
2. . "Ancient ziggurat at Ali Air Base Iraq 2005" by en:User:Hardnfast - en-WP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Image:Ancient_ziggurat_at_Ali_Air_Base_Iraq_2005.jpg. Licensed under GFDL via Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_ziggurat_at_Ali_Air_Base_Iraq_2005.jpg#mediaviewer/File
:Ancient_ziggurat_at_Ali_Air_Base_Iraq_2005.jpg .
3. . "Prologue Hammurabi Code Louvre AO10237" by Marie-Lan Nguyen - Own work. Licensed under Publ
ic Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prologue_Hammurabi_Code
_Louvre_AO10237.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Prologue_Hammurabi_Code_Louvre_AO10237.jpg .
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