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MESOPOTAMIA
OVERVIEW
ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
GEOGRAPHY
• "Mesopotamia" means "the land between the
rivers" or "the land between two rivers."
• This name was appropriate because ancient
Mesopotamia was located between the Tigris
and Euphrates Rivers in the present-day Middle
Eastern country of Iraq
• The twin rivers actually begin in eastern Turkey,
flow southeast, converge in southeast Iraq, and
empty into the Persian Gulf.
CITY-STATES
• The people who established the world's first
civilization around 3500 BCE in southern
Mesopotamia were known as the Sumerians.
• The Sumerians learned to control the Tigris
and Euphrates Rivers by constructing levees
and irrigation canals. As a result, a stable
food supply existed, and the Sumerian
villages evolved into self-governing citystates.
CITY-STATES
• At the center of each city-state was a temple
surrounded by courts and public buildings.
• The city-state also included the fertile farming land
outside the city wall.
• The people constructed their homes, public
buildings, and city walls out of sun-dried mud brick.
ZIGGURATS
• The ziggurat housed each city-state's patron god or
goddess. Only priests were permitted inside the
ziggurat; as a result, they were very powerful
members of Sumerian society.
WRITING SYSTEM
• Evolved from simple pictographic writing,
Sumerian cuneiform emerged as the world's
first writing system. The term cuneiform
means "wedge-shaped."
• Sumerians wrote on clay tablets that would
either be dried in the sun or fired in kilns to
make the writing permanent.
• Cuneiform was learned in Sumerian schools
called edubbas, or tablet houses. Only a
select group of boys were able to attend
Sumerian schools
SCRIBES
• Scribes were very valuable in order to maintain and
improve the record keeping that the Sumerians
deemed so very necessary.
GOVERNMENT
• The priest-king ruled through a series of bureaucrats,
many of them priests, that carefully surveyed land,
assigned fields, and distributed crops after harvest.
• This new institution of monarchy required the invention of
a new legitimation of authority beyond the tribal
justification of chieftainship based on concepts of kinship
and responsibility.
• So the Sumerians seemed to have at first justified the
monarch's authority based on some sort of divine
selection, but later began to assert that the monarch
himself was divine and worthy of worship. He was later
seen as the chief servant of the gods and held
ceremonies to please them.
GILGAMESH
• Was the priest-king of Uruk which was located on
the Euphrates River approximately fifty miles
northwest of Ur.
• Epic of Gilgamesh
HAMMURABI
• One of the city-states built was named Babylon,
and it was ruled by a king named Hammurabi. As
Hammurabi rose to power, he began conquering
the city-states of Mesopotamia.
• Hammurabi provided uniformity among the citystates by enacting a code of law. The code of law
provided consistent justice and covered many
aspects of daily life.
HAMMURABI’S CODE
• Hammurabi's code, was a law of exact revenge. This is
revenge in kind: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
a life for a life," and reveals to us that human law has as
its fundamental basis revenge.
• Sumerian law was also only partly administered by the
state; the victim had to bring the criminal to court. Once
there, the court mediated the dispute, rendered a
decision, and most of the time a court official would
execute the sentence
• It fell on the victim or the victim's family to enforce the
sentence.
• Finally, Sumerian law recognized class distinctions; under
Sumerian law, everyone was not equal under the law.
THE STELE
• The code begins
and ends with
addresses to the
gods. Even a legal
code was in those
days regarded as a
subject for prayer,
though the prayers
here are chiefly
cursings of whoever
shall neglect or
destroy the law
INVENTIONS
• The water clock, the twelve-month calendar based
on lunar cycles, the wheel, the plow, and the
sailboat.
• Math based on the number 60
• The Mesopotamian astronomers organized the belt
of stars around the celestial Equator into the 12
major divisions we know as the Zodiac
OTHERS
• The Mesopotamian city-state of Babylon was
conquered by a people known as the Kassites and
then the Hittites, then the Assyrians.
• The Hittites rose to power because they used iron
weapons, iron weapons were much stronger than
the bronze weapons used by their opponents.
• The Assyrians were cruel rulers who exiled large
groups of the conquered people to prevent
uprisings.
• These conquests and scatterings of people
represent examples of cultural diffusion or the
spreading of ideas.
GODS AND GODDESS
• Anu--god of the sky and father of the gods,
• Enki or Ea--Lord Earth," god of the underground fresh waters.
• Ereshkigal--"queen of the greater earth," that is, the
underworld
• Marduk or Merodakh-Patrongod of Babylon.