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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.