Ancient Mesopotamia: Cradle of Civilization

Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers,” is where the story of civilization begins — or, more precisely, where it is first written down. The Sumerians who lived in the southern half of this long, hot plain in the fourth millennium BCE invented writing, the wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the 60-minute hour, and almost every other essential technology of urban life. Their successors — Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians — built the first empires, codified the first law, and produced the first surviving work of literature: the Epic of Gilgamesh.

This pillar is your entry point to the Mesopotamian world. It walks through the major periods, the central peoples, the great works, and the long legacy that flowed from Sumer to Babylon to the Bible to the modern Middle East.

The Geography of Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is the Greek name for the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates — the two great rivers that rise in the mountains of eastern Anatolia and flow southeast through what is now Iraq and into the Persian Gulf. The northern part is hilly and well-watered; the south, ancient Sumer, is a flat, hot, marshy alluvial plain.

The climate made agriculture possible but unpredictable. The rivers flooded erratically; the soil baked hard in the summer sun; rain was scarce. Survival depended on irrigation, on large-scale cooperation, and on the gods. It was, in the words of the historian Karl Wittfogel, a “hydraulic civilization” — a civilization built on the management of water.

A Brief Timeline

Mesopotamian history spans roughly three thousand years, from the Ubaid period of the sixth millennium BCE to the fall of Babylon to the Persians in 539 BCE.

The Ubaid and Uruk Periods (c. 6500–3100 BCE)

The Ubaid culture (c. 6500–3800 BCE) is the earliest known culture of southern Mesopotamia. The Uruk period (c. 4000–3100 BCE) saw the rise of the world’s first true cities — Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur, Kish. Temples called ziggurats dominated the cityscape. Writing, in the form of pictographic tokens and later cuneiform, was invented in the late Uruk period to keep track of temple goods.

The Sumerians (c. 3100–2334 BCE)

The Sumerians — so-called because we do not know what they called themselves — invented almost everything that matters. They built the first cities, the first ziggurats, the first schools, the first legal codes, the first literature. Their language was unrelated to any other known language (it is a language isolate, like Basque) but it became the language of religion and scholarship across the ancient Near East for a thousand years after the last Sumerian-speaking city fell.

You can read the whole story in The Sumerians: Inventors of Civilization.

The Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BCE)

The Sumerian city-states were united for the first time by Sargon of Akkad (c. 2334–2279 BCE), a cup-bearer who became king and built the first true empire in history. Sargon and his successors spoke a Semitic language, Akkadian, and their empire briefly united the whole of Mesopotamia. The Akkadian language gradually replaced Sumerian as the everyday speech of the region, though Sumerian remained the language of the gods and the temple schools for another thousand years.

The Third Dynasty of Ur and the Old Babylonian Period (c. 2112–1595 BCE)

The Sumerian city-state of Ur briefly reasserted its dominance under the Third Dynasty (c. 2112–2004 BCE), and its kings built the great Ziggurat of Ur dedicated to the moon god Nanna. After Ur fell, the Amorites — a Semitic people from the west — established a dynasty at Babylon, and the Old Babylonian period (c. 1894–1595 BCE) began.

Hammurabi and Babylon (c. 1792–1750 BCE)

The sixth king of the Amorite dynasty, Hammurabi, is the most famous ruler of ancient Mesopotamia. He conquered all of southern Mesopotamia, built Babylon into a great city, and issued the Code of Hammurabi, a stele inscribed with 282 laws covering everything from theft and assault to medical malpractice and the duties of a slave toward his master.

You can read the full story of Babylon in Babylon: Hammurabi and the Hanging Gardens.

The Assyrian Empire (c. 911–609 BCE)

After a long “dark age,” the Assyrians built the largest empire the world had seen to that point. From their capital at Nineveh, the Assyrian kings conquered Egypt, the Levant, Persia, and much of Anatolia. The Assyrian army was the most efficient killing machine of the ancient world, and the Assyrian kings were the first to use systematic deportation as a tool of empire.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Persian Conquest (626–539 BCE)

The Neo-Babylonian Empire, founded by the Chaldean Nabopolassar, destroyed the Assyrian Empire and rebuilt Babylon as the largest and most magnificent city in the world. Its second king, Nebuchadnezzar II, is the Nebuchadnezzar of the Book of Daniel and the builder of the famous Hanging Gardens (if they existed at all — they may be a Greek invention). In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia took Babylon without a fight, and Mesopotamia became a province of the Achaemenid Empire.

Sumerian and Akkadian Writing

The earliest writing in the world was invented in Mesopotamia. The first stage was a set of clay tokens, used in the late Uruk period to keep track of goods. By about 3300 BCE these tokens had been replaced by pictographic signs pressed into wet clay with a stylus; over the next few centuries the pictures were simplified and rotated to a wedge-shaped script that we call cuneiform (from the Latin cuneus, “wedge”).

Cuneiform was used to write Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, and several other languages. It was the script of diplomacy, law, and literature for almost three thousand years. The library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh preserved thousands of cuneiform tablets, including the world’s oldest surviving work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Mesopotamian Religion

The Mesopotamians worshipped a large pantheon of gods and goddesses associated with celestial bodies, natural forces, and cities. The great gods were Anu (sky), Enlil (wind), Enki (water and wisdom), and the queen of heaven, Inanna/Ishtar (love and war). Below them were the underworld deities, led by Ereshkigal, and the minor gods of cities, professions, and particular temples.

Mesopotamian religion was pessimistic. The gods were powerful and largely indifferent to human suffering; the afterlife was a bleak, dusty underworld from which there was no return. The famous flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh — in which the god Enlil sends a flood to destroy humanity, and the hero Utnapishtim is saved for building a boat — is the original of the biblical story of Noah.

Mesopotamian Science and Mathematics

The Babylonians were the first great mathematicians. They worked in base 60 (which is why we have 60 seconds, 60 minutes, and 360 degrees), solved quadratic equations, calculated square roots, and used a sophisticated form of trigonometry to track the motions of the planets. Babylonian astronomy was the most accurate of the ancient world, and the Babylonians were the first to predict eclipses.

Mesopotamian Legacy

Almost everything in our civilization has a Mesopotamian ancestor. The 60-second minute, the 12-hour day, the 7-day week, the wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the ziggurat (which influenced the Biblical Tower of Babel and possibly the Egyptian pyramid), the legal code, the map, the school, the library, the cylinder seal, the calendar — all were invented in Mesopotamia. The Hebrew Bible, and through it Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, takes much of its imagery, its stories, and even some of its law from the Mesopotamian world.

The story is not over. Iraq, the modern state on the site of ancient Mesopotamia, has been through a long series of wars, sanctions, and occupations, and the archaeological sites of Sumer, Babylon, and Nineveh have suffered terribly. But the great cities — Ur, Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh — are still there, still being excavated, and still yielding new chapters of the story that started it all.

The People of Mesopotamia

The population of ancient Mesopotamia was one of the most diverse of the ancient world. The earliest inhabitants of the region were the Sumerians, a non-Semitic-speaking people who developed the first urban civilization in the south. In the third millennium BCE, the Semitic-speaking Akkadians began to migrate into the region, and they gradually absorbed the Sumerian population. The Akkadian language eventually replaced Sumerian as the everyday spoken language, but the Sumerian language remained the language of religion, literature, and scholarship for almost two thousand years.

In the second millennium BCE, the Amorites — a Semitic-speaking people from the west — established a number of kingdoms in Mesopotamia, including the First Dynasty of Babylon. The Amorites were the founders of the great Babylonian civilization, and the most famous of them was Hammurabi, the lawgiver.

In the first millennium BCE, the Aramaeans, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, and many other peoples competed for control of Mesopotamia. The Aramaeans, in particular, were a Semitic-speaking people who established a number of small kingdoms in the region, and the Aramaic language gradually became the lingua franca of the Near East, used for trade, diplomacy, and administration across a vast region from Egypt to Persia.

The most powerful of the Mesopotamian empires were the Akkadian, the Third Dynasty of Ur, the Old Babylonian, the Middle Assyrian, the Neo-Assyrian, the Neo-Babylonian, and the Achaemenid Persian. Each of these empires produced a distinctive culture, a distinctive set of political institutions, and a distinctive set of religious and philosophical ideas.

Mesopotamian Society

Mesopotamian society was highly stratified. At the top of the social hierarchy was the king, who was believed to be the representative of the gods on earth and the head of the state religion. The king was supported by a large bureaucracy of officials, scribes, and priests, who administered the state, collected the taxes, and managed the temples.

Below the king were the nobles and the wealthy merchants, who owned large estates and controlled much of the trade. The middle class was composed of the artisans, the craftsmen, the scribes, and the smaller merchants. The majority of the population was composed of peasants, who worked the land and paid taxes in the form of grain, labor, and military service.

The lowest class was the slaves, who were mostly prisoners of war or people who had been enslaved for debt. The Mesopotamian slaves were, in some respects, better treated than the slaves of classical Greece and Rome: they had certain legal rights, they could own property, and they could sometimes buy their freedom.

Mesopotamian Literature

The Mesopotamians produced a vast body of literature, most of it written in the cuneiform script on clay tablets. The most famous work is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of literature in the world. Other famous works include the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation epic), the Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld, the Erra Epic, the Anzu Epic, the Atrahasis Epic (another version of the flood story), the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, and the great hymns to the gods.

The Mesopotamians were also the first to develop the genre of the historical narrative. The Sumerian King List, a list of the kings of Sumer and Akkad from the beginning of time, is one of the oldest historical texts in the world. The Assyrian kings, in particular, were famous for their detailed annals, which recorded the events of each year of the king’s reign. The annals of the Assyrian kings — Ashurnasirpal II, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal, and others — are an extraordinarily detailed record of the military, political, and religious life of the ancient Near East.

The Mesopotamians also developed the genres of the proverb, the fable, the dialogue, the elegy, the love poem, the hymn, the prayer, the ritual, and the incantation. The famous Instructions of Shuruppak and Instructions of Ptahhotep are among the oldest wisdom texts in the world.

Mesopotamian Science and Technology

The Mesopotamian contributions to science and technology are among the most important of the ancient world. The Babylonians were the first to develop a sophisticated form of astronomy, and they were the first to predict eclipses and to record the motions of the planets. The Babylonian astronomical records, preserved on hundreds of clay tablets, are the most important source for the history of ancient astronomy, and they were the basis of the later Greek and Islamic astronomy.

The Mesopotamians were also the first to develop a sophisticated form of mathematics. The Babylonians used a base-60 number system, which is the basis of our modern system of time-keeping (60 seconds, 60 minutes, 360 degrees). They were the first to solve quadratic equations, the first to calculate square roots, the first to develop the formula for the volume of a truncated pyramid, and the first to use a place-value number system.

The Mesopotamians were also skilled in the technology of warfare. They were the first to use the battering ram, the siege tower, the sapping, the catapult, the sling, the iron weapons, the bronze armor, the war chariot, and the war horse. The Assyrian army, in particular, was the most efficient killing machine of the ancient world, and the Assyrian engineers were the first to develop a wide range of siege techniques.

The Destruction of Mesopotamian Civilization

The Mesopotamian civilization was destroyed by a long series of invasions, beginning with the Persian conquest in 539 BCE and ending with the Arab conquest in the seventh century CE. The Persian conquest brought the region into the Achaemenid Empire, and the Greek conquest under Alexander the Great brought it into the Hellenistic world. The Parthian and Sassanid Persian empires ruled the region for almost a thousand years after the fall of the Achaemenids, and the Arab conquest of the seventh century finally brought the Arabic language, the Islamic religion, and the new Arab political order to the region.

The ancient Mesopotamian civilization was gradually forgotten, and the cuneiform script was eventually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet, the Greek alphabet, the Aramaic alphabet, and the Arabic alphabet. The Mesopotamian languages — Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian — were gradually replaced by Aramaic and then by Arabic. The cuneiform script was preserved only in the libraries of the ancient Assyrian kings, where it was finally deciphered in the nineteenth century by the British Assyriologist Henry Rawlinson and his successors.

The destruction of Mesopotamian civilization was a slow, painful process, and it has been lamented by every generation of Mesopotamian scholars since the rediscovery of the ancient past. The Mesopotamian contributions to the Western tradition, however, are still being studied, and they are still being recognized as among the most important of the ancient world.