Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia — page 1 — I n approximately 1750 BC the Babylonian king Hammurabi had a shiny black basalt stela pillar placed in the capital city of Babylon This astonishing object con tained nearly 300 laws By today s standards some of them seem shockingly cruel such as number 195 If a son strike his father his hands shall be hewn off Or 196 If a man put out the eye of another man his eye shall be put out Some even seem downright unfair if a patient died during surgery according to law 218 the doctor s hands would be cut off It can be hard to believe that this code of laws was a great advance in human civiliza tion But Hammurabi was saying in effect that the king does not hold all the power People have a right to live in a society where clear laws apply to everyone It is not surprising that this innovation in legal thought came from a land where so much change had come before After all Babylonia was located in Mesopotamia the home of the world's first civilizations Mesopotamia Greek for between rivers is located between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq These rivers would over flow each year leaving behind enriched soil It

Mesopotamia — page 2 — INTRODUCTION ET Starting around 10 000 BC wandering tribes people began to grow crops on the fertile land They gradually stayed in one place sow ing seeds and domesticating animals Towns then cities began to grow Mesopotamia is located at the cross roads between Asia Africa Europe and the Arabian Peninsula That allowed the people A group of schoolchildren visit the site of Ancient Babylon in 1998 Karim Sahib AFP Getty Images

Mesopotamia — page 3 — MESOPOTAMA of this region to trade grain for other goods and get new ideas from other peoples A sense of these lively vivid people comes down to us from their writing They engraved wedge shaped letters on small clay tablets in the world's earliest known form of writing cuneiform They wrote great stories in cuneiform They also had a strong sense of private property and would hire scribes to write contracts and keep documents about every object they owned including items as small as shoes In this volume you will learn about four major Mesopotamian civilizations The first was Sumer which began about 3300 BC The Sumerians contributed to the development of the calendar metalworking the wheeled cart and the potter s wheel They also created the classic Epic of Gilgamesh The second great empire you'll learn about is Babylonia The Babylonians added to the knowledge of astronomy mathemat ics and law Their greatest king Hammurabi came to rule in about 1792 BC Aside from his laws Hammurabi is credited with expanding his empire In about 1400 BC the Assyrians of the north freed themselves from Babylon s con trol Fierce and warlike they were the first

Mesopotamia — page 4 — INTRODUCTION to use horses as cavalry They built roads and organized a mail service for commu nication Despite their ferocity their art and architecture were magnificent The Assyrian king Sargon II built a 1 000 room palace near Assyria's capital Nineveh Huge human headed winged bulls and lions carved in alabaster guarded the gates of Assyrian palaces and temples The Assyrians also pre served cuneiform texts in great libraries Next the Chaldeans took over and rebuilt Babylon into a rich and gorgeous city starting around 606 BC An example of the city s beau L LC ties was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon an ancient wonder of the world The Chaldeans also made progress in astronomy and math But in 539 BC they became a part of the Persian Empire The people of ancient Mesopotamia made vital contributions to a broad range of fields including government law literature architecture and astronomy among many others Perhaps Hammurabi s rule seems harsh but the idea of sharing a code of laws is deeply ingrained today in every civilized soci ety For that we owe a debt to the people of

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