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
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
CHAPTER 1A MESOPOTAMIA THE BIRTHPLACE OF CIVILIZATION The area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq is the site of ancient Mesopotamia birthplace of the world's first civilizations The name is Greek for land between the rivers As the muddy streams flooded and receded their silt built a plain with rich soil ideal for agriculture Tradition locates the biblical Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia The nomadic peoples of the Arabian Desert on the west and what are now Iran and Turkey on the east and north coveted the fertile river basin From the earliest times successive tribes swept into it and fought to possess it founding their nations and then falling in turn before more powerful foes Since 1840 groups of archaeologists have excavated sites in Mesopotamia and have found signs that there were primitive set tlements here as far back as 10 000 BC In about 3300 BC the Sumerians a non Semitic people from the east abandoned their wan dering tent dwelling existence and settled in IO
ESOPOTAMIA THE BRTHPACE OF CIVILIZATION As Mesopotamian people have been doing for thousands of years an Iraqi man collects the wheat harvest This field is near the marshes crossing the southern Iraqi town of al Axeir Essam Al Sudani AFP Getty Images an area called the Plain of Shinar Here they tilled the soil built houses and constructed irrigation systems draining marshes and dig ging canals dikes and ditches The need for cooperation on these large irrigation projects led to the growth of government and law The Sumerians are thus credited with forming the earliest of the major ancient civilizations of this region II
