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Mesopotamia
Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in what is now Iraq, people built the first cities, invented writing and carved the first written laws in stone. For three thousand years Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians raised and lost empires here, until the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BCE.
Cities between the rivers
THEME ONE
In the south almost no rain falls, so farmers dug canals from the Euphrates to water their fields. The surplus of grain fed cities such as Uruk, Ur, Lagash and Nippur, and around 3000 BCE the largest of them, Uruk, had tens of thousands of inhabitants. Every city belonged to its god, whose temple stood on a high stepped platform, the ziggurat, and its kings ruled in the god's name.
Writing on clay
THEME TWO
Around 3200 BCE officials in Uruk began to press signs into tablets of wet clay to record grain, animals and labour. Over the centuries the pictures turned into wedge-shaped marks - cuneiform. It was used for about three thousand years and for a dozen languages, from Sumerian and Akkadian to Hittite and Old Persian. Clay survives fire and time, and hundreds of thousands of tablets have been found.
Kings and laws
THEME THREE
Around 2334 BCE Sargon of Akkad united the Sumerian cities in what is often called the first empire. Ur-Nammu of Ur issued the oldest surviving law code around 2100 BCE. The best known is that of Hammurabi of Babylon (1792 – 1750 BCE): 282 laws carved on a basalt stele, now in the Louvre. Punishment depended on the rank of victim and offender - "an eye for an eye" applied only between equals.
Assyria and Babylon
THEME FOUR
From the city of Ashur on the upper Tigris, Assyrian kings built the largest empire the Near East had yet seen, ruled from Nimrud and later Nineveh. King Ashurbanipal gathered a library of clay tablets at Nineveh that preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh. In 612 BCE Babylonians and Medes destroyed Nineveh. Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt Babylon with the blue-glazed Ishtar Gate, but in 539 BCE the city surrendered to Cyrus.
Periods
Sumerian city-states
C. 3500 – 2334 BCE
Uruk and its neighbours grow into cities, writing appears, and independent city-states ruled by kings fight each other over water and fields.
Akkad, Ur and Old Babylon
2334 – 1595 BCE
Sargon's empire, the revival of Sumer under the Third Dynasty of Ur and the rise of Babylon under Hammurabi. The age ends when the Hittites sack Babylon.
Assyria and the last Babylon
1595 – 539 BCE
Kassite kings rule Babylon for four centuries, Assyria becomes a great power and conquers the Near East, then the Neo-Babylonian kings inherit its empire until the Persian conquest.
Key dates
- c. 3200 BCEThe first clay tablets with writing, at Uruk.
- c. 2334 BCESargon of Akkad unites Sumer and Akkad.
- c. 2100 BCEUr-Nammu's law code and the great ziggurat of Ur.
- c. 1754 BCEThe laws of Hammurabi are carved in stone.
- 612 BCEBabylonians and Medes destroy Nineveh, the Assyrian capital.
- 539 BCECyrus the Great of Persia takes Babylon.
Questions and answers
What did Mesopotamia give the world?
Writing, cities and written laws, but also some of the earliest wheeled vehicles, the counting system based on 60 that still gives us 60 minutes and 360 degrees, early astronomy and mathematics, and one of the oldest works of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Why is Mesopotamia called the cradle of civilisation?
Because cities, states and writing are attested there earlier than almost anywhere else. Egypt followed a very similar path at almost the same time, so historians today speak of several cradles rather than one.