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Mesopotamia: Ancient Mesopotamia
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Easier - Mesopotamia is the Greek word meaning "land between the rivers." Ancient civilization developed in this area because of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. The land was fertile, the nearby rivers provided water, and settled farming was practiced. These early farming communities grew to became independent city states. In addition to developing the first plows and irrigation canals, Mesopotamia developed the first form of writing, mathematics, astronomy, and complex architecture. Mesopotamians were probably the first peoples to use the wheel.
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Mesopotamia is an ancient land, through which run the great Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. At the southern end, this is a complex river delta. The two rivers meet at Qurna, 40 miles north of Basra, where they come together to form the Shatt-al-Arab, which flows into the Persian Gulf. The land is for the most part desert, and is very flat. The rivers flood the plains to a great extent, when the winter snows in the northern mountains thaw. The small towns and villages that existed along the river banks in 1914 were generally constructed several feet above water level.
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The people from Ancient Mesopotamia have contributed much to modern civilization. The first forms of writing came from them in the form of pictographs around 3100 BC. Later that was changed into a form of writing called cuneiform. They ... invented the wheel, the plow, and the sailboat. The ancient Mesopotamians were the first people to build and live in cities. They developed the twelve-month calendar and a code of law, which was copied by many civilizations.
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Iraq, as ancient Mesopotamia (the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers), seeded Abraham's Ur and Hammurabi's Babylon. The region was the Eden of city-states, the consolidator and exporter of the Agricultural Revolution. It is ... the center of a predominantly Muslim region where -- to paraphrase historian Bernard Lewis -- something "went wrong." Lewis was addressing the "fossilization" that began to afflict the Middle East at least six centuries ago, a cultural, intellectual and, yes, political ossification and decline.
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M[E]sopotamia was known as the land between two rivers, the Tigris to the north and the Euphrates to the south. Rains were seasonal in this area, which meant that the land flooded in the winter and spring and water was scarce at other times. Farming in the region depended on irrigation from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In ancient times, many resources in Mesopotamia were scarce or absent, which stimulated trade within the region and beyond. Supported by lucrative trade with its neighbors, Mesopotamia grew to become a powerful empire.
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Find out about the wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia uncovered in the last few centuries. From its culture and cities of Eridu, Lagash, Nippur, Uruk/Erech and Shuruppak, excavated by intrepid explorers such as Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson and Leonard Woolley; through to some of the oldest literary texts in the world, whose early Sumerian and later Akkadian cuneiform was deciphered by scholars such as Edward Hincks, Jules Oppert, Alexander Heidel, Samuel Noah Kramer, Thorkild Jacobsen and Stephanie Dalley. These texts recount the mythological adventures of gods such as An, Enki, Enlil, Ninhursag, Inanna, Ninlil, Ninurta and Marduk, and the epic adventures of its heroes such as Atra-Hasis, Adapa, Etana and Gilgamesh. And find out why the related theories of Zecharia Sitchin, concerning extraterrestrial visitors called the Anunnaki from the planet Nibiru, have few firm foundations.
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