mesopotamian civilisation

 

The Mesopotamian civilisation

Fantastic and massive human-headed, winged bulls and a curious wedge-shaped writing system are the best-known legacies of the place known as Mesopotamia. Although these objects give some sense of the grandeur and mystery of an ancient culture, the influence of the region and its people extends far beyond them. Long described as the “cradle of civilization,” Mesopotamia is clearly one of the earliest civilizations in the world. Its many contributions include the development of written language, as well as several advances in science, economics, law, and religion. Mesopotamian astronomers, for example, devised a 12-month lunar calendar and divided the year into two seasons. Mesopotamian mathematics is a sexagesimal, or base 60, system, which survives to this day in 60-minute hours and 24-hour days. The Sumerian calendar was divided into seven-day weeks. Many of these remarkable contributions are discussed in the pages of this volume.

When contemporary historians use the term Mesopotamia, they typically mean the region in southwest Asia that includes modern-day Iraq, as well as portions of Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Originally, however, the Hellenistic Greeks used the name Meso-potamos, “the land between the rivers,” to refer specifically to the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These rivers provided the fertile soil and water needed to support a sedentary, agrarian way of life, allowing humankind to abandon a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Largely because of this feature, Mesopotamia was one of several regions in which agriculture was born.

For nearly 2,000 years, information about Mesopotamia was limited. The Hebrew Bible provided some insight into the history and culture of the region. The Greek historian Herodotus first reported on the region in the 5th century BC. Some 100 years later, the Greek mercenary, historian, and philosopher Xenophon wrote in Anabasis (“Upcountry March”) about his experiences as part of an expedition that crossed Anatolia and traveled along both the Tigris and the Euphrates. Although extant in fragments only, the writings of Berosus—a Chaldean priest of Bel who immigrated to Greece—provide some of the most thorough and reliable accounts of the region.

Writing at the beginning of the 3rd century BC, while living on the island of Cos, Berosus produced the Babyloniaka, which consisted of three books. The first of these described the land of Babylonia and the Babylonian creation myth. It also described and a half man–half fish known as Oannes, who taught early humans about things such as law, the arts, and agriculture, thus bringing civilization from the sea. The second and third books contained the chronology and history of Babylonia and of later Assyria, from prehistory to King Nabonassar (Nabu-nasir; 747–734 BC) down to Berosus’s own time.

Urban areas of considerable size began to emerge in ancient Mesopotamia during the early sixth millennium BC. The region supported important settlements such as Uruk, Nineveh, and Babylon. These centres of social and cultural life possessed one or more shrines to major deities as well as extensive granaries that served as a focal point for smaller settlements.

The central structure in any ancient Mesopotamian city was the ziggurat, or temple complex. These massive step pyramids, as the name suggests, had receding tiers and were each topped with a shrine. Each shrine was dedicated to a single god or goddess, and each city had its own patron deity. So close was the link between city and god that wars between cities were frequently considered to reflect wars between the gods and goddesses.

The other principal structure in a Mesopotamian city was the ruler’s palace, a large compound containing private residences, sanctuaries, courtyards, and storehouses. Both the ziggurat and the palace were adorned with bas-reliefs and inscriptions that depicted cultic practices and civic and military accomplishments. Gates and important passageways were flanked by massive sculptures of mythological guardian figures, usually possessing a human head on the body of a winged bull or lion.

The region’s geography was such that Mesopotamian cities were separated from one another by vast stretches of desert or swamp. This circumstance led to the development of city-states, autonomous entities whose territory consisted of a single city and the surrounding area. Tensions often developed between neighbouring city-states, leading to armed conflicts over land and dominion. The first successful forced unification of citystates came in 2331 BC, when Sumer was conquered by what would become known as the Akkadian empire—which would, itself, be conquered several generations later by the Babylonian empire. As such, there is no unified Mesopotamian culture, but rather, a patchwork of cultures formed as conquering civilizations either adopted, co-opted, or superseded the traditions and beliefs of vanquished city-states.

With each successive conquest, Mesopotamia’s political centre moved from one city-state to another. This can best be illustrated in the Sumerian King List, an ancient document that provides a record of the kings of Sumer, wherein each dynasty is listed according to the location of the “official” seat of power. The veracity of some claims in the King List has been called into question, notably where the regnal periods of individual monarchs have spanned hundreds, even thousands, of years. Still, when understood as being part official record and part embellishment, the list provides an interesting and useful window into Mesopotamian history. Beyond a simple chronology of rulers, it gives an intriguing glimpse into the nature of war, justice,and religion as practiced by the people of the various city-states.

The King List survives by means of logograms, which are pictures or symbols intended to represent a whole word. By refining logograms and adding phonetic signs, the Sumerians created cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of written language. Their scribes used blunt reeds to imprint the wedge-shaped symbols of cuneiform script on wet clay tablets. Tablets unearthed by archaeological excavation make it clear that cuneiform spread quickly from Sumer throughout the region and that the language evolved as it moved. The arrival of the Akkadians, a Semitic tribe that entered Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, further expanded the Sumerian pictorial and phonetic “vocabulary.” Several variants of Old Akkadian cuneiform have been discovered in Babylon and northern Mesopotamia.

A written language allowed the civilizations of Mesopotamia to document the receipt of commodities imported and exported through trade and laws. These commercial documents were catalogued and housed primarily—but not always— within temples. One noteworthy exception to the general rule was a treasure trove of cuneiform writings that were discovered at Nineveh in the library of the palace built by the Babylonian ruler Ashurbanipal.

Cuneiform also provided an early example of transformation of the oral tradition to the literary. Also discovered in the Nineveh palace library were an incomplete set of tablets containing The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient odyssey story and one of the earliest known works of literature.

In addition to cuneiform, Mesopotamian art and architecture reveal much about the region’s history. The excavation and examination of ruins over the decades has led experts to postulate that the temples of this time were characterized by buttresses and recessed walls with interior mosaics. Temples were built either at ground level or on a raised platform, with the latter being the more popular and common mode. Secular buildings were of simpler design and construction— chiefly flat roofs upheld by the trunks of palm trees or columns of brick made from dried riverbank clay.

Artwork consisted primarily of wood carvings, metal sculpture, and decorative clay pottery. Cylinder seals, which acted like identifying stamps, moved beyond their utilitarian purpose to become some of the greatest examples of art to come out of the region. Rather than being adorned with the visages of gods and goddess, the remains of temple sculptures more commonly depict supplicants, revealing the physical characteristics of a given city-states’ inhabitants; bearded men and women with upswept hair.

Stone was difficult to come by in Mesopotamia, and was considered an extravagance for building. Yet examples of ornate stone decoration and sculptures abound among the ruins of temples. This speaks directly to the importance places of worship within the region. Religion was a central aspect of life in Mesopotamia. The focus of Mesopotamian worship was a pantheon of gods, around which were built elaborate myths to explain natural occurrences (such as floods and drought) and the creation of universe itself. Religion and politics frequently meshed. Kings were crowned during sacred festivals, and they oversaw the administration of temples within their domain.

Many achievements in the realms of economics, law, and government also are attributed to Mesopotamian civilizations. The earliest known system of economics was developed by the Babylonians. Early laws created by the ancient Mesopotamians included the Code of Ur-Nammu, the Laws of Eshnunna, and, perhaps best known of all, the Code of Hammurabi. As the first king of the Babylonian empire (c. 17281686 BC), Hammurabi composed more than 200 laws that cover a wide variety of subjects, including family, commercial, and criminal law. Many of the Code's criminal laws follow the familiar “an eye for an eye” approach; however, its commercial laws are something else entirely. The Code of Hammurabi firmly codified the newly created economic system with a series of commercial laws. The Code addressed things such as property rights, inheritance laws, fair trade, taxation, statutory wages, and debt management.

Despite the region’s cultural significance, very little was known about it before the first excavations in the mid19th century. Over the centuries, between the decline of the Roman Empire and the European Renaissance, Europeans made occasional forays into the region. Among these visitors was the Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who traveled in the Middle East between 1160 and 1173 AD. It was the Italian Pietro della Valle, however, who in the early part of the 17th century rediscovered the ruins of Babylon in Iraq (roughly 60 miles south of present-day Baghdad). Della Valle was responsible for bringing the very first specimens of cuneiform writing back to Europe. From that point on, European interest in Mesopotamia grew, and its visitors included the German traveler Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), the British business agent and proto-archaeologist Claudius James Rich (1787–1820), and the English painter and traveler Sir Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842).

The era of modern archaeological research in Mesopotamia began with the French excavations at Nineveh (1842) and Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad; 1843–55), as well as English expeditions to Nineveh (1846–55) and Calah (modern Nimrud; 1845). Excavations of other important cities, among them Babylon, Ashur, Erech (Uruk), and Ur, soon followed. A second phase of research focusing on “provinces” and outlying areas, as well as capital cities, began in 1925 when American archaeologists began excavations at Nuzu (modern Yorgan Tepe; about 140 miles north of Baghdad). Each of these excavations contributed to what we now know about the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. Introduction | 15 than 200 laws that cover a wide variety of subjects, including family, commercial, and criminal law. Many of the Code's criminal laws follow the familiar “an eye for an eye” approach; however, its commercial laws are something else entirely. The Code of Hammurabi firmly codified the newly created economic system with a series of commercial laws. The Code addressed things such as property rights, inheritance laws, fair trade, taxation, statutory wages, and debt management.

Mesopotamia meaning

esopotamia is the region in southwestern Asia where the world’s earliest civilization developed. The name "Mesopotamia" comes from a Greek word meaning “between rivers,” referring to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but the region can be broadly defi ned to include the area that is now eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and most of Iraq. This region was the centre of a culture whose infl uence extended throughout the Middle East and as far as the Indus Valley in the Indian subcontinent, Egypt, and the Mediterranean.

Where is the Mesopotamia

In Mesopotamia civilisation located in Mesopotamia, what we today call iraq.Mesopotamia is the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, north or northwest of the bottleneck at Baghdad, in modern Iraq; it is Al-Jazīrah (“The Island”) of the Arabs. South of this lies Babylonia, named after the city of Babylon. However, in the broader sense, the name "Mesopotamia" has come to be used for the area bounded on the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and on the southwest by the edge of the Arabian Plateau and stretching from the Persian Gulf in the southeast to the spurs of the Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northwest. Only from the latitude of Baghdad do the Euphrates and Tigris truly become twin rivers, the rāfidān of the Arabs, which have constantly changed their courses over the millennia. The low-lying plain of the Kārūn River in Persia has always been closely related to Mesopotamia, but it is not considered part of Mesopotamia as it forms its own river system.

Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Mesopotamia had many languages and cultures, and its history is broken up into many periods and eras.

The area had no real geographic unity and, above all, no permanent capital city, so that by its very variety it stands out from other civilizations with greater uniformity, particularly that of Egypt. The script and the religious pantheon constitute the unifying factors, but in these also Mesopotamia shows its predilection for multiplicity and variety. Written documents were turned out in quantities, and there are often many copies of a single text. The pantheon consisted of more than 1,000 deities, even though many divine names may apply to diff erent manifestations of a single god.

During Mesopotamia’s 3,000 years of existence, each century brought a rebirth to the area. Thus classical Sumerian civilization influenced that of the Akkadians, and the Ur III empire, which itself represented a Sumero-Akkadian synthesis, exercised its influence on the first quarter of the second millennium BC. With the Hittites, large areas of Anatolia were infused with the culture of Mesopotamia from 1700 BC onward. Contacts, via Mari, with Ebla in Syria, some 30 miles (48 km) south of Aleppo, go back to the 24th century BC, so that links between Syrian and Palestinian scribal schools and Babylonian civilization during the Amarna period (14th century BC) may have had much older predecessors. At any rate, the similarity of certain themes in cuneiform literature and the Hebrew Bible, such as the story of the Flood or the motif of the righteous sufferer, is due to such early contacts and not to direct borrowing

Achievements

The world of mathematics and astronomy owes much to the Babylonians—for instance, the sexagesimal system for the calculation of time and angles, which is still practical because of the multiple divisibility of the number 60; the Greek day of 12 “double-hours”; and the zodiac and its signs. In many cases, however, the origins and routes of borrowings are obscure, as in the problem of the survival of ancient Mesopotamian legal theory.

The achievement of the civilization itself may be expressed in terms of its best points—moral, aesthetic, scientific,and, not least, literary. Legal theory flourished and was sophisticated early on, being expressed in several collections of legal decisions, the so-called codes, of which the best-known is the Code of Hammurabi. Throughout these codes recurs the concern of the ruler for the weak, the widow, and the orphan—even if, sometimes, the phrases were regrettably only literary clichés.

The aesthetics of art are too much governed by subjective values to be assessed in absolute terms, yet certain peaks stand out above the rest, notably the art of Uruk IV, the seal engraving of the Akkad period, and the relief sculpture of Ashurbanipal. Nonetheless, there is nothing in Mesopotamia to match the sophistication of Egyptian art.

Science the Mesopotamians had, of a kind, though not in the sense of Greek science. From its beginnings in Sumer before the middle of the third millennium BC, Mesopotamian science was characterized by endless, meticulous enumeration and ordering into columns and series, with the ultimate ideal of including all things in the world, but without the wish or ability to synthesize and reduce the material to a system. Not a single general scientific law has been found, and only rarely has the use of analogy been found. Nevertheless, it remains a highly commendable achievement that Pythagoras’s law (that the sum of the squares on the two shorter sides of a right-angled triangle equals the square on the longest side), even though it was never formulated, was being applied as early as the 18th century BC.

Technical accomplishments were perfected in the building of the ziggurats (temple towers resembling pyramids), with their huge bulk, and in irrigation, both in practical execution and in theoretical calculations. At the beginning of the third millennium BC, an artificial stone often regarded as a forerunner of concrete was in use at Erech (Uruk; 160 miles [257 km] south-southeast of modern Baghdad), but the secret of its manufacture apparently was lost in subsequent years.

Writing pervaded all aspects of life and gave rise to a highly developed bureaucracy—one of the most tenacious legacies of the ancient Middle East.Remarkable organizing ability was required to administer huge estates, in which, under the third dynasty of Ur, for example, it was not unusual to prepare accounts for thousands of cattle or tens of thousands of bundles of reeds. Similar figures are attested at Ebla, three centuries earlier.

Above all, the literature of Mesopotamia is one of its finest cultural achievements. Though there are many modern anthologies and chrestomathies (compilations of useful learning), with translations and paraphrases of Mesopotamian literature, as well as attempts to write its history, it cannot truly be said that “cuneiform literature” has been resurrected to the extent that it deserves. There are partly material reasons for this. Many clay tablets survive only in a fragmentary condition, and duplicates that would restore the texts have not yet been discovered, so there are still large gaps. A further reason is the inadequate knowledge of the languages: insuffi cient acquaintance with the vocabulary and, in Sumerian, major diffi culties with the grammar. Consequently, another generation of Assyriologists will pass before the great myths, epics, lamentations, hymns, “law codes,” wisdom literature, and pedagogical treatises can be presented to the reader in such a way that he can fully appreciate the high level of literary creativity of those times.

The Emergence of Mesopotamia civilisation

Between about 10,000 BC and the genesis of large permanent settlements, the following stages of development are distinguishable, some of which run parallel: (1) the change to sedentary life, or the transition from continual or seasonal change of abode, characteristic of hunter-gatherers and the earliest cattle breeders, to life in one place over a period of several years or even permanently, (2) the transition from experimental plant cultivation to the deliberate and calculated farming of grains and leguminous plants, (3) the erection of houses and the associated “settlement” of the gods in temples, (4) the burial of the dead in cemeteries, (5) the invention of clay vessels, made at fi rst by hand, then turned on the wheel and fi red to ever greater degrees of hardness, at the same time receiving almost invariably decoration of incised designs or painted patterns, (6) the development of specialized crafts and the distribution of labour, and (7) metal production (the first use of metal—copper—marks the transition from the Late Neolithic to the Chalcolithic period).

These stages of development can only rarely be dated on the basis of a sequence of levels at one site alone. Instead, an important role is played by the comparison of different sites, starting with the assumption that what is simpler and technically less accomplished is older. In addition to this type of dating, which can be only relative, the radiocarbon, or carbon-14, method has proved to be an increasingly valuable tool since the 1950s. By this method the known rate of decay of the radioactive carbon isotope (carbon-14) in wood, horn, plant fibre, and bone allows the time that has elapsed since the “death” of the material under examination to be calculated. Although a plus/minus discrepancy of up to 200 years has to be allowed for, this is not such a great disadvantage in the case of material 6,000 to 10,000 years old. Even when skepticism is necessary because of the use of an inadequate sample, carbon-14 dates are still very welcome as confirmation of dates arrived at by other means. Moreover, radiocarbon ages can be converted to more precise dates through comparisons with data obtained by dendrochronology, a method of absolute age determination based on the analysis of the annual rings of trees.

The beginning of agriculture

The first agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the transition to sedentary life took place in regions in which animals that were easily domesticated, such as sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, and the wild prototypes of grains and leguminous plants, such as wheat, barley, bitter vetch, pea, and lentil, were present. Such centres of dispersion may have been the valleys and grassy border regions of the mountains of Iran, Iraq, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine, but they also could have been, say, the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush. As settled life, which caused a drop in infant mortality, led to the increase of the population, settlement spread out from these centres into the plains—although it must be remembered that this process, described as the Neolithic Revolution, in fact took thousands of years.

Representative of the first settlements on the borders of Mesopotamia are the adjacent sites of Zawi Chemi Shanidar and Shanidar itself, which lie northwest of Rawāndūz. They date from the transition from the 10th to the ninth millennium BC and are classified as prepottery. The finds included querns (primitive mills) for grinding grain (whether wild or cultivated is not known), the remains of huts about 13 feet (4 metres) in diameter, and a cemetery with grave goods. The presence of copper beads is evidence of acquaintance with metal, though not necessarily with the technique of working it into tools, and the presence of obsidian (volcanic glass) is indicative of the acquisition of nonindigenous raw materials by means of trade. The bones found testify that sheep were already domesticated at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.

At Karīm Shahir, a site that cannot be accurately tied chronologically to Shanidar, clear proof was obtained both of the knowledge of grain cultivation, in the form of sickle blades showing sheen from use, and of the baking of clay, in the form of lightly fired clay figurines. Still in the hilly borders of Mesopotamia, a sequence of about 3,000 years can be followed at the site of Qal’at Jarmo, east of Kirkūk, some 150 miles (241 km) north of Baghdad. The beginning of this settlement can be dated to about 6750 BC; excavations uncovered 12 archaeological levels of a regular village, consisting of about 20 to 25 houses built of packed clay, sometimes with stone foundations, and divided into several rooms. The finds included types of wheat (emmer and einkorn) and two-row barley, the bones of domesticated goats, sheep, and pigs, and obsidian tools, stone vessels, and, in the upper third of the levels, clay vessels with rough painted decorations, providing the first certain evidence for the manufacture of pottery. Jarmo must be roughly contemporary with the sites of Jericho (13 miles [21 km] east of Jerusalem) and of Çatalhüyük in Anatolia (central Turkey). Those sites, with their walled settlements, seem to have achieved a much higher level of civilization, but too much weight must not be placed on the comparison because no other sites in and around Mesopotamia confirm the picture deduced from Jarmo alone. Views on the earliest Neolithic in Iraq have undergone radical revisions in the light of discoveries made since the 1970s at Qermez Dere, Nemrik, and Maghzaliyah.

About 1,000 years later are two villages that are the earliest so far discovered in the plain of Mesopotamia: H ·assūna, near Mosul, and Tall S ·awwān, near Sāmarrā’. At H ·assūna the pottery is more advanced, with incised and painted designs, but the decoration is still unsophisticated. One of the buildings found may be a shrine, judging from its unusual ground plan. Apart from emmer there occurs, as the result of mutation, six-row barley, which was later to become the chief grain crop of southern Mesopotamia. In the case of Tall S ·awwān, it is significant that the settlement lay south of the boundary of rainfall agriculture; thus it must have been dependent on some form of artificial irrigation, even if this was no more than the drawing of water from the Tigris. This, therefore, gives a date after which the settlement of parts of southern Mesopotamia would have been feasible.

The Emergence of cultures

For the next millennium, the fifth, it is customary to speak in terms of various “cultures” or “horizons,” distinguished in general by the pottery, which may be classed by its colour, shape, hardness,and, above all, by its decoration. The name of each horizon is derived either from the type site or from the place where the pottery was first found: Sāmarrā’ on the Tigris, Tall H ·alaf in the central Jazīrah, H ·assūna Level V, Al-‘Ubayd near Ur, and H ·ājj Muh ·ammad on the Euphrates, not far from Al-Samāwah (some 150 miles [241 km] south-southeast of Baghdad). Along with the improvement of tools, the first evidence for water transport (a model boat from the prehistoric cemetery at Eridu, in the extreme south of Mesopotamia, c. 4000 BC), and the development of terracottas, the most impressive sign of progress is the constantly accelerating advance in architecture. This can best be followed in the city of Eridu, which in historical times was the centre of the cult of the Sumerian god Enki

Originally a small, single-roomed shrine, the temple in the Ubaid period consisted of a rectangular building, measuring 80 by 40 feet (24 by 12 metres), that stood on an artificial terrace. It had an “offering table” and an “altar” against the short walls, aisles down each side, and a facade decorated with niches. This temple, standing on a terrace probably originally designed to protect the building from flooding, is usually considered the prototype of the characteristic religious structure of later Babylonia, the ziggurat. The temple at Eridu is in the very same place as that on which the Enki ziggurat stood in the time of the third dynasty of Ur (c. 2112–c. 2004 BC), so the cult tradition Originally a small, single-roomed shrine, the temple in the Ubaid period consisted of a rectangular building, measuring 80 by 40 feet (24 by 12 metres), that stood on an artificial terrace. It had an “offering table” and an “altar” against the short walls, aisles down each side, and a facade decorated with niches. This temple, standing on a terrace probably originally designed to protect the building from flooding, is usually considered the prototype of the characteristic religious structure of later Babylonia, the ziggurat. The temple at Eridu is in the very same place as that on which the Enki ziggurat stood in the time of the third dynasty of Ur (c. 2112–c. 2004 BC), so the cult tradition

In extracting information as to the expression of mind and spirit during the six millennia preceding the invention of writing, it is necessary to take account of four major sources: decoration on pottery, the care of the dead, sculpture, and the designs on seals. There is, of course, no justification in assuming any association with ethnic groups

The most varied of these means of expression is undoubtedly the decoration of pottery. It is hardly coincidental that, in regions in which writing had developed, high-quality painted pottery was no longer made. The motifs in decoration are either abstract and geometric or figured, although there is also a strong tendency to geometric stylization. An important question is the extent to which the presence of symbols, such as the bucranium (a sculptured ornament representing an ox skull), can be considered as expressions of specific religious ideas, such as a bull cult, and, indeed, how much the decoration was intended to convey meaning at all.

It is not known how ancient is the custom of burying the dead in graves nor whether its intention was to maintain neighbouring lands is evidence for the existence of trade, whether consisting of direct caravan trade or of a succession of intermediate stages.

Just as no ethnic identity is recognizable, so nothing is known of the social organization of prehistoric settlements. It is not possible to deduce anything of the “government” in a village nor of any supraregional connections that may have existed under the domination of one centre. Constructions that could only have been accomplished by the organization of workers in large numbers are first found in Uruk Levels VI to IV: the dimensions of these buildings suggest that they were intended for gatherings of hundreds of people. As for artificial irrigation, which was indispensable for agriculture in south Mesopotamia, the earliest form was probably not the irrigation canal. It is assumed that at first floodwater was dammed up to collect in basins, near which the fields were located. Canals, which led the water farther from the river, would have become necessary when the land in the vicinity of the river could no longer supply the needs of the population.

Mesopotamia Protohistory

Attempts have been made by philologists to reach conclusions about the origin of the flowering of civilization in southern Mesopotamia by the analysis of Sumerian words. It has been thought possible to isolate an earlier, non-Sumerian substratum from the Sumerian vocabulary by assigning certain words on the basis of their endings to either a Neolithic or a Chalcolithic language stratum. These attempts are based on the phonetic character of Sumerian at the beginning of the second millennium BC, which is at least 1,000 years later than the invention of writing. Quite apart, therefore, from the fact that the structure of Sumerian words themselves is far from adequately investigated, the enormous gap in time casts grave doubt on the criteria used to distinguish between Sumerian and “pre-Sumerian” vocabulary.

The earliest peoples of Mesopotamia who can be identified from inscribed monuments and written tradition—people in the sense of speakers of a common language—are, apart from the Sumerians, Semitic peoples (Akkadians or preAkkadians) and Subarians (identical with, or near relatives of, the Hurrians, who appear in northern Mesopotamia around the end of the third millennium BC). Their presence is known, but no definite statements about their past or possible routes of immigration are possible.

At the turn of the fourth to third millennium BC, the long span of prehistory is over, and the threshold of the historical era is gained, captured by the existence of writing. Names, speech, and actions are fixed in a system that is composed of signs representing complete words or syllables. The signs may consist of realistic pictures, abbreviated representations, and perhaps symbols selected at random. Since clay is not well suited to the drawing of curved lines, a tendency to use straight lines rapidly gained ground. When the writer pressed the reed in harder at the beginning of a stroke, it made a triangular “head,” and thus “wedges” were impressed into the clay. It is the Sumerians who are usually given the credit for the invention of this, the first system of writing in the Middle East. As far as they can be assigned to any language, the inscribed documents from before the dynasty of Akkad (c. 2334–c. 2154 BC) are almost exclusively in Sumerian. Moreover, the extension of the writing system to include the creation of syllabograms by the use of the sound of a logogram (sign representing a word), such as gi, “a reed stem,” used to render the verb gi, “to return,” can only be explained in terms of the Sumerian language. It is most probable, however, that Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC, just as in later times, was composed of many races. This makes it likely that, apart from the Sumerians, the interests and even initiatives of other language groups may have played their part in the formation of the writing system. Many scholars believe that certain clay objects or tokens that are found in prehistoric strata may have been used for some kind of primitive accounting. These tokens, some of which are incised and which have various forms, may thus be three-dimensional predecessors of writing.

Sumerian is an agglutinative language: prefixes and suffixes, which express various grammatical functions and relationships, are attached to a noun or verb root in a “chain.” Attempts to identify Sumerian more closely by comparative methods have as yet been unsuccessful and will very probably remain so, as languages of a comparable type are known only from AD 500 (Georgian) or 1000 (Basque)—that is, 3,000 years later. Over so long a time, the rate of change in a language, particularly one that is not fixed in a written norm, is so great that one can no longer determine whether apparent similarity between words goes back to an original relationship or is merely fortuitous. Consequently, it is impossible to obtain any more accurate information as to the language group to which Sumerian may once have belonged.

The most important development in the course of the fourth millennium BC was the birth of the city. There were precursors, such as the unwalled prepottery settlement at Jericho of about 7000 BC, but the beginning of cities with a more permanent character came only later. There is no generally accepted definition of a city. In this context, it means a settlement that serves as a centre for smaller settlements, one that possesses one or more shrines of one or more major deities, has extensive granaries, and, finally, displays an advanced stage of specialization in the crafts.

The earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia, as far as their names are known, are Eridu, Erech (Uruk), Badtibira, Nippur, and Kish (35 miles [56 km] south-southeast of Baghdad). The surveys of the American archaeologist Robert McCormick Adams and the German archaeologist Hans Nissen have shown how the relative size and number of the settlements gradually shifted: the number of small or very small settlements was reduced overall, whereas the number of larger places grew. The clearest sign of urbanization can be seen at Erech (Uruk), with the almost explosive increase in the size of the buildings. Uruk Levels VI to IV had rectangular buildings covering areas as large as 275 by 175 feet (84 by 53 metres) These buildings are described as temples, since the ground plans are comparable to those of later buildings whose sacred character is beyond doubt, but other functions, such as assembly halls for noncultic purposes, cannot be excluded.

The major accomplishments of the period Uruk VI to IV, apart from the first inscribed tablets (Level IV B), are masterpieces of sculpture and of seal engraving and also of the form of wall decoration known as cone mosaics. Together with the everyday pottery of gray or red burnished ware, there is a very coarse type known as the beveledrim bowl. These are vessels of standard size whose shape served as the original for the sign sila, meaning “litre.” It is not too rash to deduce from the mass production of such standard vessels that they served for the issue of rations. This would have been the earliest instance of a system that remained typical of the southern Mesopotamian city for centuries: the maintenance of part of the population by allocations of food from the state.

too rash to deduce from the mass production of such standard vessels that they served for the issue of rations. This would have been the earliest instance of a system that remained typical of the southern Mesopotamian city for centuries: the maintenance of part of the population by allocations of food from the state.

Mesopotamia religion

The religious beliefs and practices of the Sumerians and Akkadians and their successors, the Babylonians and Assyrians, form a single stream of tradition. Sumerian in origin, Mesopotamian religion was added to and subtly modifi ed by the Akkadians, whose own beliefs were in large measure assimilated to, and integrated with, those of their new environment. As the only available intellectual framework that could provide a comprehensive understanding of the forces governing existence and also guidance for right conduct in life, religion ineluctably conditioned all aspects of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. It yielded the forms in which that civilization’s social, economic, legal, political, and military institutions were, and are, to be understood, and it provided the signifi cant symbols for poetry and art. In many ways it even infl uenced peoples and cultures outside Mesopotamia, such as the Elamites to the east, the Hurrians and Hittites to the north, and the Aramaeans and Israelites to the west.

Architecture of Mesopotamia

The beginnings of monumental architecture in Mesopotamia are usually considered to have been con- temporary with the founding of the Sumerian cities and the invention of writing, in about 3100 BC.

presence of the Sumerians throughout the temple’s history. Already, in the Ubaid period (c. 5200–c. 3500 BC), this temple anticipated most of the architectural characteristics of the typical Protoliterate Sumerian platform temple. It is built of mud brick on a raised plinth (platform base) of the same material, and its walls are ornamented on their outside surfaces with alternating buttresses (supports) and recesses. Tripartite in form, its long central sanctuary is flanked on two sides by subsidiary chambers, provided with an altar at one end and a freestanding offering table at the other.

Typical temples of the Protoliterate period—both the platform type and the type built at ground level—are, however, much more elaborate both in planning and ornament. Interior wall ornament often consists of a patterned mosaic of terra-cotta cones sunk into the wall, their exposed ends dipped in bright colours or sheathed in bronze. An open hall at the Sumerian city of Erech (modern Tall al-Warkā’, Iraq) contains freestanding and attached brick columns that have been brilliantly decorated in this way. Alternatively, the internal-wall faces of a platform temple could be ornamented with mural paintings depicting mythical scenes, such as at ‘Uqair.

Sculpture of Mesopotamia

Practically all Sumerian sculpture served as adornment or ritual equipment for the temples. No clearly identifiable cult statues of gods or goddesses have yet been found. Many of the extant figures in stone are votive statues, as indicated by the phrases used in the inscriptions that they often bear: “It offers prayers,” or “Statue, say to my king (god)… .” Male statues stand or sit with hands clasped in an attitude of prayer. They are often naked above the waist and wear a woolen skirt curiously woven in a pattern that suggests overlapping petals (commonly described by the Greek word kaunakes, meaning “thick cloak”). A togalike garment sometimes covers one shoulder. Men generally wear long hair and a heavy beard, both often trimmed in corrugations and painted black. The eyes and eyebrows are emphasized with coloured inlay. The female coiffure varies considerably but predominantly consists of a heavy coil arranged vertically from ear to ear and a chignon behind. The hair is sometimes concealed by a headdress of folded linen. Ritual nakedness is confined to priests.

It has been thought that the rarity of stone in Mesopotamia contributed to the primary stylistic distinction between Sumerian and Egyptian sculpture. The Egyptians quarried their own stone in prismatic blocks, and one can see that, even in their freestanding statues, strength of design is attained by the retention of geometric unity. By contrast, in Sumer, stone must have been imported from remote sources, often in the form of miscellaneous boulders, the amorphous character of which seems to have been retained by the statues into which they were transformed.