World History: Mesopotamia -world’s first civilization

Let’s learn about the Mesopotamia (from the Greek, meaning ‘between two rivers’) was an ancient region located in the eastern Mediterranean bounded in the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and in the southeast by the Arabian Plateau, corresponding to modern-day Iraq and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey and known as the Fertile Crescent and the cradle of civilization.

The ‘two rivers’ of the name refer to the Tigris and the Euphrates and the land was known as ‘Al-Jazirah’ (the island) to the Arabs as a fertile land surrounded by water. The term “Fertile Crescent” was coined by Egyptologist J.H. Breasted (l. 1865-1935) in 1916 to describe the region at the north-end of the Persian Gulf, associated with the biblical Garden of Eden.

Mesopotamia was the home of many different civilizations spanning thousands of years which contributed significantly to world culture and progress. Many of the aspects of daily life taken for granted in the present day, such as writing, the wheel, a code of laws, the sail, the concept of the 24-hour day, beer-brewing, civil rights, and irrigation of crops all were first developed in the land between two rivers which was home to the great Mesopotamian civilizations.

The Cradle of Civilization

Unlike the more unified civilizations of Egypt or Greece, Mesopotamia was a collection of varied cultures whose only real bonds were their script, their gods, and their attitude toward women. The social customs, laws, and even language of the Sumerian people differs from the Akkadian Period, for example, and cannot be assumed to correspond to those of the Babylonian Civilizations; it does seem, however, that the rights of women (during some periods), the importance of literacy, and the pantheon of the gods were indeed shared throughout the region, though the gods had different names in various regions and periods.

As a result of this, Mesopotamia should be more properly understood as a region that produced multiple empires and civilizations rather than any single civilization. Even so, Mesopotamia is known as the “cradle of civilization” primarily because of two developments that occurred there, in the region of Sumer, in the 4th millenium BCE:

• the rise of the city as recognized today.

• the invention of writing (although writing is also known to have developed in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, in China, and to have taken form independently in Mesoamerica).

The invention of the wheel is also credited to the Mesopotamians and, in 1922 CE, the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered “the remains of two four-wheeled wagons, [at the site of the ancient city of Ur] the oldest wheeled vehicles in history ever found, along with their leather tires” (Bertman, 35). Other important developments or inventions credited to the Mesopotamians include, but are by no means limited to, domestication of animals, agriculture and irrigation, common tools, sophisticated weaponry and warfare, the chariot, wine, beer, demarcation of time into hours, minutes, and seconds, religious rites, the sail (sailboats), and legal codes. Orientalist Samuel Noah Kramer, in fact, has listed 39 `firsts’ in human civilization that originated in Sumer.

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