2013

HUM-101

Sec-0004

[ ]TERM PAPER

Background

Mesopotamia is a name for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, corresponding to

modern-day Iraq, the northeastern section of Syria and to a lesser extent southeastern Turkey

and smaller parts of southwestern Iran.

Around 150 BC, Mesopotamia was under the control of the Parthians. Mesopotamia became

a battleground between the Romans and Parthians, with parts of Mesopotamia coming under

ephemeral Roman control. In AD 226, it fell to the Sassanid Persians and remained under

Persian rule until the 7th century Arab Islamic conquest of the Sassanid Empire. A number of

primarily neo Assyrian and Christian native Mesopotamian states existed between the 1st

century BC and 3rd century AD, including Adiabene, Osroene, and Hatra.

Map showing the extent of Mesopotamia

Natural Conditions

The place between Euphrates and Tigris rivers was a good agricultural place because it had

rich and easily cultivated soil. However irregular floods which arrived about the harvest time

made agriculture a hard work without irrigation systems. These systems were to maintained

regularly, because the alkaloids gathered in them were harsh materials reduced the fertility of

the earth. Moreover, there were no metals, stones or valuable minerals available in

Mesopotamia. To be able to live a sedentary life under these conditions, people had to

cooperate in order to plan and execute new irrigation systems which could be achieved by

mobilization of huge man power. So they formed towns.

Proliferating population increased pressure on the region’s food supply; hence cities

supplemented their resources by raiding over their more prosperous neighbors. Because of

these attacks people made great walls to protect themselves such as the ramparts of Uruk. The

population of towns rose along with their towering temples, largely at the expense of

countryside, and big cities like Ur, Uruk formed.

Since Mesopotamian people lacked many natural resources, they started trading these

necessities. Merchants sailed through network canals which is again an invention of

Mesopotamian civilization. They traded surplus food for metals and tools.

In conclusion, abundance of natural resources, different geographical conditions and the urge

for needs and desires under different circumstances allowed these unique civilizations to

develop in Ancient Mesopotamia.

Environmental Challenges

The three environmental challenges in the Mesopotamian civilization were to flood, fire, and

droughts. Although the floods make the soil fertile, sometimes it floods too much and

overflows it. The fire can help burn up the trees and make the soil fertile, but it might catch

up on houses it will burn. Without flood, there will be drought, or not enough water for your

crops to grow.

Political System

Mesopotamia was comprised of self-governing city-states, with each one operating as

separate political and economic units. Aristocracies emerged, most likely because of disputes

over resources, and were made up of kings, their families and nobility. They owned the

majority of land and controlled the highest ranking positions in both government and the

military. Though the kings were not considered divine, they did overtake some of the power

and authority of religious leaders. Priests, however, cooperated with their governments and

owned some of the land and craft shops. Scribes came from noble families and were

considered supreme among civil servants. This privileged order was the minority in

Mesopotamia. Most of the citizens were considered free, but with rights of slaves, who had

none. Peasants were among the free but could only rent land that belonged to the king or the

temple, which required them to relinquish part of their harvests in order to use the property.

Sumerian Economy

Jobs included pottery makers, stonecutters, bricklayers, metal smiths, farmers, fishers,

shepherds, weavers, leather-workers, and sailors. The wheel was invented for carts, chariots,

and pottery making. Iron was smelted about 2500 BC. Seals had been used to stamp a carved

insignia on clay before cylindrical seals became widespread for labeling commodities and

legal documents. The Sumerian economy was based on agriculture, which was influenced by

major technological advances in Mesopotamian history.

Early Sumerian homes were huts built from bundles of reeds, which went on to be built from

sun-baked mud bricks because of the shortage of stone. Sumerians would have ploughed with

stone and cut with clay sickles, and went on to using metal ploughs with the development of

metal-working skills. A significant invention (one of many by the Sumerians) was the wheel,

which at first was made of solid wood.

Discoveries of obsidian from far-away locations in Anatolia and lapis lazuli from

northeastern Afghanistan, beads from Dilmun (modern Bahrain), and several seals inscribed

with the Indus Valley script suggest a remarkably wide-ranging network of ancient trade

centered around the Persian Gulf. The Epic of Gilgamesh refers to trade with far lands for

goods such as wood that were scarce in Mesopotamia. In particular, cedar from Lebanon was

prized.

Sumerian potters decorated pots with cedar oil paints. The potters used a bow drill to produce

the fire needed for baking the pottery. Sumerian masons and jewelers knew and made use of

alabaster (calcite), ivory, gold, silver, carnelian and lapis lazuli.

Social Structure

One of the duties of the king was to care for the gods and restore or rebuild their temples. In

the late third millennium BC, rulers often depicted themselves carrying out this pious task in

the form of foundation pegs. Foundation pegs were buried in the foundation of buildings to

magically protect them and preserve the builder's name for posterity. In this case, the peg is

supported by a god

Accompanying divisions in wealth was a division in power, and power among the Sumerians

passed to an elite. Sumerian priests, who had once worked the fields alongside others, soon

were separated from commoners. A corporation run by priests became the greatest

landowners among the Sumerians. The priests hired the poor to work their land and claimed

that land was really owned by the gods. Priests had become skilled as scribes, and in some

cities they sat with the city's council of elders. These councils wielded great influence,

sometimes in conflict with a city's king. They even worked in temples and conducted

religious ceremonies.

Sumerian Agriculture

Sumerian agriculture depended heavily on irrigation. The irrigation was accomplished by the

use of shadufs, canals, channels, dykes, weirs, and reservoirs. The frequent violent floods of

the Tigris, and less so, of the Euphrates, meant that canals required frequent repair and

continual removal of silt, and survey markers and boundary stones continually replaced. The

government required individuals to work on the canals in a corvee, although the rich were

able to exempt themselves.

Sumerians harvested during the spring in three-person teams consisting of a reaper, a binder,

and a sheaf handler. The farmers would use threshing wagons to separate the cereal heads

from the stalks and then use threshing sleds to disengage the grain. They then winnowed the

grain/chaff mixture.

The Sumerians grew barley, chickpeas, lentils, millet, wheat, turnips, dates, onions, garlic,

lettuce, leeks and mustard. They also raised cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. They used oxen as

their primary beasts of burden and donkeys as their primary transport animal. Sumerians

hunted fish and fowl.

Sumerian Family

Sumerian family were Patriarchal. A typical Sumerian family consisted of a husband, wife,

and children. Marriage was usually an arranged event between family elders. The tenants of

the marriage were contained in a sealed tablet. The guidelines detailed the process for the

marriage and the divorce. Monogamy was the norm, though concubines were tolerated.

The husband held the power in the family. A husband could initiate a divorce with very little

reason. He also had the right to take on a second wife if his first was not able to bear a child.

Children were generally loved and cared for, but children could be sold into slavery to repay

a debt.

Sumerian Religion

Religion was an intricate part of the daily life of a citizen of Sumer. Accordingly, the largest

and most important structure in the city was the temple. Each city had a patron deity to which

its main temple was dedicated. However, a multitude of gods were recognized and some of

them might have shrines located in the main temple complex or have their own smaller

temples.

The temple served several purposes, including worship and education. Each temple held an

educational center in which students learned mathematics and scribing. Mathematics included

simple skills, such as multiplication and addition, to the more complex, such as geometry and

square roots. A student learning to be a scribe would spend many years in study learning the

intricacies of grammar and the thousands of cuneiform symbols. The Sumerian teacher was

known as an ummia.

Temples formed into large stepped mud-brick structures known as zigurrats. It is thought that

zigurrats were built to resemble the mountains from which the ancestors of the Sumerians

may have hailed. Temples were self-sufficient. They operated their own granaries, mills,

bakeries, and livestock. The king was the high priest of the city and was considered the god's

representative. After death, the king was often deified as a natural extension of this belief.

The temple was also attended by a group of women classified into a caste system. At the

highest order of this system was the entu who was considered to be the consort of the god.

She often hailed from a very respectable background, such as the daughter of the king and

thus was expected to lead a "proper" life. Second in the caste system were the sal-me. The

two lowest were the zikru and the kadishtu, and they seemed to serve no purpose other than

prostitution.

Sumerian Writing System

Sumerian cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. Its origins can be traced back to

about 8,000 BC and it developed from the pictographs and other symbols used to represent

trade goods and livestock on clay tablets.

Type of writing system: semanto-phonetic - the symbols consist of phonograms, representing

spoken syllables, determinatives, which indicate the category a word belonged to and

logograms, which represent words.

Direction of writing: variable - early texts were written vertically from top to bottom, but by

about 3,000 BC the direction had changed to left to right in horizontal rows. At the same time

the signs were rotated 90° anticlockwise and started to be made up mainly of wedges.

Number of symbols: between about 1,000 in older texts to 400 in later texts. Many of the

symbols had multiple pronunciations.

Sumerian Art

More than 4,000 years ago the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers began to teem with

life--first the Sumerian, then the Babylonian, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian empires. Here

too excavations have unearthed evidence of great skill and artistry. Examples of fine works in

marble, diorite, hammered gold, and lapis lazuliahve been found. Stone, wood, and metal was

imported. Sumerian art and architecture was ornate and complex - primarily used for

religious purposes - painting and sculpture the main median used.

Of the many portraits produced in this area, some of the best are those of Gudea, ruler of

Lagash. Some of the portraits are in marble, others, such as the one in the Louvre in Paris, are

cut in gray-black diorite. Dating from about 2400 BC, they have the smooth perfection and

idealized features of the classical period in Sumerian art.

Clay was the Sumerians' most abundant material. Sumerian techniques and motifs were

widely available because of the invention of cuneiform writing before 3000 B.C. Among

other Sumerian arts forms were highly sophisticated clay cylinder seals used to mark

documents or property.

Sumerian Literature

Sumerian literature is the literature written in the Sumerian language during the Middle

Bronze Age. Most Sumerian literature is preserved indirectly, via Assyrian or Babylonian

copies.

The Sumerians invented the first writing system, developing Sumerian cuneiform writing out

of earlier proto-writing systems by about the 30th century BCE. The earliest literary texts

appear from about the 27th century BCE.

The Sumerian language remained in official and literary use in the Akkadian and Babylonian

empires, even after the spoken language disappeared from the population; literacy was

widespread, and the Sumerian texts that students copied heavily influenced later Babylonian

literature.

Sumerian literature has not been handed down to us directly; rather it has been rediscovered

through archaeology. Nevertheless, the Akkadians and Babylonians borrowed much from the

Sumerian literary heritage, and spread these traditions throughout the Middle East,

influencing much of the literature that followed in this region.

Babylon

Babylon was an Akkadian city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which are found

in present-day Hillah, Babylon Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometres (53 mi) south of Baghdad.

All that remains of the original ancient famed city of Babylon today is a large mound, or tell,

of broken mud-brick buildings and debris in the fertile Mesopotamian plain between

the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The city itself was built upon the Euphrates, and divided in

equal parts along its left and right banks, with steep embankments to contain the river's

seasonal floods.

Code of Hammurabi

The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code, dating back to about 1772

BC. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth

Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a human-sized

stone stele and various clay tablets. The Code consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments,

adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" as graded depending on social status, of

slave versus free man.

Nearly one-half of the Code deals with matters of contract, establishing for example the

wages to be paid to an ox driver or a surgeon. Other provisions set the terms of a transaction,

establishing the liability of a builder for a house that collapses, for example, or property that

is damaged while left in the care of another. A third of the code addresses issues concerning

household and family relationships such as inheritance, divorce, paternity and sexual

behavior. Only one provision appears to impose obligations on an official; this provision

establishes that a judge who reaches an incorrect decision is to be fined and removed from the

bench permanently. A handful of provisions address issues related to military service.

Babylonian Economy

Babylonian economy was based on agriculture. Goods are exchange on a barter system with

silver as the standard of exchange. Houses were made of Sun-dried Brick. They raised cattle

and sheep. The main crop was barley. It is a traditional market economy including foreign

trade

Babylonian Religion

Religion was based upon Polytheism. Moral and supernatural beliefs and ritual practices of

the ancient Babylonians. The cosmogony and cosmology of Babylonian religion—that is, the

gods and demons, cults and priests, and moral and ethical teachings—were taken almost

entirely from the Sumerians. The Babylonians, however, whose dominant ethnic strain was

Amorite, undoubtedly modified many of the borrowed Sumerian religious beliefs and

practices in accordance with their own cultural heritage and psychological disposition. To

cite only two outstanding examples, it was the military success and political drive of the

Semitic Amorites that made the city of Babylon the religious and cultural centre of the land

and that gave the Amorite god Marduk pre-eminence in the Babylonian pantheon.

Nevertheless, the Babylonian theologians found it necessary to justify Marduk's newly

acquired exalted position by the legal fiction that his Sumerian predecessors, the gods An and

Enlil, had themselves officially transferred their powers to him.

Babylonian Science

Babylonian mathematics (also known as Assyro-Babylonian mathematics) refers to any

mathematics of the people of Mesopotamia, from the days of the early Sumerians to the fall

of Babylon in 539 BC. Babylonian mathematical texts are plentiful and well edited. In respect

of time they fall in two distinct groups: one from the Old Ba bylonian  period (1830-1531 BC),

the other mainly Seleucid from the last three or four centuries B.C. In respect of content there

is scarcely any difference between the two groups of texts. Thus Babylonian mathematics

remained constant, in character and content, for nearly two millennia. In contrast to the

scarcity of sources in Egyptian mathematics, our knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is

derived from some 400 clay tablets unearthed since the 1850s. Written in Cuneiform script,

tablets were inscribed while the clay was moist, and baked hard in an oven or by the heat of

the sun. The majority of recovered clay tablets date from 1800 to 1600 BC, and cover topics

which include fractions, algebra, quadratic and cubic equations and the Pythagorean theorem.

The Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 gives an approximation to   accurate to five decimal

places.

Babylonians was famous for astronomical observations. The Mesopotamians also divided a

circle into 360 degrees of 60 arc minutes and had a great progress in surgery.

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