When was mesopotamia developed

The Kassites abandoned their own culture after a couple of generations of dominance, allowing themselves to be absorbed into Babylonian civilization.

Reception of a victorious general of the Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia. Around B. The Assyrian Empire continued to expand over the next two centuries, moving into modern-day Palestine and Syria. Under the rule of Ashurnasirpal II in B.

His son Shalmaneser spent the majority of his reign fighting off an alliance between Syria, Babylon and Egypt, and conquering Israel. One of his sons rebelled against him, and Shalmaneser sent another son, Shamshi-Adad, to fight for him. Three years later, Shamshi-Adad ruled.

A new dynasty began in B. Modeling himself on Sargon the Great, he divided the empire into provinces and kept the peace. His undoing came when the Chaldeans attempted to invade and Sargon II sought an alliance with them. The Chaldeans made a separate alliance with the Elamites, and together they took Babylonia.

Sargon II lost to the Chaldeans but switched to attacking Syria and parts of Egypt and Gaza, embarking on a spree of conquest before eventually dying in battle against the Cimmerians from Russia. Esarhaddon struggled to rule his expanded empire. A paranoid leader, he suspected many in his court of conspiring against him and had them killed.

His son Ashurbanipal is considered to be the final great ruler of the Assyrian empire. Ruling from to B. Nabopolassar attempted to take Assyria but failed. His son Nebuchadnezzar reigned over the Babylonian Empire following an invasion effort in B. Nebuchadnezzar is known for his ornate architecture, especially the Hanging Gardens of Babylon , the Walls of Babylon and the Ishtar Gate. Under his rule, women and men had equal rights. Nebuchadnezzar is also responsible for the conquest of Jerusalem , which he destroyed in B.

He appears in the Old Testament because of this action. Nabonidus was such an unpopular king that Mesopotamians did not rise to defend him during the invasion. Babylonian culture is considered to have ended under Persian rule, following a slow decline of use in cuneiform and other cultural hallmarks. Eventually, the region was taken by the Romans in A. Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic, with followers worshipping several main gods and thousands of minor gods. The three main gods were Ea Sumerian: Enki , the god of wisdom and magic, Anu Sumerian: An , the sky god, and Enlil Ellil , the god of earth, storms and agriculture and the controller of fates.

Ea is the creator and protector of humanity in both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of the Great Flood. In the latter story, Ea made humans out of clay, but the God Enlil sought to destroy humanity by creating a flood. Ea had the humans build an ark and mankind was spared. If this story sounds familiar, it should; foundational Mesopotamian religious stories about the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, and the Creation of the Tower of Babel found their way into the Bible, and the Mesopotamian religion influenced both Christianity and Islam.

Each Mesopotamian City had its own patron god or goddess, and most of what we know of them has been passed down through clay tablets describing Mesopotamian religious beliefs and practices. A painted terracotta plaque from B. While making art predates civilization in Mesopotamia, the innovations there include creating art on a larger scale, often in the context of their grandiose and complex architecture, and frequently employing metalwork.

A Kneeling bull holding a spouted vessel, one of the earliest examples of metalwork in art from Mesopotamia. One of the earliest examples of metalwork in art comes from southern Mesopotamia, a silver statuette of a kneeling bull from B. Before this, painted ceramics and limestone were the most common art forms. Another metal-based work, a goat standing on its hind legs and leaning on the branches of a tree, featuring gold and copper along with other materials, was found in the Great Death Pit at Ur and dates to B.

Mesopotamian art often depicted its rulers and the glories of their lives. Also created around B. One famous relief in his palace in Nimrud shows him leading an army into battle, accompanied by the winged god Assur. Ashurbanipal is also featured in multiple reliefs that portray his frequent lion-hunting activity. Exactly how this first came about is unknown, but it seems likely that this development was linked to the endemic warfare that set in between city-states at this time attested by the appearance of city walls.

It may have been that the high priests of the temples — who, in an age when politics and religion were deeply entwined would always have been highly political figures — became more and more important as the people of the city looked to them for military leadership; or it may have been that gifted war-leaders were given or seized pre-eminent power in the states.

In any event, during the early third millennium BCE kingship arose in all the city-states, and in subsequent centuries became gathered more and more power and status to themselves judging by the ever-larger palaces that they built.

Accompanying this process was the alienation of land away from the temples, with the growth of large estates in the hands of rulers, and later of private individuals.

Other aspects of economic life, such as trade and craftwork, followed a similar course. Hammurabi enthroned as king of Babylon by the god, Shamash The Louvre.

The king was held to be the earthly representative of the patron god of the city. He was a sacred being, and to disobey him was to disobey the god. His primary duty was to ensure that the people served their god properly.

Because the people believed themselves to be the slaves of their god, they were also viewed as being slaves of the king. However, the king was also seen as the shepherd of his people, and his duty was not simply to ensure their obedience; it was also to provide justice and order, to protect property, and of course to defend the people from attack.

From time to time, one of these city-states would succeed in conquering its neighbors, with the conquering ruler becoming acknowledged by other kings as their overlord, or high king. Extensive states would thus be formed temporarily, enduring for a generation or two.

However, holding such conquests together was hard, in the face of invasions from the surrounding mountains or deserts, or from rebellions from within. Mesopotamia would soon fall back into its normal patchwork of small states. As time went by, however, the independence of the city-states was gradually undermined as more enduring states covering many cities arose.

From the early 2nd millennium, southern Mesopotamia was usually unified under the control of various dynasties, ruling from the large city of Babylon. As a result, this region came to be called Babylonia. Some time later, northern Mesopotamia came to be dominated by the Assyrians. Mesopotamian rulers had wide duties. Not only had they to maintain law and order, but they had to ensure that the canals and irrigation systems were in proper working order, so that agriculture could thrive.

As a result, much of the bureaucratic apparatus that had grown up to serve the temple was now under the orders of the king, to assist him in fulfilling his awesome responsibilities. The Sumerian city-states had a complex hierarchy of scribes and officials to look after the complex workings of the temple and royal government.

Most notably, Ur, at the height of its power under Shulgi reigned BCE , had a large and elaborate bureaucracy to administer the remarkably centralized state it had built up. A few centuries later, Hammurabi , king of Babylon BCE also had a large organization of officials to assist him rule his empire.

By this date, Mesopotamian states also had a regular postal system at their service. To sustain the state apparatus, Mesopotamian landowners had to pay the king a portion of the crops they grew.

Also, the king owned large estates from which he could draw income. The individual cities were also responsible for the upkeep of their local irrigation systems, and could raise their own labor for this.

To meet their local government needs, the subordinate cities could impose their own taxes and dues, as well as levy duties on local trade. One of the major contributions of ancient Mesopotamia to government practice was the development of written law codes.

However, this code drew on earlier codes going back to the Sumerian city-states of the 3rd millennium BCE. From them, we know a great deal about the Mesopotamian legal system. Cases were heard by judges appointed by the king; in important cases, a panel of judges was appointed.

Appeals could be made to the king. Indeed, it seems that one of the reasons for Hammurabi issuing his Code was to make it clear to all his subjects who would have been accustomed to different laws in different places on what basis decisions would be arrived at if appeals were made to the royal court.

A person could not be convicted unless there was clear evidence of his or her guilt. By modern standards, punishments could be harsh — many crimes carried the death penalty with sentences ranging from hanging to burning.

Flogging was used for various crimes, but fines were the most common punishment. As well as criminal law, there was a well-developed body of civil law. Contracts, deeds and agreements had to be written on a clay tablet, witnessed on oath and placed in the temple archives, so that in case of dispute they could be referred to later.

Warfare was endemic in early Mesopotamian society, as cities quarreled over land and water rights. The Sumerian city-states organized the first true armies as opposed to warrior bands in history.

We know very little about how these armies were composed or organized. Their elite soldiers were armed with bronze armor and weapons, and less-well armed but more mobile troops were deployed slings and bows and arrows.

In the 2nd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian armies adopted a new piece of military technology, the horse-drawn chariot. This was an innovation imported from the nomads of the steppes to the north. Mastering chariot warfare demanded considerable training and practice, and the adoption of this technology must have given further impetus to the use of trained, perhaps even professional, soldiers.

Click here for the Assyrian army , which brought Mesopotamian warfare to its peak. Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic; more than 2, gods and goddesses have been identified. The chief of the gods varied from period to period. For the Sumerians, it was Enlin, the Sky God. The Babylonians worshipped Marduk above all others, and Ashur was the supreme god of the Assyrians. Other notable gods and goddesses were Ishtar, goddess of love and fertility, Tiamat, god of the sea and chaos, and Sin, the moon god.

Marduk, high god of the Babylonians the Louvre. The Mesopotamians conceived of the material world as being deeply bound up with the divine. Every household, village and city had its own god. Everything that happened on Earth had a divine dimension to it — was at least as much the result of the wishes of gods as of men and women.

The overriding purpose of man was to serve the gods. In early Mesopotamian times this meant that the entire economic life of a city-state was geared to the service of the temple. This gave religious justification for their complete authority over their subjects. Mesopotamian cosmology viewed the world as a flat disc, with a canopy of air above, and beyond that, surrounding water above and below.

The universe was held to have come out of this water. The Mesopotamians had a rich store of myths and legends. The early Mesopotamian city-state was, to a very large extent, a self-sufficient economic unit.

It was viewed as being the household of the patron god — which meant, in practice, that the temple had an immense degree of control over economic activity. Craftsmen — metal-smiths, potters, spinners, weavers, carpenters — and laborers were what we would call employees of the temple. So too were traders. Long-distance trade caravans were organized and supplied by the temple, and the traders were temple servants.

As time went by this situation was modified by the rising importance of the secular ruler, the king. As he grew in power, little by little he arrogated more economic control to himself. This was achieved through taking land the primary economic asset from the temple, and diverting the work of scribes, overseers, craftsmen and workmen to his own purposes.

As more time passed, the situation changed again as the king granted lands and wealth to his officials and supporters, and so created a private market for goods and services separate from either king or temple. Traders, craftsmen and laborers increasingly worked on their own account. Nevertheless, throughout ancient Mesopotamian times, temples and palaces retained huge economic influence.

The Mesopotamians grew a variety of crops, including barley, wheat, onions, turnips, grapes, apples and dates. They kept cattle, sheep and goats; they made beer and wine. Fish were also plentiful in the rivers and canals. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and their numerous branches, made farming possible in Mesopotamia. However, they could be wild rivers, and floods were frequent. At the same time, the hot, dry climate meant that year-round irrigation was needed to grow crops.

The Euphrates river runs through a hot and dry landscape in Mesopotamia. Irrigation is needed to bring the arid Mesopotamian landscape to life photo: jamesdale The Mesopotamians were the first people to attempt to control water on a large scale by the use of an integrated system of dykes, reservoirs, canals, drainage channels and aqueducts. Maintaining, repairing and extending this system was seen as one of the prime duties of a king.

The water control system was built up generation by generation, covering an ever wider area and involving an ever denser network of waterways. As a result of the large and concentrated population which grew up in Mesopotamia, farming was carried out by peasants rather than by slaves mass slavery tends to be a response to a shortage of labor. In early times these were bound to the land as temple or royal serfs; later, some became free farmers, owning their land outright, but many farmed estates owned by kings, temples, high officials and other wealthy members of the ruling classes.

All remained liable to forced labor on irrigation projects, or on the construction and maintenance of temples, palaces and city walls. Until the spread of the use of iron, in the first millennium BCE, farming implements were made of stone and bone — as they had been during the Stone Age.

Metals such as bronze were far too expensive to use in this way, while copper was too soft for most uses. Wood was also quite rare, as there is little tree cover in the region. However, the soil of Mesopotamia, once watered, is easy to work, and agriculture was highly productive.

The plain of Mesopotamia was created in comparatively recent times from an geological point of view by the mud brought down by the rivers. This means that the region is very short of useful minerals such as stone for building, precious metals and timber. This had the effect of stimulating trade with neighboring regions, and beyond.

Later, Mesopotamian merchants ventured further afield, with trading contacts being developed with peoples in Syria and Asia Minor in the west, and in Iran and the Indus civilization , in the east. With the coming of the Bronze Age, in about BCE, an added incentive to trade was the desire to acquire the copper and tin needed to make this valuable metal.

Once Mesopotamian states started to equip their soldiers with bronze armor and weapons, this hunger intensified. However, these minerals are only found in widely scattered locations, so the search for them involved developing long distance trade routes. Trade caravans of donkeys — camels were only domesticated after BCE were organized by specialist agents, to whom merchants entrusted their goods.

Overland transport was by oxen. Most bulk goods such as the timbers brought from as far away as Lebanon was transported by river.

Sea-going ships were also used, with trading voyages being made to the ports of northern India. Metal coinage would not come into use until much later, but trade was based on a regulated system of exchange — a given amount of seed would be worth so many ounces of silver, for example. These relative values were enshrined in the law codes. Temples acted as banks, with merchants and landowners acting as lenders. Temples also made loans on their own account.

If the debt was repaid before the due date, no interest was levied. The ancient Mesopotamians lived in cities, which formed the core of the city-states. These cities were surrounded by numerous satellite villages, and in the case of the larger cities, smaller towns were also under their authority. Estimates for the size of Mesopotamian cities vary wildly. However, a typical city may have housed 20, people, and a larger one 50, Once it became the chief city of southern Mesopotamia, Babylon could have had a population of as much as , The typical Mesopotamian city was built around the temple, a monumental structure sitting at the center of a complex of granaries, storehouses and other administrative buildings.

From the mid-second millennium onwards, a monumental royal palace would also stand nearby, sometimes rivaling the temple in magnificence. One or more wide streets connected the central area to the city gates. Away from these public spaces, the large homes of the elite and the squat mud dwellings of the common people crowded together, interspersed by narrow passages down which even pack animals could not pass.

The stench must have been appalling, as most people had no means of disposing of their waste apart from into the street. No wonder the better-off houses had all their windows facing inwards, onto their courtyards!

The larger cities followed the above pattern except that they were composed of several districts, each one centered on its own temple whose god was subordinate to the patron god of the city. The city proper would be enclosed by a stout mud or baked brick wall, pierced by guarded gates. Just outside these gates were probably reed huts of those unable to afford to live inside the walls. The remains of such structures have long since perished, but carvings depict them, and many people in modern Iraq live in similar houses.

Reconstruction of the avenue leading to the Ishtar Gate, Babylon Pergamum museum, Berlin; photo: gryffindor. Either joined to the main town, or a little distance from it, were the quays of the river or sea port.

Around the harbor were the homes of foreign traders, who would not have been allowed to live in the city itself. Surrounding this built up area was the territory ruled from the city.

Nearest the city were the irrigated farms and meadows. Dense villages of closely-packed mud huts dotted this countryside, and every now and then the large courtyard-style house of a wealthy landowner. Beyond the fertile farmland would be the grassland where shepherds and nomads grazed their sheep and goat; and beyond this, the desert.

Most of the population in ancient Mesopotamia were farmers, working small plots of land. Above them stood a very small elite group made up of the ruling classes — kings, courtiers, officials, priests and soldiers.

Merchants and craftsmen also held a high position in society. The elite was greatly restricted in size by the difficulty, length of time and expense it took to acquire literacy and numeracy.

The cuneiform script had hundreds of symbols to master, which took long years of hard schooling — and one can be sure that access to such schooling was available only to the children of elite families.

In any case, the vast majority of ordinary folk needed their children to be contributing to the family income as soon as they were able, and not spending time in education. All this would have given the members of the literati a huge amount of authority over the rest of the population.

Only through exercising the skills of literacy and numeracy could the large bodies of people be organized. Very probably literacy was seen as a mysterious and sacred skill, conferring high status on those who possessed it. In early Mesopotamia, members of this elite group would have been supported by temple revenues. Later still, as kings gave away landed estates, or as wealthy individuals were able to purchase them, the topmost levels of Mesopotamian society would have come to form an hereditary landed aristocracy.

Near the bottom of society was an underclass of landless laborers and beggars. These had only restricted rights as citizens; and right at the bottom was a class of slaves, who had very few rights. They could be bought and sold like other property. Additionally, he notes, the marsh provided a connection to sea routes on the Persian Gulf, which made it possible for people who lived in the south to eventually develop long-distance trade with other places.

They also had access to mountains and forests, where they could hunt for game and cut down trees for wood. Their areas also had land routes to places to the north beyond the mountains, where they could obtain materials such as obsidian , a type of rock that can be used in jewelry or for making cutting tools.

But they also created gardens shaded by date palms, where they cultivated a wide variety of crops including beans, peas, lentils, cucumbers, leeks, lettuce and garlic, as well as fruit such as grapes, apples, melons and figs. They also milked sheep, goats and cows to make butter, and slaughtered them for meat. Eventually, the agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia led to what Diamond describes as the next big step in progress, the Urban Revolution.

Roughly 5, to 6, years ago in Sumer, villages evolved into cities. One of the earliest and most prominent was Uruk , a walled community with 40, to 50, inhabitants. The Sumerians developed may have been the earliest system of writing as well as sophisticated art, architecture, and complex government bureaucracies to supervise agriculture, commerce and religious activity.

Sumer also became a hotbed of innovation , as the Sumerians took inventions that other ancient peoples developed, from pottery to textile weaving, and figured out how to do them on an industrial scale.