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Ancient Mesopotamia

In the first week of this class, we looked at Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples. As you will recall,
Paleolithic people were hunters and gatherers. Neolithic people, on the other hand, began to
settle down, usually in small villages. They began to domesticate animals and practice
agriculture.

Today, we will move forward and begin to look at how larger civilizations developed. The word
“civilization” can have multiple meanings. Sometimes people use it in a very positive sense: to
say that someone or something is “civilized” is much more complimentary than saying that they
are “uncivilized” or “barbaric.” In this class, however, I am using “civilized” with a much more
restricted meaning. The word originally comes from the Latin “civitas,” which simply means
city. Today, we will began looking at people who began to live in cities, rather than in smaller
settlements.

The first cities in the world were built in Mesopotamia, a region in the Middle East that is
now part of Iraq. Mesopotamia lies between two large rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Both of these rivers drain into the Persian Gulf. The term Mesopotamia means “the land between
the rivers.”

Cause and Effect

In this lecture and the next, I will tell you a lot of facts about Mesopotamia – that they had
agriculture, and kings, and writing, for example. In general, if you try to memorize these things
as “100 random facts,” you will probably not retain very much information. A better tactic is to
try to see how they fit together.

Let me give you an example. Mesopotamian people lived in societies that had agriculture and
also had specialized labor (that is, some people were farmers, some people were craftsmen, some
people were scribes, etc.). These are not unrelated random facts. Instead, the chain of cause and
effect goes like this:

 They had agriculture

 Therefore, they had a fairly reliable source of producing a lot of food
 Therefore, not everyone had to be involved in food production
 Therefore, some people could do other things – like become craftsmen or scribes.
 So we can see – having successful agriculture can lead to specialization of labor

Trying to see how things are related to each other in chain of cause-and-effect will help you
in virtually every lecture this entire semester!
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The Sumerians and the Akkadians

The Sumerians were the first major civilization to appear in the region. They appear to have
arrived in the region about 3100 BC, and conquered the people who already lived there.

 They spoke a language called Sumerian. A few scholars in the present day can read it,
so we do know about the Sumerians from their own writing. Interestingly, Sumerian is
entirely unrelated to any other known language. (The technical term for languages like
this is “language isolate.”)
 They built cities. The first of these cities included Eridu, Uruk, and Ur.
o Uruk was famed for the great wall that surrounded it, supposedly built by the hero
Gilgamesh.
o If you are very Biblically literate, you may recognize the name Ur. In the book of
Genesis, Abram (later called Abraham) was originally from “Ur of the
Chaldeans,” a Mesopotamian city near the Persian Gulf.
 These cities were not politically united. Each was in essence a “city-state,” a city-sized
country. Each had its own king and its own government. Some cities made alliances with
each other, and others fought. Most of these wars were probably about access to water
and land.
o Archaeologically, the existence of walls around cities testifies to warfare: building
a wall around an entire city would take an enormous amount of effort. Nobody
would do it except for defense.

The Akkadians were the second major civilization in the region. They arrived from the west
and from Arabia by about 2900 BC, or roughly two hundred years after the Sumerians.

 Their language, Akkadian, is a Semitic language. It is related to many other languages,

including modern Hebrew and Arabic.
 About 2370 BC, Sargon of Akkad became an important king and conqueror. Many
details of his life are obscure, but he conquered much of Mesopotamia, including regions
inhabited both by Akkadians and Sumerians. He is sometimes credited with establishing
the first empire, as he ruled over many city-states that had once been independent nations.

Characteristics of Mesopotamian Society

Although the cities of Mesopotamia were not always politically united, they did share many
characteristics in common. Today, we will look at agriculture, kings, and writing. Next time,
we will look at religion and social structure.
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I. The Beginnings of Agriculture

We saw last time that people in the Middle East began to transition to the Neolithic around
10,000 BC. By about 6,000 BC, Mesopotamian people were growing a wide variety of plants,
including barley, wheat, and vegetables. They had also domesticated sheep, cows, goats, and
pigs.

Mesopotamian Geography
The geography of Mesopotamia presents some serious challenges for farmers. The landscape
was quite varied.
 Overall, the region is characterized by wide, flat plains.
 Much of the land is desert. The summers were very hot, and there was little rainfall.
 There were, however, also lakes, swamps, and rivers.
o The most important rivers were the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Tigris and the
Euphrates flood fairly regularly, between April and June. Unfortunately, this
pattern of flooding is not useful for growing crops.

If people want to practice agriculture in a land like this, they have to learn to control water. The
ancient Mesopotamians did that, devising a system of canals and catch basins to hold water. This
allowed them to irrigate their plants systematically, rather than just hoping for enough rainfall.

II. Kings
You may recall that I suggested that earlier (Neolithic) societies were largely egalitarian. And
yet, when we look at Mesopotamia, we see cities with powerful kings. What were these kings
like, and how did this institution arise?

 Mesopotamian kings (sometimes priest-kings) were quite powerful. They led the army,
administered the economy, served as judges, and served as intermediaries with the gods.
(That is, although they were not seen as gods themselves, they offered sacrifices and
prayers to the gods on behalf of the people.)
 How did this institution originate? Our best idea is that it arose from the practice of
agriculture and the difficulties involved in farming in the region.
o If you have a large population that depends on irrigated agriculture in a difficult
climate, you need some kind of centralized control.
o Who will dig the canals and water basins? Who will dredge them out when they
need dredging? Who will decide how much water goes here and how much water
goes there? Who will plant wheat? Who will plant barley? How will the food be
distributed?
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o In ancient Mesopotamia, all of these were decisions made by a centralized

government. Farmers were told what and when to plant, their yields were
estimated and distribution was planned in advance.

A moment’s thought should suggest that this would be an enormous amount of information
to keep track of. Nobody could keep it all in their heads. It is only possible because these
peoples also had a system of writing.

III. Writing
In essence, scholars think that writing was invented in order to keep track of agricultural needs.
With a system of writing, lasting records could be made. Mesopotamian governments could keep
track of land ownership, access to water, labor records, the distribution of harvests, and taxation.

An enormous amount of Mesopotamian writing has survived. We have stories, poems, and
songs, but the vast majority of surviving Mesopotamian writing relates to contracts, laws,
regulations, business transactions, and court cases.

Cuneiform
Writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC. This first form of writing is called
“cuneiform,” from a Latin-word meaning “wedge.” In cuneiform writing, a wedge-shaped
writing instrument (called a stylus) was pressed into soft clay, leaving wedge-shaped marks. The
hardened clay was very durable, which helps to explain why so much cuneiform has survived to
the present.

Cuneiform writing

Source: University of Oxford at https://www.ox.ac.uk

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Cuneiform does not use an alphabet as we understand it. Alphabets, if you think about it, are
really kind of amazing! In English, with just 26 characters, we can express any word in our entire
language. But alphabets are a much later invention. Cuneiform writing used hundreds of
symbols. These symbols could work in various ways:
 Pictograms – a figure that looks like the head of an ox might mean “ox.” Or a picture of
an ear of barley might mean “barley.”
 Expansion – a picture of a foot might mean “foot.” Or, by an extension of meaning, it
might mean “stand,” or “walk.”
 Punning – a symbol meaning one word might be used to indicate a word with a similar
sound. If English worked this way, we might imagine that a picture of the sun could
indicate “sun” or “son.”

Cuneiform also changed over time. The earliest forms looked more like pictures. But if you
imagine trying to draw pictures in wet clay with a stylus, you can see why later forms would
become simplified and more geometric. The following chart shows how a few symbols in
Sumerian cuneiform changed over the course of 2400 years. You will notice that the later images
are more geometric and stylized, and look less like pictures.
Sumerian cuneiform

Source: https://www.omniglot.com
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Learning how to write a language with hundreds of different characters would obviously be quite
difficult, and most people (even priests and kings) in ancient Mesopotamia were illiterate. If you
were a ruler, you would have scribes who worked for you. If you were a merchant or a priest and
needed to send a message to someone, you would hire a scribe to write it for you.

Most scribes were men, but we do know of some literate women in ancient Mesopotamia. As
you can imagine, being a scribe would have been a good job! Writing was very necessary, and
most people couldn’t do it. But . . . it would have been very hard to learn to write. Among other
things, a scribe in ancient Mesopotamia needed:
 Fluency in both Sumerian and Akkadian, which are totally unrelated languages.
 Knowledge of hundreds of different characters.
 An understanding of the technical language of various professions (including
silversmiths, priests, and farmers).
 Knowledge of mathematics and geometry, to aid in writing about the division of fields or
the distribution of food.

If you consider daily life in ancient Mesopotamia, with its irrigated fields, kings, and complex
writing systems, you are aware that you are looking at people who seem to be very different from
us. And yet, some human characteristics never seem to change, including complaining about the
younger generation. As we finish up today, please consider these words from an ancient
Mesopotamian father, criticizing his son for not working hard enough in school:

 “What have you done, what good came of your sitting here? You are already a . . . man
and close to being aged! Like an old ass you are not teachable any more. Like withered
grain, you have passed the season. How long will you play around? But, it is still not too
late! If you study night and day and work all the time modestly and without arrogance, if
you listen to your colleagues and teachers, you can still become a scribe! The scribal
craft, receiving a handsome fee, is a bright-eyed guardian, and it is what the palace
needs.”
Source: Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1998), 98.

Next time, we will look at Mesopotamian social structure and religion