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Mesopotamia, general background Mesopotamia is from the Greek meaning between two rivers. It
was an elongated, cone-shaped lowland lying between the Euphrates and the Tigris. Many scholars think that this is where the Biblical "Garden of Eden" was and thus making it the cradle of the human race. Sometime during the millennium 5,00-4,000 B.C., neolithic (stone age) people settled the fertile plains and began rapid technological and sociological developement. Among the changes these people produced during this period were the use of copper and bronze as tools and weapons, the development of the wheel for land transportation, the invention of the sailboat for water travel, and the revolutionizing of ceramics with the use of the potter's wheel. Mesopotamia included two distinct regions, each with their own culture (Akkad in the north and Sumer in the south) prior to a military unification under the Akkadian king, Sargon I around 2300 B.C. Although the Akkadians conquered Mesopotamia, the culture of Sumer predominated and survived. Therefore, the discussion of civilized would begin with the Sumerians. |
Sumerian civilization The Sumerian agriculture, architecture, law, science, mathematics, philosophy, and religion was far-reaching in their effects on the world.
The Sumerian irrigation conduits that channeled the precious river water to their fields was so well constructed that their remains are visible today. Their ruins have been carefully resurrected by patient archaeologists. One of the oldest written documents in existence on the subject of agriculture is a Sumerian text telling in detail how to prepare and cultivate a barley crop. The basic building material in this largely treeless land was sun-dried mud cut into bricks and used for construction. This adobe material was also used by the Native American tribes in the American Southwest. Sumerians built city walls, palaces, temples, fortresses, and other public and private structures. The characteristic architectural type for a large building was the ziggurat, a semi-pyramidal tower built in layers (or terraces) and often crowned with a religious shrine. Similar temples were built in the Americas by Incans and Mayans centuries later: their material was stone rather than brick though. One of the major reasons for the splendid achievements of Sumerian builders was their discovery of the arch. Seemingly simple, the arch is really a sophisticated structure based upon complex engineering principles. Its superiority over the basic post-and-lintel technique permitted a building to support considerably more overhead weight. A simple extension of the arch principle resulted in two further architectural innovations, the vault and the dome. One of the most interesting and important uses of the sun-dried process used in builidng materials was the preparation of clay tablets used for writing materials. The earliest Sumerian writing was ideographs (picture writing) but by 2800 B.C. scribes were using a system of symbols to designate sounds rather than complete ideas. Therefore a true symbolic alphabet was formed. This combined phonetic and syllabic system compromised 150 characters cut into the wet clay tablets with a reed or bone stylus. The wedge-shaped marks are called cuneiform writing (from the Latin cuneus, meaning wedge). After their initial development, they changed very little for over 2,000 years. The symbols (they can't actually be called letters) were cut into the tablets by scribes and when a perfect copy was completed, the tablet was allowed to dry. Literally thousands of these tablets, still readily decipherable, have been dug from the Mesopotamian earth. The most noteable of Sumer's achievments was its system of law. Near the end of the third millennium B.C. (King Ur-Nammu 2060-2043 B.C.), from his capital at Ur (named in the Bible as the home of Abraham before his journey to Palestine), reunified Sumer after a period of foreign domination and began the third dynasty of Sumerian kings. Ur-Nammu set his scribes to collecting and editing old laws, writing new ones, and formulating schedules of fines and punishments. The results might may have been the world's earliest written laws. The two fragments of tablet that contain what survives of this code are the oldest yet to be discovered. The legal concepts revealed in these writings and other concepts that treat specific cases are surprisingly sophisticated, even by modern standards. Later codification shows that Sumerian laws punished wealthy and clever law-breakers more severely than poor and simple ones. The reasoning for this seems to have been that someone who is educated and has property has fewer reasons to perform criminal acts. For people of today, one of the curious features of Sumerian law was its refusal to recognize accidental crime. In modern law, considerable difference exists between premeditated murder and a traffic accident that results in a death. In Sumerian law, the taking of a life was just that (the taking of a life)--no matter how it occured--and was dealt with accordingly. Perhaps this reflected the fatalistic Sumerian philosophy that men were entirely in the hands of the gods anyway. The mathematicians developed a number system based upon 60; and their units of measurements were multiples or dividends of this number. We still retain their system in counting time and measuring angles. The Sumerians also developed the arithmetic process of multiplication, division, and the solutions for square roots and cube roots. Their time-measurements devices included a water clock and a calendar registering lunar months. Although efforts were made to develope the science of astronomy, they were primitive; it remained for later Mesopotamians, especially Chaldeans, to excel in these skills. Sumerian medical practice was little more than magical arts. Their religion may be described as polytheistic (having many gods) and their gods as anthropomorphic (man-like). The gods of Sumer were thought to be similar to human beings but much more powerful and clever. These gods were dualistic (both good and evil in each). One aspect of Sumer's religious mythology deserves special mention. One story of their folk-memory and tradition bears a striking resemblance to Old Testament material; scholars refer to this story as THE FLOOD EPIC. In this epic, mankind, having angered the gods, is sentenced to death by a great flood; but a good and devout king (Ziusudra) is warned of the calamity by the gods and is told how to save himself, his kinsmen, plants, and animal life. Following these directions Ziusudra builds a great boat, rides out the flood and emerges safely to restore humanity and living things on earth. Although the Amorites, Assyrians, and Chaldeans all made contributions, the characteristic civilization that emerged from Mesopotamia was Sumerian. |
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Amorites The Amorites were also called the "Old Babylonians," former tribesmen from the Arabian peninsula who conquered Mesopotamia after 1950 B.C., and made Babylon their capital.
Their most significant king was Hammurabi (1970-1750 B.C.), creator of the famous law code which bears his name and which influenced several sunbsequent law systems in the Near East. Life under the Old Babylonians was harsher than life under the Sumerians had been. The king of Mesopotamia became all-powerful and allowed and permitted no opposition to his policies. Laws were stricter and required a more frequent death penalty. Commerce under the Sumerians had been a type of limited free-enterprise system, but under the Mesopotamians it was rigidly controlled from the throne through use of taxes, quotas, and fixed prices. To the extent of his ability, the king also controlled agricultural production. The basic culture of Sumer was adopted by the Amorites; however, they made certain changes or additions of their own, particularly in religion. From the Sumerian mythos; Marduk was elevated to chief importance among the gods. The worship of Ishtar increased with the use of degraded ceremonies that included ritual prostitution. Among their most noteable achievment were those in philosophy and literature. Two great examples that have survived are the Gilgamesh Epic and the Babylonian Job. Written in the Akkadian script that the Amorites preferred over the Sumerian, these two writings reveal much of the basic philosophical thought of Old Babylonia. In the Gilgamesh Epic a king of Uruk in Mesopotamia goes on a long, adventurous journey in search of immortality. After many encounters with gods and men and after enduring much peril with honor and dignity, the hero realizes that all men are mortal and their common destination is the grave. This story is the prototype for countless similar sagas of later centuries and predates the Homerian Epics by about 1500 years. In the so-called Babylonian Job, a wealthy and important man undergoes misfortune at the hands of the gods and is unable to understand why. The story reflects on of mankind's oldest questions, and one to which the Babylonians had no answer: "Whence cometh evil in the world, and why is man's pilgrimage so difficult?" Their solution was simply that life was in the hands of the gods, whose arbitrary actions were beyond human understanding. Life should, therefore, be lived with as much dignity and grace as possible and the results left to fate. Some progress was made in the astronomical and mathematical sciences, but the Old Babylonians did not improve upon Sumerian culture except in the realm of philosophy. |
Assyrians After a 300 year rule by Kassites, hill tribesmen from the northeast who introduced the first horses into the Mesopotamian plain, the land between the rivers began to come increasingly under the domination of a third major power, Assyria.
Although Assyria was only a small, isolated kingdom when Sumer was at the height of her splendor, it began to rise about 1300 B.C. and eventually culminated in a vast world empire. The ambition of this tiny state can best be illustrated by one of its early kings, who, although he had as yet won only a few local battles, took the official title "King of Everything"! The vehicle of Assyrian expansion was its army that was destined to be feared throughout the Near East for its military efficiency and terrible brutality. Sculpture of this period show fierce Assyrian kings dragging long processions of chained war captives, many blinded and with iron hooks through their noses. Since Assyria itself was rather small, all her resources had to be devoted to maintaining a large army and her vast empire. The result was a highly regimented, strictly governed society which subordinated cultural matters to military priorities. One result of this type of society was that little of significance was achieved in the arts, literature, or philosophy. The most impressive achievements, however, were in technology and the sciences related to warfare. A single exception to the decline in the arts of the Assyrians was its bas-relief sculptures. These low-relief scenes were chiseled into stone in friezes that were used to decorate palaces and other public buildings. They owed much to their success as conquerors to the equipment provided by their armorers. Iron swords and lances, heavy bows, body armor, battering rams, and wheeled fortresses (ancestor of the tank) helped to make the armies of Assyria virtually invincible for nearly 600 years. One of the few instances of Assyrian military failure is recorded in the Bible in II Kings 19:35. Among Assyrian conquests were Mesopotamia, Syria, Phoenicia, Israel, and Egypt. Assyria developed medical practice to a high degree of efficiancy, probably bcause of her need to maintain a healthy army and conserve as many members of her small populace as possible. As a result, her doctors used a variety of medicines, performed sophisticated surgery (including eye surgery), and maintained what may have been the world's first ambulance service. As their armies traversed the Near East, Assyrian generals had an increasing need for accurate knowledge of the campaign areas. At home, bureaucrats also demanded reliable maps to administer to the growing empire more adequatley. In response, cartographers (mapmakers) invented the latitude and longitude grid system which we still use today to locate any given spot on a map or globe. Women seem to have occupied a more subordinate position than in Sumerian times. The Assyrians may have been the first people to veil their women in public, a practice that persists in some Near Eastern countries to this day. Although Assyria produced many great kings such as Tiglath-Pileser I (1116-1078 B.C.), Shalmaneser III (859-825 B.C.), and Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.), in many ways the most notable was Assurbanipal (668-626 B.C.). General, sportsman, patron of the arts, and himself an author, Assurbanipal collected a great library of cuneiform text in his palace at Ninevah. These text were discovered in the nineteenth century by archaeologists and reamin our largest single collection of written text from ancient Mesopotamia. |
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Chaldea By 625 B.C., the Assyrians had suffered a long series of adversities that included civil wars, rebellions by subjected peoples and military defeats abroad. In that year, a struggle began with Nebopolassar, king of Chaldea, another Mesopotamian kingdom. By 612 B.C., the Chaldeans were triumphant, Nineveh was in ruins, and Assyrian power was broken forever.
New Babylonia was the fourth and last major empire to arise in Mesopotamia. This region later became part of the Persian conquests. New Babylonia may be considered, to some degree, a re-creation of the Amorite (Old Babylonian) culture. Ancient laws, customs, and literature were revived. The commercial stagnation that had occured during Assyria's ascendancy ended. Once more Babyloniam ships and caravans plied the trade routes of the Near East. In philosophy and religion, the New Babylonians made great changes. The gods lost their anthropomorphic qualities and became transcendent(unknowable). Increasingly they were identified with the heavens and individual stars and planets. Humanity was regarded as sinful and debased; some of the most stirring examples of this emphasis in ancient religious literature are the penitentent hymns of these Babylonian philosophers. Yet this sense of sin had no centrl focus, and one consequence of it was a feeling of helpless separation from the gods and any salvation. Men were counseled to live humbly and piously, but no hope was extended for any meaningful afterlife. Necause of their preoccupation with the heavens in relation to the gods and the universe, Chaldean astronomers achieved great progress. They kept accurate astronomical records for 350 years. Using astral calculations, they developed the seven-day week and days consisting of 12 hours with 120 minutes each. (Our 24-hour day and 60 minute hour are merely variations of this calculation.) In the sixth century B.C. one such astronomer (Nabu-Rimannu) calculated the time in a solar year to within 26 minutes of perfect accuracy. A century later, another Chaldean (Kidinnu) proved a periodic change in the inclination of the earth's axis. Both of these measurements require very sophisticated processes. With little surprise, we acknowledge that at the birth of Christ three Chaldean "wise men" appeared in Palestine declaring, "We have seen his star in the east!" Despite the accomplishments of the Chaldeans, their empire did not remain long. After their ablest king (Nebuchadnezzar 605-561 B.C.) had defeated Egypt, he turned his attention to some troublesome revolts in Palestine. After bloody fighting in Judah, the city of Jerusalem fell in 587 B.C. and the Jews were marched away to their "Babylonian Captivity." Nebuchadnezzar died a few years later, however, and a series of weak usurpers occupied the throne for the remaining two decades of Babylonian authority. Then in 539 B.C. (as described in the Bible in the book of Daniel), the mighty Medo-Persians seized the capital from the hapless Belshazzar, and Babylonia joined the growing list of collapsed world empires. |
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