Mrs. Steinke

 About 4000 years ago, several major civilizations developed in the river valleys southwest of Asia.

 The region between the Tigres and Euphrates rivers, in modern Iraq, was one of the sites: Mesopotamia, the Greek name for this site which actually means “the land between the two rivers.”

 The southeastern part of this area, Sumer, was flat, dry and arid; moreover, it lacked timber and minerals. Yet, overflows from the two rivers made the land fertile and the resulting mud could be baked into bricks.

 To capitalize on these floods, however, farmers had to build irrigation ditches. The need to coordinate the digging and repair of these ditches may have prompted the growth of the Sumerian civilization.

 As the founders of Mesopotamia civilization, the Sumerians have many “firsts” to their credit.

 They probably invented the region’s earliest system of writing, which developed from simple pictures to the cuneiform, or wedge-shaped, signs familiar to archeologists.

 The professional writers, called scribes, learned this system in Mesopotamia’s first schools, called edubbas.

 These scribes were the guardians of Sumeria’s rich literary tradition.

 While much literature circulated in oral form, scribes also recorded and transmitted many of this culture’s epics, hymns, historical accounts, myths and proverbs.

 Besides cuneiform writing, the Sumerians developed a system of numeration based on sixty. This system led to our 60 second minute, 60 minute hour, and 360 degree circle.

 Perhaps the most famous Sumerian “first” was the creation of cities. Many of these urban centers, which were like mini nations, were actually within sight of one another. At first, the main institution of each city was a temple.

 This temple contained the image of the city’s chief god—the Sumerians worshiped many gods—and housed the temple staff: priests who ruled the city, scribes who recorded crops the temple received from its land, and artisans.

 The largest building in the complex, and in the city itself, was the ziggurat, a six or seven story tower that Sumerians believed the gods could use as a ladder in descending from heaven.

 As city-states grew and came into conflict, military leaders replaced priests as rulers. These military rulers eventually became kings, and the king’s palace, with its own staff, rivaled the temple in importance.

 One of the greatest Mesopotamia kings was named Sargon. His new capital city of Agade, located near the site of Babylon, was north of Sumer (the northward shift of power would continue to be a trend.)

 Agade contributed its name to the region where Sargon lived (Akkad) and the language he spoke (Akkadian). It was a Semitic language, related to modern Hebrew and Arabic. It became the tongue of the new northern centers of power, Babylon and Assur.

 Those who spoke Semitic languages, the Semites, were nomadic people who migrated to Mesopotamia from the Arabian peninsula.

 One such group, the Amorites, founded the village of Babylon on the Euphrates River. Not until the reign of the Hammurabi did Babylon come into its own as the capital of a great empire.

 Hammurabi’s kingdom was massive. His famous legal code, engraved on a stone slab, contains 282 laws covering all aspects of daily life.

 It was based on a principle described as “an eye for an eye”: A person who blinded someone was punished by being blinded.

 Babylonians had a reverent attitude towards Sumerian culture. Babylonian scribes learned the Sumerian language and preserved its literature.

 The Babylonians are responsible for reshaping Sumerian tales about a legendary king into a brilliant Akkadian work we know today as The Epic of Gilgamesh.

 The Assyrians were a Semitic group that built the city state of Assur in northern Mesopotamia. For about half a millennium, they used their iron weapons and formidable calvary to battle for control of the land between the two rivers.

 While Assyrians competed with Babylonians, they recognized the superiority of Babylonian and Sumerian culture.

 The Assyrian king Assurbanipal paid homage to that culture by assembling the first great library of the ancient world—more than 20,000 clay tablets in Sumerian and Babylonian Cuneiform.

 What makes a civilization like the early Mesopotamia? There are several ingredients. There is, first of all, a large number of people living together in the cities with a sense of community.

 They must have a sense of place, a common and shared territory (even when they fight over it).

 They must have enough material resources and wealth to allow the people to eat, gather possessions, raise families and prosper.

 There must be some system to govern the people (with or without their consent) and to carry out the functions of government; and this all must take place under some form of law.

 There is a sense of common purpose under a common leader. There must be a sense of shared traditions and ideals built up over the centuries.

 These traditions are the core of the education that the children receive.

 There must be a shared sense of the same all-embracing and inclusive divinity (or divinities)-- a creator who formed the universe and all its creatures, and who watches and cares for the people of that civilization, and who in his or her wisdom orders the activities of the world.

 There must, of course, be writing (for that is how we define historical civilizations) and education to teach the next generation the wisdom and customs of the ancestors.

 And all three civilizations we spoke of today, Mesopotamians, Babylonians and Assyrians had all those elements that made them important civilizations and the start of written word as we know it.