The final king of the Akkadian Empire, Shar-kali-sharri, died in B. Among these groups were the Gutian people, barbarians from the Zagros Mountains. In B. The ruler of Ur-Namma, the king of the city of Ur, brought Sumerians back into control after Utu-hengal, the leader of the city of Uruk, defeated the Gutians. Ur-Namma was attacked by both the Elamites and the Amorites and defeated in B. Choosing Babylon as the capital, the Amorites took control and established Babylonia.
Kings were considered deities and the most famous of these was Hammurabi , who ruled — B. Hammurabi worked to expand the empire, and the Babylonians were almost continually at war. The list of laws also featured recommended punishments to ensure that every citizen had the right to the same justice. Together with the control of the Amorites, this conquest marked the end of Sumerian culture.
Smelting was a significant contribution of the Hittites, allowing for more sophisticated weaponry that lead them to expand the empire even further. Their attempts to keep the technology to themselves eventually failed, and other empires became a match for them. The Hittites pulled out shortly after sacking Babylon, and the Kassites took control of the city.
Hailing from the mountains east of Mesopotamia, their period of rule saw immigrants from India and Europe arriving, and travel sped up thanks to the use of horses with chariots and carts. 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. The division of goods isn't necessarily even, which leads to social classes -- the haves, the have-nots and those in the middle.
Civilization, then, is the organization of all of the systems people use to interact with one another -- whether that's to the benefit of all, as in the protection of an organized army, or to the detriment of the people, for example when a few are able to exploit the work of the masses to grow more powerful. By this definition, Mesopotamia was indeed a true civilization. Beginning around B.
Agriculture drew the earliest people to the banks of Mesopotamia's rivers. But as they figured out how to reroute some of the water through canals, they were able to irrigate fields farther away. With a food supply capable of sustaining large numbers of people, cities began to develop. We might imagine these early city dwellers were visionaries.
But the truth is much less dramatic. Mesopotamia became a civilized powerhouse largely out of necessity. Take, for example, their writing. The Sumerians produced some of the earliest writing discovered, on baked clay tablets. These tablets captured the more mundane aspects of life, such as accounting and tax records. This writing eventually led to phonetic writing , which uses symbols to represent sounds rather than objects.
This is a good example of how the civilization of Mesopotamia developed. Necessity bore invention, which after refinement, lead to the organized integration of these creations -- civilization. So now we know that the Sumerians and other Mesopotamians developed writing and literature.
But not everything civilization brings to the world helps humanity. Read about more innovations -- good and bad -- on the next page. People built huge temples, and a priestly ruling class took its place high up in the power structure. After all, these were the people who knew the intentions of gods like Enlil wind and Utu sun. Organized religion also produced moral codes of conduct, which gave birth to formal laws. Legal concepts like restitution, retaliation and punishment for false accusations were streamlined.
Freedom from the necessity of foraging for food also allowed early agricultural societies to engage in other pursuits with less tangible rewards. Chief among these is science. The Babylonians are believed to be the first civilization to document time.
They created minutes and seconds, and produced a calendar. This breakthrough provided the foundation for astronomy and math [ Britannica ]. But Mesopotamian civilization is also credited with negative innovations, like expansionism, empires, slavery and war.
In B. The capitol city, Ur, was invaded and leveled by another Mesopotamian group, the Elamites, just a few hundred years later. The presence of those rivers had a lot to do with why Mesopotamia developed complex societies and innovations such as writing, elaborate architecture and government bureaucracies.
The regular flooding along the Tigris and the Euphrates made the land around them especially fertile and ideal for growing crops for food. That made it a prime spot for the Neolithic Revolution , also called the Agricultural Revolution, that began to take place almost 12, years ago.
With people cultivating plants and domesticating animals, they were able to stay in one place and form permanent villages. Eventually, those small settlements grew into early cities, where a lot of the characteristics of civilization —such as concentrations of population, monumental architecture, communication, division of labor, and different social and economic classes—developed.
As he explains, urban societies developed independently in Lower Mesopotamia, an area in what is now southern Iraq where the early civilization of Sumer was located, and Upper Mesopotamia, which includes Northern Iraq and part of present-day western Syria. One factor that helped civilization to develop in both places was the climate of Mesopotamia, which 6, to 7, years ago was wetter than that part of the Middle East is today.
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.
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