Chapter 6
Mesopotamia: Origins of Civilization
Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Neo-Babylonians
Using Ancient Mesopotamia, the focus will shift from the general to particular examples
of the elements of ancient civilization. The role of the environment in the rise and fall of
these civilizations will once again be highlighted.
Pages 92
Preface
Pages 93-98
Summer
Page 99
Babylon
Pages 100-101
Assyria
Pages 101-102
Neo Babylonians
Pages103-107
DBQ Document Based Question
Page 108
Works Consulted
Essential Questions:
What are the essential elements for the development of complex societies?
What factors cause the collapse of complex societies?
Timeline of Mesopotamian Civilizations
Mesopotamia: The Cradle of Civilization
Preface
This portion of the book is about the first civilizations and their continuing legacies. In a
sense it is really about today’s world, but its root is the revolution which began in the
Fertile Crescent five thousand years ago when human beings first began to live in cities.
It deals with the city civilizations which developed independently in Mesopotamia,
Levant, Anatolia, Aegean, Egypt, India, and China which for good or ill affect the lives
of everyone on earth today.
Definition and
Common Markers
The definition of civilization commonly used by anthropologists and archaeologists is a
material one. For them civilization means, literally, “life in cities”. The moral and
spiritual character of the world’s early civilizations was very diverse. But their common
markers in material terms are virtually universal: cities, bronze technology, writing,
great ceremonial buildings, temples, monumental art, hierarchies and class division,
all sanctioned by some form of law, and held together by organized military force.
Nevertheless, these common material factors hide very different conceptions of what
actually is civilization, the ultimate goals of organized human life on earth, moral,
intellectual, political, and spiritual.
Basic
Tenets of
western
civilization
The independent origins of civilization have particular significance. By looking at the
beginnings and the long and continuing influence of the first civilizations one can
become aware of what is universally relevant. Some of the basic tenets of the modern
West, its possessive individualism, scientific utility, and free market philosophy,
perhaps, now need to be seen in this light. Western attitudes to nature and the
environment, too, take on a different color when seen in the light of traditional Eastern
civilizations. Indeed, many crucial questions concerning liberty, equality, and nature can
be traced back to the Bronze Age urban revolution.
92
Geography
The North
The South
Irrigation
93
Mesopotamia is a Greek word meaning 'between the rivers'. The rivers are the Tigris
and Euphrates which flow through modern Iraq. The Euphrates also flows through
much of Syria. Mesopotamia is made up of different regions, each with its own
geography. The geography of each area and the natural resources found there affected
the ways that people lived.
Northern Mesopotamia is made up of hills and plains.
The land is quite fertile due to seasonal rains, and the
rivers and streams flowing from the mountains. Early
settlers farmed the land and used timber, metals and stone
from the mountains nearby. Southern Mesopotamia is
made up of marshy areas and wide, flat, barren plains.
Cities developed along the rivers which flow through the
region. Early settlers had to irrigate the land along the
banks of the rivers in order for their crops to grow. Since
they did not have many natural resources, contact with
neighboring lands was important.
“The Land”, as the Sumerians called it, is a flat alluvial plain 300 miles long and
never more than 150 miles wide. It was created by the silt of the two rivers, Tigris
and Euphrates, which flow down the plain. Rising in the hills of Armenia, the Tigris
is the bigger, faster and more unpredictable of the two, more dangerous in flood; even
in the last hundred years it has devastated Baghdad on several occasions after
bursting its banks. The Euphrates is smaller and less violent, and most of the early
cities were clustered along its lower course. The two rivers were the foundation of
the achievement built up in the south over 150 generations: great brown arteries
carrying life-giving silt in their waters, flowing through what in the summer is a
burning dun-colored flat land. Today the rivers meet and form the Shatt-al-Arab. The
flood of the Tigris
and the Euphrates
unlike that of the
Nile cannot be
predicted. It may
come any time
between
the
beginning of April
and the early part
of June. Not only
is the exact time of
year unpredictable,
but the extent of
the flood cannot be
estimated.
Not
surprisingly,
the
people of the valley viewed nature and the gods as angry and unreasonable.
Without irrigation, any farming is impossible in such a landscape, and the irrigation
necessary to sustain big populations in cities was impossible without large-scale cooperative enterprise. Nor was the plain endowed with other natural resources:
Resources
Defense
There was little stone, no wood or precious metals. Apart from reeds and palm trees,
the only building material was mudbrick with which the people became brilliantly
adept, inventing the dome and the arch and constructing some of the largest and most
impressive brick structures in the world.
The creation of the artificial landscape in the southern plain, with the elaborate
irrigation systems needed to sustain city civilization, made the Sumerians peculiarly
vulnerable to outside attack. With no natural frontiers, Mesopotamia was always at
risk from its neighbors, especially to the east, from the Elamites and, later, the
Persians (Iran), the ancient enemies from beyond the Zagros Mountains which crowd
Iraq’s eastern flank, forming a harsh rugged plateau, austere and arid, extending as far
as Afghanistan and the Indus. Hill peoples against people of the plain; nomads
against sedentary farmers: these are two of the most ancient confrontations in human
history.
Fertile Crescent
Sumer
In landscape and climate, one can see the long-term patterns which have shaped the
region’s history. Against such deep continuities it peoples have lived their lives and
created their civilizations which in their turn have risen and fallen. And there is no
question that landscape and climate were determining factors in the rise of
civilization.
As populations slowly expanded, mankind had begun to make its mark on the
environment: slashing, burning, cutting down forests, clearing brushwood, leaving
that distinctive, bare-ribbed hilly landscape of Eastern Anatolia and Kurdistan of
today. The soil thus eroded washed into the rivers with each winter’s rain, “pouring
off the hills in great chocolate torrents” as the excavator of Jarmo described,
providing the source of the alluvium which has extended the southern plain of Iraq by
a hundred miles since the fourth millennium BC. So even before the rise of the first
cities of the plain, mankind was changing the balance with nature forever, as it
continues to do today. And no doubt it was the pressure on a growing population to
open up new land which led large groups of people for the first time into the deep
south.
94
Uniformitarianism
Living links with that deep past still survive.
In the deep south of the plain, today’s Marsh
Arab settlements must look much as the
Ubaidian and Sumerian settlements once
did, scattered along the alluvium: built on
man-made islands in the fresh-water lagoons
where they live by fishing, cutting the reed
beds, and cultivating the rich soil along the
shores. Their elaborate reed houses, some up
to 100 feet long, and their slim and elegant
boats sealed with natural bitumen, are still
built in the same fashion as was depicted 5000 years ago in Sumerian art.
Here it was still possible, at least up until the first Iraq
War and its aftermath, to enter into a world which recalls
the early myths. A world of small artificial islands each
with a reed house, barn, or guest hut (mudhif), clay kiln
and bread oven and a painted boat. Here a single family
might live with their water buffalo. (picture right)
Role of religion in
Origins of Cities
Mound of creation
and civilization
Religion, too, must have played its part. When they emerge, the cities of Sumer
center on shrines of the deities of the plain, gods of wind, air, and sky, of the grape
vine, the grain and fertility; shrine for the herders, the cattlefolk, the fisherpeople.
They were often situated in the border regions. Nippur, the city of the wind god
Enlil, was on the northern edge of Sumer; Enki of Eridu, lord of the fresh water, was
at the bottom of the marshes; Sin the Moon god was at Ur on the sea. Perhaps in
ancient times, such favorable meeting places grew bigger, becoming permanent
settlements for the storing of treasure, goods, and produce, and eventually places of
exchange. Perhaps the root of the Mesopotamian city, for good and practical reasons,
was the shrine.
The First Cities are found here. Eridu is lonely, windswept and abandoned today.
But the Sumerians believed it was the site of the mound of creation, the first land
which rose from the primordial sea at the beginning of time. They thought that
kingship-that is political society- first came down to earth here. It stood at the edge of
a great sea of fresh water stretching out to the south, the Apsu, from which apparently
comes our word “abyss”. This was the dwelling place of Enki, the god of waters,
wisdom, who made the waters out of which came all human life.
For what the Bible calls paradise, Eden, was simply the Sumerian word Edin, the
wild, uncultivated grassland of the south,
the natural landscape which lay outside the
artificial landscape of the city.
And
picking over the debris of paradise, it is
hard not to see the psychological truth of
the Bible story: that the very beginning of
our ascent to civilization was also the fall,
when we tasted the fateful fruit of the tree
of knowledge: the means by which we
would become masters of the earth yet eventually gain the power to destroy it and
ourselves.
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Key Arts of
Civilization
The Eridu myths then perhaps are reflections of a real historical process, from the
creation of organized communities to the arrival of the temple, the city and kingship.
These, in sum, were the key arts of civilization.
Firsts
The Mother of Invention
Amid the vast rubbish of human history are clues to the genius of these first city builders.
Everywhere are the fragments of pottery: wheel-turned pottery, with a beautiful greenish
color and fine black geometric patterns. The wheel is found here in Sumer for the first
time, along with so many of the great inventions we still live our lives by today. Here
was the first astronomy, the first literature, the first law, the first school, the first map of
the world. Here they first thought of dividing time and space in multiples of sixty.
Cuneiform
Character of
the people
Enduring
legacy
The greatest of all Sumerian inventions however was
writing. Writing is first found in the world in Uruk,
maybe invented in this city by some unknown genius,
no long before 3000BC. Most of the writing found on
Iraqi sites, more than ninety-five percent of it in fact, is
economic texts: facts and figures, bills, accounts,
inventories, measures of dates or barley, parcels of land
down to every rod, pole or perch. Contrast that with the
earliest Sanskrit religious texts or the Chinese oracle
bones and you have the clearest possible indicator of the
different character of these civilizations right from the
outset. Here in Mesopotamia is the birth of economic man, homo eocnomicus, whose
relations are bound by secular law, the root idea of the modern west thinking.
Nevertheless, perhaps the most enduring legacy of Mesopotamian culture is its
imaginative literature, especially, its myths. The world’s first literature, the Epic of
Gilgamesh is associated with the tale of the Flood and the great ark, which many
centuries later appeared in the Bible. Gilgamesh’s last adventure was his futile quest for
everlasting life is the model of all searches from the Odyssey to the Holy Grail. The story
of Gilgamesh also brings us to one of the characteristic qualities of Mesopotamian
civilization from earliest times until today: its pessimism.
96
Akkad
World’s first
empire
Sargon’s
story
Achievements
SARGON OF AKKAD was an ancient Mesopotamian ruler who reigned
approximately 2334-2279 BC, and was one of the earliest of the world's great
empire builders, conquering all of southern Mesopotamia as well as parts of Syria,
Anatolia, and Elam (western Iran). He established the region's first Semitic dynasty
and was considered the founder of the Mesopotamian military tradition.
Sargon is known almost entirely from the legends and tales that followed his
reputation through 2,000 years of cuneiform Mesopotamian history, and not from
documents that were written during his lifetime. According to a folktale, Sargon
was a self-made man of humble origins. A gardener, having found him as a baby
floating in a basket on the river, brought him up in his own calling. His father is
unknown; his own name during his childhood is also unknown; his mother is said
to have been a priestess in a town on the middle Euphrates. Rising, therefore,
without the help of influential relations, he attained the post of cupbearer to the
ruler of the city of Kish, in the north of the ancient land of Sumer.
As the result of Sargon's military prowess, ability to organize, as well as of the
legacy of the Sumerian city-states that he had conquered, of previously existing
trade with other countries, commercial connections flourished with the Indus
Valley, the coast of Oman, the islands and shores of the Persian Gulf, the lapis
lazuli mines of Badakhshan, the cedars of Lebanon, the silver-rich Taurus
Mountains, Cappadocia, Crete, and perhaps even Greece.
Map of extent
of trade as
shown by
distribution
of Dilmun
seals stones
Reasons for
Fall of
Sumer
97
Given their collective dependence on the Euphrates system for irrigation, it was
in the interests of all the city states of the south of Iraq to co-operate despite their
differences. But internecine warfare is the constant theme of the fist age of
cities. Shulgi of Ur initiated massive and costly administrative reforms including
the revival of an archaic custom of tribute by the nineteen cities of Sumer to the
national shrine at Nippur, where vast numbers of animals and supplies were
Salinization
See picture
on right
Omens and
Events
Picture of
Meteor
crater in
Persian Gulf
brought each month for sacrifice at the temples. That this enormous expenditure
contributed to the dynasty’s economic troubles seems likely. The climate of the plain
seems now to have been going
through a long, dry spell; much
agricultural land had gone out of use,
and economic documents show
administrators shifting from wheat to
more salt-resistant barley to combat
salinization. There is evidence that
much land had been abandoned
through salinization. The population
could not be fed: prices hit the ceiling
with a sixtyfold increase in grain.
International trade, on which Sumer
had always depended for its raw
materials, broke down, and soon government communications started to fail. Worse, the
perennial raids on the plain from nomadic outsiders grew more and more threatening.
Gloomy oracles prophesied the worst, and the worst duly arrived. It was the perennial
problem of Iraqi history- how to hold the rich and populous plain, with no natural
boundaries, against the many enemies covetous of its wealth: a drama still being played
out today.
In ancient times comets and meteors were thought to be harbingers of doom and people
thought that they would bring death and destruction. The planet moving through the tail
of a comet has been reported to bring illness, poisoning of crops and foul water. Only
recently science found out that the ancients were not superstitious. They just described
the terrible experiences the encounters with such harbingers of doom were. Most of this
planet's surface is covered by water. The probability for a hit in an ocean is
approximately 3:1. Aside from a hit on a continental shelf where the earth crust is
estimated at 35 km a hit in an ocean where the crust is only about 2.5 km produces very
different effects than a hit on land. A huge amount of water is ejected into the
atmosphere, which will rain out for weeks after the impact producing the kind of rain
reported in the Bible and the epic of Gilgamesh. Localized events end civilizations like
the hit which ended the Sumerian epoch in Mesopotamia around 2100 BC.
At the same time the era of the Old Kingdom ended
in Egypt, Crete was destroyed and there are craters
elsewhere dating back to this time like one big
crater in Argentina. The Australian aborigines tell
of a time when fireballs fell from the sky and the air
was unbearably hot. In recent years science
accepted the fact that there was a connection
between the demise of entire civilizations like the
Sumerian and impacts by meteors or comets.
A date of around 2300 BC for the impact may also cast a new light on the legend of
Gilgamesh, dating from the same period. The legend talks of “the Seven Judges of
Hell,” who raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, and a storm that turned day
into night, “smashed the land like a cup,” and flooded the area. The discovery of the
crater has sparked great interest among scientists.
98
The Shift to the
North: Babylon
Government
Law
Administration
Writing
Retribution
Code of Hammurabi
stele
99
After the last Sumerian dynasty fell around 2000 BC, Mesopotamia drifted into conflict
and chaos for almost a century. Around 1900 BC, a group called the Amorites had
managed to gain control of most of the Mesopotamian region. The Amorites
centralized the government over the individual city-states and based their capital in the
city of Babylon. For this reason, the Amorites are called the Old Babylonians and the
period, which lasted from 1900-1600 BC, is called the Old Babylonian period.
The Sumerian monarchy underwent significant changes; in order to justify the
enormous power the monarch enjoyed, the Old Babylonians believed that the monarch
was a god and had a divine origin. This powerful new monarchy invented new ways to
administer the state and its resources: taxation and involuntary military service. Above
all, the greatest innovation was centralization. The Old Babylonian state was a
behemoth of dozens of cities. In order to make this system work, power and autonomy
was taken from the individual cities and invested in the monarch. As a result, an
entirely new set of laws were invented by the Old Babylonians: laws which dealt with
crimes against the state.
While law among the Sumerians was administered jointly by individuals and the state,
the Old Babylonians allowed the state to more actively pursue and punish criminals.
The punishments became dramatically more draconian: the death penalty was applied
to many more crimes, including "bad behavior in a bar." All cultures have some
system of social regulation and conflict resolution, law is a distinct
phenomenon. Law is written and administered retribution and conflict
resolution. It is distinct from other forms of retribution and conflict resolution
by the following characteristics:
 Law is retribution that is administered by a centralized authority. This
way retribution for wrongs does not threaten to escalate into a cycle of
mutual revenge. Sumerian law sits half way between individual revenge
and state-administered revenge: it is up to the individual to drag (quite
literally) the accused party into the court, but the court actually
determines the nature of the retribution to be exacted.
 Law is written; in this way, law assumes an independent character
beyond the centralized authority that administers it. This produces a
sociological fiction that the law controls those who administer the law
and that the "law" exacts retribution, not humans.
 Law is at its heart revenge; the basic cultural mechanism for dealing
with unacceptable behavior is to exact revenge. Unacceptable behavior
outside the sphere of revenge initially did not come under the institution
of law: it was only much later that disputes that didn't involve retribution
would be included in law.
Perhaps the most important legal text in history is an Old
Babylonian code of laws written by Hammurabi (around 17921750 BC), the most famous of the Old Babylonian monarchs This
code, called the Code of Hammurabi is generally regarded as
Sumerian in spirit, but with all the harshness of the Old
Babylonian penalties. The Law of Talon, “eye for an eye and
tooth for a tooth,” is the basis of Babylonian law and eventually
finds its way into the Hebrews law system.
Assyrians
Geography
Importance of
plains
History
Notable Kings
Deportation of
peoples
conquered
Assyria originally occupied
a scant geographical area,
comprising
the
small
triangular shaped land lying
between the Tigris and Zab
Rivers, but in later times,
due to its conquests, its
boundaries extended to
northern Syria, and to the
country of the Hittites on
the west and to Babylonia
occupying almost the entire
Mesopotamian valley. To
the south of Baghdad lies
Babylon. There is a stark
geographical distinction between Babylonia and Assyria. In the region of Baghdad and
southwards the predominant vegetation is palm trees. The terrain is flat to the horizon,
and for most of the year its sun-parched earth is arid and dead wherever irrigation
ditches do not reach. Approaching Mosul [Nineveh] the traveler finds a striking change.
The flat terrain gives way to undulating plains, in spring green with pasturage or cereal
crop and scented with flowers and clover. The rolling plains are cut with wadis, flowing
full after spring rains, with higher ranges of hills on the horizon. The Assyrian land is
rich and fertile, with growing fields found in every region. Two large areas comprise the
Assyrian breadbasket: the Arbel plain and the Nineveh plain. This is from where Assyria
derived her strength, as it could feed a large population of professionals and craftsman,
which allowed it to expand and advance.
For most of its history, the Assyrians were subjugated to the more powerful kingdoms
and peoples to the south. The Assyrian dream of empire began with the monarch,
Tiglat-Pileser (1116-1090 BCE), who extended Assyrian dominance to Syria and
Armenia. But the greatest period of conquest occurred between 883 and 824, under the
monarchies of Ashurnnazirpal II (883-859 BCE) and Shalmeneser III (858-824 BCE),
who conquered all of Syria and Palestine, all of Armenia, and, the prize of prizes,
Babylon and southern Mesopotamia. The Assyrian conquerors invented a new policy
towards the conquered: in order to prevent nationalist revolts by the conquered people,
the Assyrians would force the people they conquered to migrate in large numbers to
other areas of the empire. Besides guaranteeing the security of an empire built off of
conquered people of different cultures and languages, these mass deportations of the
populations in the Middle East,
Mesopotamia, and Armenia, turned the
region into a melting pot of diverse
cultures, religions, and languages. It was
the Assyrian monarch, Sennacherib (705681 BCE), who first forcefully relocated
Hebrews after the conquest of Israel, the
northern kingdom of the Hebrews.
Although this was a comparatively mild
deportation and perfectly in line with
Assyrian practice, it marks the historical
beginning of the Jewish Diaspora. This chapter in the Jewish diaspora, however, never
has been really written, for the Hebrews deported from Israel seem to have blended in
with Assyrian society.
100
Technologyadv
ances
Fall of Assyria
The exigencies of war excited technological innovation: iron swords, lances, metal armor,
and battering rams made them a fearsome foe in battle. The greatest period of conquest
occurred under Shalmeneser III (858-824 BC), who conquered all of Syria and Palestine,
all of Armenia, and Babylon and southern Mesopotamia. The odd paradox of Assyrian
culture was the dramatic growth in science and mathematics; this can be in part explained
by the Assyrian obsession with war and invasion. Among the great mathematical
inventions of the Assyrians were the division of the circle into 360 degrees and were
among the first to invent longitude and latitude in geographical navigation. They also
developed a sophisticated medical science which greatly influenced medical science as far
away as Greece.
The last great monarch of Assyria was Ashurbanipal
(668-626 BC), who not only extended the empire, but
also began a project of assembling a library of tablets
of all the literature of Mesopotamia. Thirty thousand
tablets still remain of Ashurbanipal's great library in
the city of Nineveh; these tablets are the single greatest
source of knowledge of Mesopotamian culture, myth,
and literature. After Ashurbanipal, the empire began to
crumble; the greatest pressure came from their old and
bitter enemies, the Babylonians. Aided by, the Medes, the Babylonians led by
Nabopolassar eventually conquered the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and burned it to the
ground, ending forever Assyrian dominance in the region.
New Babylonian Empire
Neo
Babylonians
Nabopolassar was succeeded by his son, Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BC).
Nebuchadnezzar was the equal of all the great Mesopotamian conquerors, from Sargon
onwards; he not only prevented major powers such as Egypt and Syria from making
inroads on his territory, he also conquered the Phoenicians and the state of Judah (586
BC), the southern Jewish kingdom that remained after the subjugation of Israel, the
northern kingdom, by the Assyrians. In order to secure the territory of Judah,
Nebuchadnezzar brought Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, the two kings of Judah (in succession)
and held them in Babylon. In keeping with Assyrian practice, the "New Babylonians," or
Chaldeans forced a large part of the Jewish population to relocate. Numbering possibly
up to 10,000, these Jewish deportees were largely upper class people and craftspeople; this
deportation marks the beginning of the Exile in Jewish history.
Under Nebuchadnezzar, the city of Babylon was
rebuilt with great splendor; it would eventually
become one of the most magnificent human cities in
the area of the Middle East and Mediterranean. But all
was not perfect beneath the shining surface; there still
existed a number of cities that were loyal to the
Assyrians. The entire period dominated by the
Babylonians, in fact, is a period of great unrest as
Babylonian hegemony was continually tested by
philo-Assyrians. This conflict slammed the door on
the Babylonian empire after a dynasty of only five
kings.
101
Fall of
Babylon
Summary
Babylon in 555 BC came under the control of
a king loyal to the Assyrians, Nabonidus (555539 BC), who attacked Babylonian culture at
its heart: he placed the Assyrian moon-god,
Sin, above the Babylonian's principal god,
Marduk, who symbolized not only the faith of
Babylon but the very city and people itself.
Angered and bitter, the priests and those
faithful to Babylon would welcome Cyrus the
Conqueror of Persia into their city and end
forever Semitic domination of Mesopotamia.
The center of the Middle Eastern world shifted
to Cyrus's capital, Susa, and it would shift again after the Greeks and then the Romans. For
almost two and a half centuries, Mesopotamia and Babylon at its center, dominated the
landscape of early civilization in the Middle East to be finally eclipsed by the rising sun of the
Indo-European cultures to the north and to the west.
Legacy of Mesopotamia
The ancient civilization of Mesopotamia was based on the city as a center of economic and
political life. It depended on international trade, on a diversified economy and on
thoroughgoing control of the environment. It used writing and written law to record and
order transactions involving large numbers of its population. Theirs was a pluralist society, as
far as we can tell, multiracial from its earliest period. In tone, it was pessimistic civilization,
albeit a confident pessimism: a vision deeply rooted in a harsh landscape where all the people
worked for was often destroyed by war or nature, and still is.
Mesopotamians
Conception of
civilization
The Mesopotamians conceived of civilization as separate from nature, set in an artificial
environment of man’s creation, which could insulate human society from the threats of
primal nature. And monotheism, the spiritual expression of Near Eastern Culture, would see
nature in the same light, the creator-god standing outside his creation, imparting its laws. It
was only the Near East which made this leap forward: in technology, in large-scale trade; in
irrigation; in the use of writing for economic purposes; in the cosmological revolution which
separated gods from nature. These ideas were later transmitted to the later civilizations of
the West, developed there and coupled with the theories of individual freedom, and are now
regarded by those who hold the Western view of civilization as the driving force of history.
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Document 1
Ancient Mesopotamians History, Timeline, Inventions and Life
Ankita Bhugra, Anu Meha, Thulasi K.Raj. “Ancient Mesopotamians History, Timeline,
Inventions, and Life”. Ancient Mesopotamians. January 14, 2015.
http://www.ancientmesopotamians.com/
Mesopotamia, an ancient Greek term meaning "the land between rivers," or "the land between the two
rivers" was the world's first civilization, where the two rivers mentioned above are the Tigris and the
Euphrates. With a very rich history, ancient Mesopotamia is the provenance of civilization or "cradle of
civilization" as it was the place of origin for many things for instance agriculture, language, cities,
religion and government.
Timeline of Mesopotamia begins with the earliest evidence of human culture around 5000 BC. During
4700 BC which is also known as the hassunah period was recognized for the earliest pottery making
culture. Moving towards 4400 BC came the Halaf period where in addition to pottery making culture
there was the add-on of the knowledge of metal in the process.
The Tigris River is one of the rivers along with the river Euphrates that defines Mesopotamia. The river
Tigris is on the eastern side of Mesopotamia which is 1,150 miles long and at its widest point, the Tigris
is 1,300 feet, the Sumerians knew the Tigris as the Idigna, which may be translated as "the swift river."
In ancient Mesopotamia, there were a lot of crops to grow. But the floods in that region were very
destructive, violent and unpredictable. The climate was also not suitable for farming throughout the year.
The climate of Mesopotamia was generally dry and there was very little rainfall so all these factors
contributed to unsuccessful farming in this region. So to overcome this problem of farming
Mesopotamians became depended on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
103
Document 2
Reasons for the Decline of Mesopotamia
Ankita Bhugra, Anu Meha, Thulasi K.Raj. “Reasons for the Decline of Mesopotamia”. Ancient
Mesopotamians. January 14, 2015. http://www.ancientmesopotamians.com/
It sometimes appears paradoxical that the same reasons which resulted in the dominance of an
empire may end up being the reasons of its destruction. How did Mesopotamia, one of the most
wonderful civilizations of the ancient world, decline is an interesting question to consider. It is
said that the Sumerians ceased to exist as a civilization by 2000 BC.
Historians attribute many reasons for the fall of Mesopotamian Empire. Some say that there was
overcrowding which subsequently led to pollution along with other reasons like war and changes
in the environment.
Mesopotamian cities also had major pollution problems. Lack of indoor toilets and ineffective
garbage collection led to contaminated water supplies and frequent epidemics such as Typhus.
An important observation is that irrigation techniques are also one of the chief reasons for the
decline of the empire. When irrigation water is allowed to evaporate in the fields, it leaves
behind mineral salts. These mineral salts become highly poisonous for the plants. It irrigation
water is drained, erosion occurs.
The rivers were higher than the surrounding plain because of built-up silt in the river beds, so
water for irrigation flowed into the fields by gravity. Once the water was on the fields, it could
not readily drain away because the fields were lower than the river.
As the water evaporated, it not only left its dissolved mineral salts behind, but also drew salts
upward from lower levels of the soil. By 2300 BC, agricultural economy of the Mesopotamians
began to shatter as the soil could no longer support plants.
Historians also opine that wars were an important cause for the collapse. In 2000 BC, the last
Sumerian dynasty fell and for almost a century, Mesopotamia was a place of chaos and
confusion. In 1900 BC, Amorites captured the region and centralized the government over
various city states.
Finally, it was the invasion of Hittites which marked the end of Old Babylonian Empire in
Mesopotamia during 1900 BC to 1600 BC.
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ocument 3
Collapses, past and present
By Jared Diamond From Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond,
copyright (c) 2004. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly
triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources
on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide — ecocide —
has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists,
historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). The processes through which
past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight
categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat
destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management
problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human
population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.
Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a
theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production
(such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands
first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths.
Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just
listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for
society included food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few
resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population
decreased through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political, economic,
and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting to draw
analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human
lives — to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death — and to assume that the
long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also
applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies: they declined
rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a
surprise and shock to their citizens. In the worst cases of complete collapse, everybody in the
society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajectory is not one that all past societies
followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies collapsed to different degrees and in
somewhat different ways, while many societies didn't collapse at all.
Perhaps there are some practical lessons that we could learn from all those past collapses. We
know that some past societies collapsed while others didn't: what made certain societies
especially vulnerable? What, exactly, were the processes by which past societies committed
ecocide? Why did some past societies fail to see the messes that they were getting into, and that
(one would think in retrospect) must have been obvious? Which were the solutions that
succeeded in the past? If we could answer these questions, we might be able to identify which
societies are now most at risk, and what measures could best help them, without waiting for more
Somalia-like collapses.
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But there are also differences between the modern world and its problems, and those past
societies and their problems. We shouldn't be so naïve as to think that study of the past will yield
simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in
some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include
our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, and greater
knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past societies in
some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our
potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization (such that now a
collapse even in remote Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the dependence of millions (and,
soon, billions) of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human
population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its
lessons.
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Open response
This question is based on the accompanying documents (1–3). The question is designed to test your
ability to work with historical documents. As you analyze the documents, take into account the source of
each document and any point of view that may be presented in the document.
Question: Using information from the documents and your knowledge of history, answer the following
question in one well-written paragraph.
“Why do civilizations collapse?”
Guidelines: In your paragraph, be sure to:
• Have a thesis statement that includes the restated question and three main points you will use to support
your thesis.
• Use information from the documents in the body of the essay supported by footnote Chicago references
• Prove your thesis with relevant facts, examples, and details
• Have a logical and clear plan of organization
Below is a checklist of key suggestions for writing a DBQ essay. Use this check list to compare your
response on the preceding page.
Introductory Sentence
Does the sentence clarify the DBQ itself? Does it present a clear thesis, or overall answer, to that DBQ?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
The Internal points — 1
Are these sentences organized around main points with details supporting those main ideas? Do all these
main ideas support the thesis?
The Internal points — 2
Are all of your main ideas and key points linked in a logical way? That is, does each idea follow clearly
from those that went before? Does it add something new and helpful in clarifying your thesis?
Use of Primary Source Documents
Are they simply mentioned in a “laundry list” fashion? Or are they used thoughtfully to support main
ideas and the thesis?
Concluding Statement
Does it restate the DBQ and thesis in a way that sums up the main ideas without repeating old information
going into new details?
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Works Consulted
"Ancient Mesopotamins History, Timeline, and Decline." Ancient Mesopotamia.
Ancient Mesopotamia.com, 2013. Web. 28 Feb. 2013.
<http://www.ancientmesopotamians.com/index.html>.
Hooker, Richard. World Civilizations. 9 July 1999. Washington State University. May 2008
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7Edee/WORLD.HTM.
What Are Fault Lines?" Earthquake Facts. Earthquake Facts, 2010. Web. 26 Jan.
2010. <http://www.earthquake-facts.com/earthquake-basics/
what-are-fault-lines/>.
Wood, Michael. Legacy: The Search for Ancient Civilizations. New York: Sterling
Publishing,1992. Out of Print.
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