Transcript Mesopotamia - cloudfront.net

Mesopotamia
Ancient Middle East
Prehistory
• Mesopotamia, an ancient Greek term meaning "the land between rivers,"
is considered to be the cradle of civilization because this is where we find
the origins of agriculture, written language, and cities. Mesopotamia now
present-day Iraq…A prehistoric hand axe stained with human blood has
provided scientists with valuable information about humans living over
100,000 years ago!The settlement of humans in the Near East began with
the movement of Homo erectus off the African continent roughly 2 million
years ago during the Paleolithic period. Over the course of several
thousand years, Homo erectus spread rapidly throughout the Near East
and then into Europe and Southeast Asia.The first three phases of the
Paleolithic period (Lower, Middle, and Upper) extend from roughly 2.5
million years BC through 14,000 BC and 9000 BC, humans lived in circular
or semi-circular structures called pit houses. These houses often had
hearths and plaster floors and sometimes several pits were linked
together to form various rooms.
• Plants and animals were domesticated in the Near East
roughly between 11,000 and 6500 BC. By 9000 BC,
modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) were living in
settled communities throughout the Near East.
• To the left is a model of a section of a house found at
the archaeological site of Jarmo, Iraq. The settlement
of Jarmo dates from the pre-pottery Neolithic period,
between 9000 and 7000 BC. It is believed that Jarmo
had a population of 150-200 people who lived in 20-30
houses like this one, spread over an area of 3.2 acres.
Fertile Cresent
• Between 6000 and 4000 BC, farming communities of
increasing size and complexity developed throughout
the Tigris-Euphrates valley with a few central towns of
perhaps 2000 inhabitants.
• By 5800 BC, people were living in the southern plains
of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The land in this
region was exceptionally fertile, but the rainfall was
insufficient to grow crops. The rivers were
undependable, drying up in the searing heat of the
summer. Irrigation was the solution to these problems.
Over time, ditches laced the fields near the rivers,
making the land a maze of artificial waterways.
The First Cities
• For the ancient Mesopotamians, their cities
were the centers of life. When they looked
back to the beginning of time, they did not
see a Garden of Eden, but rather an ancient
site called Eridu, which they believed was the
first city ever to be created. Ancient
Mesopotamia is where the world's first cities
appeared around 4000 - 3500 BC.
Development of cities
• No one knows for sure why urbanization began in
Mesopotamia. The development of cities could have
occurred due to environmental conditions. Lack of
rainfall might have been the inspiration for people to
organize themselves in a common effort to build canals
for the irrigation of farmland. Another reason may
have been the need for protection on the open plain,
which could have led people to gather together to
create walled enclaves. Whatever the reasons, this was
the first time in history that humankind channeled its
energies towards addressing the needs of a community
as a whole.
Religion
•
•
The cultures of Mesopotamia had a polytheistic belief system, which means that
the people believed in multiple gods instead of just one. They also believed in
demons created by the gods, which could be good or evil. The people of
Mesopotamia worshiped these other worldly beings to keep the beings happy,
because if one of these powerful beings was angered then the people of
Mesopotamia would, in some way, be punished for that unhappiness. They
believed that when something bad happened, whether a natural disaster or not, it
was because the correlating god was angry at them, so they did their best to keep
the gods happy.
Each city had its own patron deity, some of which were connected to specialized
occupations. There were also gods and goddess, the rulers of the sky, air, and
more, which received more attention from worshipers. To worship the gods and
goddesses, the people of Mesopotamia built large structures, called Ziggurats that
served as temples. Inside the worshiping area of the Ziggurat people would place
carved stone human figures with wide eyes and clasped hands, praying on behalf
of the people of Mesopotamia. This area was also where people could make
offerings to please the deities or regain their favor.
City-state
• he Sumerians were the first people to migrate to
Mesopotamia, they created a great civilization.
Beginning around 5,500 years ago, the Sumerians built
cities along the rivers in Lower Mesopotamia,
specialized, cooperated, and made many advances in
technology. The wheel, plow, and writing (a system
which we call cuneiform) are examples of their
achievements. The farmers in Sumer created levees to
hold back the floods from their fields and cut canals to
channel river water to the fields. The use of levees and
canals is called irrigation, another Sumerian invention.
A typical Sumerian city-state, notice the ziggurat, the
tallest building in the city.
City-state
• The Sumerians had a common language and
believed in the same gods and goddesses. The
belief in more than one god is called polytheism.
There were seven great city-states, each with its
own king and a building called a ziggurat, a large
pyramid-shaped building with a temple at the
top, dedicated to a Sumerian deity. Although the
Sumerian city-states had much in common, they
fought for control of the river water, a valuable
resource. Each city-state needed an army to
protect itself from its neighbors.
• Around 2,300 BC, the independent city-states of
Sumer were conquered by a man called Sargon
the Great of Akkad, who had once ruled the citystate of Kish. Sargon was an Akkadian, a Semitic
group of desert nomads who eventually settled in
Mesopotamia just north of Sumer. The Sumerian
king, Lugal-Zaggisi, tried to form a coalition of
Sumerian city-states against Sargon, but he was
defeated by the Akkadian. Sargon is considered
the first empire builder. Sargon made Agade the
capital city of his empire.
• Sargon's daughter, Enheduanna, was first
world's first credited author because she
signed her name to a set of poems she wrote
about her gods and goddesses. Sargon's son
and grandson ruled after him, but eventually
the Akkadian Empire fell, and was replaced by
the Old Babylonian Empire.
Map of Mesopotamia
Writing
• The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly
the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship
suggests that Mesopotamia’s writing appeared first. That writing
system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged in Mesopotamia
around 3500 BCE. At first, this writing was representational: a bull
might be represented by a picture of a bull, and a pictograph of
barley signified the word barley. Though writing began as pictures,
this system was inconvenient for conveying anything other than
simple nouns, and it became increasingly abstract as it evolved to
encompass more abstract concepts, eventually taking form in the
world’s earliest writing: cuneiform. An increasingly complex
civilization encouraged the development of an increasingly
sophisticated form of writing. Cuneiform came to function both
phonetically (representing a sound) and semantically (representing
a meaning such as an object or concept) rather than only
representing objects directly as a picture
Code of Hammurabi
• One of the earliest and most complete ancient legal
codes was proclaimed by the Babylonian king
Hammurabi, who reigned from 1792 to 1750 B.C.
Hammurabi expanded the city-state of Babylon along
the Euphrates River to unite all of southern
Mesopotamia. His code, a collection of 282 laws and
standards, stipulated rules for commercial interactions
and set fines and punishments to meet the
requirements of justice. Hammurabi’s Code was
proclaimed at the end of his reign and carved onto a
massive, finger-shaped black stone stela (pillar) that
was looted by later invaders and rediscovered in 1901
by a French archaeological team in present-day Iran.
The code
•
The black stone stela containing Hammurabi’s Code was carved from a single, fourton slab of diorite, a durable but incredibly difficult stone for carving. At its top is a
two-and-a-half-foot relief carving of a standing Hammurabi receiving the law—
symbolized by a measuring rod and tape—from the seated Shamash, the
Babylonian god of justice. The rest of the seven-foot-five-inch monument is
covered with columns of chiseled cuneiform script.
•
The text, compiled at the end of Hammurabi’s reign, is less a proclamation of legal
principles than a collection of precedents set between prose celebrations of
Hammurabi’s just and pious rule. The 282 edicts are all written in if-then form. For
example, if a man steals an ox, he must pay back 30 times its value. The edicts
range from family law to professional contracts and administrative law, often
outlining different standards of justice for the three classes of Babylonian society—
the propertied class, freedmen, and slaves. A doctor’s fee for curing a severe
wound would be 10 silver shekels for a gentleman, 5 shekels for a freedman and
two shekels for a slave. Penalties for malpractice followed the same scheme: a
doctor who killed a rich patient would have his hands cut off, while only financial
restitution was required if the victim was a slave. Hammurabi’s Code provides
some of the earliest examples of the doctrine of “An eye for an eye.”