Transcript Mesopotamia - De Anza College

MESOPOTAMIA
Means Land Between 2 rivers:
Euphrates River, Tigris River
Present day Iraq
The Fertile Crescent
• Mesopotamia—the land between the Tigris and the
Euphrates rivers
• Irrigation transformed the original hunter-gatherers into
small farming communities
• ca. 4000 BCE the peoples of Mesopotamia began to
replace stone and bone tools and weapons with metal,
thus marking the end of the Stone Age and the beginning
of the Bronze Age
Eastern Mediterranean Basin and Major
Mesopotamian Capitals,
ca. 2600-2500 BCE
Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia
• Polytheistic—multiple gods and goddesses
connected to the forces of nature (sun and sky, water
and storm, earth and its fertility
• Mesopotamian ruler often represented as a “priestking” and believed to possess divine attributes
• Ziggurats, pyramidal temples consisting of successive
platforms with outside staircases and shrines at the
top, functioned as sacred places
Mesopotamia
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Sumerian: 3000-2300 BCE
Akkadian: 2300-2150 BCE
Neo-Sumerian: 2100-2000 BCE
Babylonian: 1800-1600 BCE
Hittites from Anatolia: 1600-1000 BCE
Assyrian: 900-612 BCE largest empire to date
Mesopotamia
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Neo-Babylonian: 612-538 BCE
Achaemenid Persian 538-330 BCE
(even larger empire than Assyrian)
Alexander conquers Persia & Egypt
Greco-Roman rule 330-224 CE
Sassanian: 224-636 BCE
Remains of the City of Ur (modern Muqaiyir, Iraq),
ca. 2100 BCE
The Ziggurat at Ur
ca. 2100 BCE
Reconstructed Drawing of the Ziggurat at Ur
• The best preserved and most
fully restored of the ancient
Sumerian temples
• Platforms might have been
covered with soil and planted
with trees
• Weeper holes, venting ducts
loosely filled with broken
pottery, in the side of the
ziggurat would have drained
rainwater
• Bridge between heaven and
earth
Tell Asmar Statues
• Discovered in shrine room of the Abu Temple
ziggurat in Tell Asmar, near modern Baghdad
• Ten men and two women, the tallest being approx.
30”
• Huge eyes and clasped hands, suggestive of
worshippers gazing in perpetual awe at the deity
Tell Asmar Statues
Marble, Alabaster, and Gypsum
ca. 2590-2500 BCE
Mesopotamian Music
• Two lyres discovered at Ur in the royal tombs of
either King Meskalamdug or Queen Puabi
• Bodies of two women (the singers or musicians?)
found under the lyres
• Decorations related to the Epic of Gilgamesh
• Indicate that music was important in Mesopotamian
society
Lyre from Tomb at Ur
Soundbox front panel of the lyre
Gold leaf and lapis lazuli over wood core,
ca. 2600 BCE
Wood with inlaid gold, lapis lazuli, and shell
ca. 2600 BCE
Royal Standard of Ur
• Rectangular box of unknown function
• Main panels called “War” and “Peace” because they
illustrate on one side a military victory and on the
other a banquet with musicians
• Social perspective, or hierarchy of scale—most
important figures (king) represented as larger than
the others
Royal Standard of Ur
Shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone, 8’ x 19’
ca. 2600 BCE
Cuneiform Writing
• Writing first appeared in the middle
of the 4th millennium BCE as
pictograms—pictures that represent
a thing or concept—etched into clay
tablets
• Beginning about 2900 BCE, scribes
adopted a straight-line script made
with a triangular-tipped stylus, or
writing tool, cut from reeds
• The resulting impressions looked like
wedges. Cuneiform writing is named
from the Latin cuneus, wedge
Pictograms
Sumerian Tablet from Lagash, modern
Tello, Iraq
Clay, ca. 2360 BCE
Fragment of Tablet 11 of the Epic of
Gilgamesh
Second millennium BCE
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