While human civilization developed in many places around the world, it emerged thousands of years ago in the ancient Middle East.
“We see the first cities, the first scriptures and the first technologies to originate from Mesopotamia,” says Kelly-Anne Diamond, assistant professor of history at the University of Villanova, whose expertise includes ancient history and archeology. from the Middle East.
The name of Mesopotamia comes from the ancient Greek word for “the land between rivers”. It is a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the two sources of water for a region located mainly within the borders of modern Iraq, but which also included parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran.
The presence of these rivers has a lot to do with the reasons why Mesopotamia developed complex societies and innovations such as writing, elaborate architecture, and government bureaucracies. Regular flooding along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have made the land around them particularly fertile and ideal for growing food crops. This made it a prime location for the Neolithic Revolution, also known as the Agricultural Revolution, which began almost 12,000 years ago.
This revolution “transformed human life across the planet, but it was in Mesopotamia that this process began,” explains Diamond.
With people who cultivated plants and pets, they were able to stay in one place and form permanent villages. Eventually, these small settlements developed to become the first cities, where many features of civilization developed – such as population concentrations, monumental architecture, communication, division of labor and different social classes and economic.
But the emergence and evolution of civilization in Mesopotamia were also influenced by other factors – in particular, changes in the climate and the natural environment, which forced the inhabitants of the region to organize themselves more. to deal with it.
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How nature nourished civilization
17th century map with Mesopotamia and the Tower of Babel.
DEA Image Library / Getty Images
Civilization has not developed in exactly the same way across the region, according to Hervé Reculeau, associate professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago and an expert in the history of ancient Mesopotamia. As he explains, urban societies developed independently in Lower Mesopotamia, an area in what is now southern Iraq where the primitive civilization of Sumer was located, and in Upper Mesopotamia, which includes northern l ‘Iraq and part of present-day western Syria.
One factor that helped civilization to develop in both places was the climate of Mesopotamia, which 6,000-7,000 years ago was wetter than this part of the Middle East is today.
“The first towns in southern Mesopotamia developed on the fringes of a large swamp that provided an abundance of natural resources for construction (reed) and food (game and fish), with readily available water for a Small-scale irrigation that could be organized at a local level and did not require the supervision of large-scale state structures, ”writes Reculeau. Additionally, he notes, the swamp provided a connection to sea routes on the Persian Gulf, which allowed people who lived in the south to develop long-distance trade with other places.
In Upper Mesopotamia, rainfall was reliable enough that farmers did not have to do much irrigation, according to Reculeau. They also had access to mountains and forests, where they could hunt game and fell trees for timber. Their regions also had overland routes to places north beyond the mountains, where they could obtain materials such as obsidian, a type of rock that can be used in jewelry or to make cutting tools.
According to the British Museum, the main crops of the early Mesopotamian farmers were barley and wheat. But they also created gardens shaded by date palms, where they grew a wide variety of crops, including beans, peas, lentils, cucumbers, leeks, lettuce and garlic, as well as fruits such as grapes, apples, melons and figs. They also milk sheep, goats and cows for butter and slaughter them for their meat.
Eventually, the agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia led to what Diamond describes as the next big step in progress, the urban revolution.
About 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in Sumer, villages turned into towns. One of the first and most important was Uruk, a fortified community of 40,000 to 50,000 people. Others have included Eridu, Bad-tibira, Sippar and Shuruppak, according to the Encyclopedia of Ancient History.
The developed Sumerians may have been the first writing system as well as the sophisticated art, architecture, and complex government bureaucracies to oversee agriculture, commerce, and religious activity. Sumer also became a hotbed of innovation, as the Sumerians took inventions developed by other ancient peoples, from pottery to textile weaving, and figured out how to make them on an industrial scale.
During this time, Upper Mesopotamia developed its own urban areas such as Tepe Gawra, where researchers have discovered brick temples with intricate recesses and pilasters, and found other evidence of a sophisticated culture.
READ MORE: 9 Ancient Sumerian Inventions That Changed the World
How environmental change changed Mesopotamian civilization
According to Reculeau, climate change may have played a role in the development of Mesopotamian civilization. Around 4000 BC, “climates slowly became drier and rivers more unpredictable,” he explains. “The swamp retreated from Lower Mesopotamia, leaving behind settlements now surrounded by land that needed to be irrigated, requiring additional work and perhaps greater coordination.
Because they had to work harder and in a more organized manner to survive, the Mesopotamians gradually developed a more elaborate system of government. As Reculeau explains: “The bureaucratic apparatus that first appeared to manage the goods and people of temples in swamp cities has increasingly become the tools of royal power. [that] found its justification in the support of the gods, but also in its ability to get things done.
All of this led to the development of a social structure in which the elites coerced workers or got their jobs by providing meals and wages.
“In a sense, the famous Sumerian agrarian system, its city-states and associated control over land, resources and people were in part the result of people adapting to worse conditions, for the riches of the swamps had started to become scarce. ”, Said Reculeau.
In Upper Mesopotamia, on the other hand, people faced a drier climate by going socially in the opposite direction. This area has seen “the deconcentration towards a less complex social organization, relying on the villages and their solidarity on a small scale”, explains Reculeau.
Mesopotamia eventually saw the rise of empires such as Akkad and Babylonia, whose capital Babylon became one of the largest and most advanced in the ancient world.
READ MORE: How Hammurabi turned Babylon into a mighty city-state
