Ancient Mesopotamia

Question 1

What is Mesopotamia?

Answer 1

A civilization in present day Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers - “Meso” means “between”

Question 2

What’s special about Mesopotamia?

Answer 2

1. Ziggurats were religious temples in which the priests had supreme power because they could communicate directly with the gods
2. A lot of Slave Labor was needed to make the Tigris and Euphrates useful for irrigation, which would flood unpredictably and violently, and were hard to navigate.
3. Since Mesopotamia suffered from terrible drought and flood, a person who could placate the gods would seem useful.
4. 1k years after Ziggurats in Uruk, a Mesopotamian city-state, a rival structure shows up - the Palace.
5. Military leaders and rich land owners who ruled the Palace shifted the responsibility and well being of the citizens from the gods to the people - and took a qwasi-religious role by sleeping with the high priest
6. Cuneiform, Mesopotamian writing to record transactions and history, was created because while Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent were fertile, they lacked everything else and needed to trade.
7. Trading led to Mesopotamia to expand and become the world’s first territorial kingdom
8. Mesopotamia was created around 2k BCE
9. The original Mesopotamians were conquered by other nomads after Mesopotamia was ravaged by drought and flooding. These other nomads then settled into new city states
10. The old Socialism where farmed grain payed everyone else in a set amount was replaced by free enterprise where people could produce as much as they wanted as long as they gave a cut of it to the government - taxes
11. The government officials changed in that the new people became kings and tried to pass their power onto their sons.
12. Hammurabi ruled the new Kingdom of Babylon from 1792 BCE to 1750 BCE
13. Hammurabi created the law code, an Eye for an Eye
14. Hammurabi helped shift the social order of protection of people from gods to people
15. New Babylon was taken over by the formerly nomadic Kassites
16. 911 BCE - 680 BCE Assyrian Empire took over Mesopotamia and Egypt
17. Assyrians had the worlds most ruthless army
18. Assyrian god, Ashur, through the king, stated if conquest of the empire ever stopped, the world would end
19. The Assyrian city of Ninevah was conquered so the Assyrian empire fell out of the crumbling of their world view