Theme #2: Early Societies-Writing and city life

Mesopotamia (middle – land), the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers.Through Mesopotamian history, nomadic communities of the western desert filtered into the prosperous agricultural heartland These included the Akkadians, Amorites, Assyrians and AramaeansIn the beginning of recorded history, the land, mainly the urbanized south was called Sumer and Akkad. After 2000 BCE, when Babylon became an important city, the term Babylonia was used for the southern region. From about 1100 BCE, when the Assyrians established their kingdom in the north, the region became known as Assyria.

Urbanization in Southern Mesopotamia:

• Agriculture began between 7000 and 6000 BCE
• From 5000 BCE, settlements had begun to develop in southern Mesopotamia.
• The earliest cities emerged from some of these settlements earliest cities in Mesopotamia date back to the Bronze Age,
• These were of various kinds:
• those that gradually developed around temples;
• those that developed as centers of trade;
• and imperial cities
• Uruk developed  into a huge city, increasing use of bronze toolsc.3000 BCE.
• Early settlers (their origins are unknown) began to build and rebuild temples at selected spots in their villages.
• The division of labour is a mark of urban life.Food production, trade, manufactures, and services , and storage
• Required keeping of written records.
• Some people give commands that others obey,a mutually reinforcing cycle of development in which leaders encouraged the settlement of villagers close to themselves, to be able to rapidly get an army together
• a ruling elite  emerged
• Its mineral resources were few. Most parts of the south lacked stones for tools, seals and jewels; the wood for carts, cart wheels or boats; and was no metal for tools, vessels or ornaments
• in Mesopotamian society the nuclear family was the norm
• Instead of being stamp seals as in Harappa in Mesopotamia until the end of the first millennium BCE, cylindrical stone seals
• Narrow winding streets and the irregular shapes of house plots also indicate an absence of town planning.

• There were no street drains of the kind we find in contemporary Mohenjo-daro
• After 2000 BCE the royal capital of Mari flourished.Located on the Euphrates in a prime position for trade -goods that were carried in boats along the Euphrates – between the south and the mineral rich up lands of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon,Although the kingdom of Mari was not militarily strong, it was exceptionally prosperous

The Development of Writing

• Writing began when society needed to keep records of transactions. later for dictionaries, giving legal validity to land transfers, narrating the deeds of kings, and announcing the changes a king had made in the customary laws of the land
• The first Mesopotamian tablets, written around 3200 BCE, contained picture-like signs and numbers.
• The first known language of the land was Sumerian.
• It was gradually replaced by Akkadian around 2400 BCE when Akkadian speakers arrived.
• This language flourished till about Alexander’s time (336-323 BCE), with some regional changes occurring.
•  From 1400 BCE, Aramaic also trickled in. This language, similar to Hebrew, became widely spoken after 1000 BCE. It is still spoken in parts of Iraq.
•  By 2600 BCE or so, the letters became cuneiform, and the language was Sumerian and later Akkadian. Continued to be used till 1^st  CBC.(more than 2000 years)
• Mesopotamia’s writing system and literature spread to the eastern Mediterranean, northern Syria, and Turkey after 2000 BCE, and to the Pharaoh of Egypt.
• Cuneiform script did not represent consonants or vowels but syllables (la put etc
• Writing was a skilled craft (wet clay tablets) and intellectual achievement (100s of complex symbols in script).Very few were literate.
• It was kingship that organized Trade and writing.
• Writing was seen as a sign of the superiority of Mesopotamian urban culture.

The Legacy of Writing

• Dating around 1800 BCE are tablets with multiplication and division tables, square- and square-root tables, and tables of compound interest.The square root of 2 was given as:1 + 24/60 + 51/602 + 10/603
• The division of the year into 12 months according to the revolution of the moon around the earth, the division of the month into four weeks, the day into 24 hours, and the hour into 60 minutes – all that we take for granted in our daily lives – has come to us from the Mesopotamians. These time divisions were adopted by the successors of Alexander and from there transmitted to the Roman world, then to the world of Islam, and then to medieval Europe