Mesopotamia

In Western mythology and religious tradition, the land of Mesopotamia in the ancient period was a land of lush vegetation, abundant wildlife, and copious if unpredictable water resources. As such, at a very early date it attracted people from neighboring, but less hospitable areas. By 6000 B.C., Mesopotamia had been settled, chiefly by migrants from the Turkish and Iranian highlands.

Around 4000 B.C., groups of people began developed so many new ideas that the area has been called the “cradle of civilization.”

Mesopotamia was one of the oldest and broadest cradles of civilization. Unlike Egypt, which was a relatively unified state, it was the site of many different city-states, kingdoms, and empires, frequently at odds with one another, and replacing one another as the locus of power—Akkad, Ur, Babylon, the Kassites, Isin, Assyria—and then tending into the more “modern” Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanian Dynasties.

The people who settled in southern Mesopotamia about 3500 B.C. were a short, stocky, black-haired people called Sumerians (su ̄ mer’ e ̄ uhnz). Their area of Mesopotamia was known as Sumer (su ̄’ mu ̆ hr).

The Greek name Mesopotamia means “land between the rivers.” The Ro-mans used this term for an area that they controlled only briefly (between115 and 117 A.D.)—the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, from the south Anatolian Mountains ranges to the Persian Gulf.

In 2340 BC Sargon (a Sumerian in the city of Kish) overthrows the Sumerian king of Nippur. Sargon's new kingdom is called Akkad and Sargon extends his kingdom to Syria.

Mesopotamia