Ancient History/Mesopotamia/Babylonia/Old Babylonian period

The Rise of Babylon[edit]

From the remotest times, the city-states of southern Mesopotamia were enemies of the kings of Elam, a
country to its east. For centuries at a time, the Elamite kings held the cities of the plain in a state of
more or less complete vassalage. Their dominion was finally broken by a king of Babylon, a city which
had been rising in prominence and eventually gave its name to the entire area. This king was named
Hammurabi (reigned circa 1780 BC 1750 BC). He united under his rule all the cities of Babylonia and
became the founder of what is known as the Old Babylonian Empire.

Hammurabi has been called the Babylonian Moses because he promulgated a code of laws which in
many respects resembles the Mosaic code attributed to Moses.

The Old Babylonian Empire eclipsed by the Rising Assyrian Empire[edit]

For more than a millennium after Hammurabi. Babylon continued to be the political and commercial
centre of changing dynasties and shifting frontiers. Meanwhile, a Semitic power had been slowly
developing in the north. This was the Assyrian Empire, eventually to be centered on its capital Nineveh.
For a long time Assyria was practically a province of the lower kingdom; but in 726 BC, Babylon was
conquered by an Assyrian king and passed under Assyrian control.

Ancient History/Mesopotamia/Introduction
< Ancient History

Contents [hide]
1 The First Cities
2 The First Empires
3 Law and Conflict
4 Trade and Technology
The First Cities[edit]

Ancient History/Mesopotamia/Babylonia/Old Babylonian period

By roughly 4000 BC, the lower plain of Mesopotamia was filled with city-states much like the ones we
find later in Greece and Italy. Each city had a patron god and was ruled by a king. The political side of
their history may be summarized by saying that for a period of almost three millennia, the written
records of the cities of Euphrates and Tigris valley are annals of wars waged for supremacy by one city
and its gods against other cities and their gods.

The First Empires[edit]

Of all the Mesopotamian city-states' kings whose names have been recorded, one stands out above the
others: Sargon I, a Semitic king of Agade, whose reign was a great landmark in early Babylonian history.
Reigning from 2334 BC to 2279 BC, he built up a powerful state in the area and extended his rule as far
as the Mediterranean.

Yet, Sargon is as much remembered as a patron of letters as well as a warrior. He caused to be collected
and edited the literature of the period, and deposited books in great libraries which he established or
enlarged - the oldest and most valuable libraries of the ancient world.

Law and Conflict[edit]

Trade and Technology[edit]
New tools and techniques are always used to solve problems. As far as farming, animal tamming and
more. Special workers need and use tools the most so cities would improve the city and worlds
technology.
Ancient History/Ancient Near East/Mesopotamia/Sumer
| Mesopotamia
Sumer was a civilization located in the southern part of Mesopotamia (modern day southeastern Iraq)
from the time of the earliest records in the mid 4th millennium BC until the rise of Babylonia in the late
3rd millennium BC. The term "Sumerian" applies to all speakers of the Sumerian language. Sumer is
considered the first settled society in the world to have manifested all the features needed to qualify
fully as a "civilization". Settlements such as Ur and Uruk were the first to arise on Earth which could
qualify as cities, where the majority of inhabitants were engaged in pursuits other than agriculture,
supported by the surplus food production of surrounding lands.

Sumer was a favorable location for a civilization to arise. Watered by the annual floods of the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers, the rich soil of the region, combined with the warm climate, offered farmers a long

Ancient History/Mesopotamia/Babylonia/Old Babylonian period

growing season and high productivity. Sumer also lay at a confluence of trade routes -- the Persian Gulf
offered access to Arabia and lands around the Indian Ocean, while the Tigris and Euphrates were natural
highways leading north and west toward Anatolia and the Mediterranean Sea. Since the first
appearance of agriculture six millennia earlier, Mesopotamia had been home to a series of farming
cultures of increasing number and sophistication. As populations in the region rose, leaders organized
communal labor to build irrigation systems and bring more land into production. These efforts, which
required coordination and record-keeping, most likely became the basis for the Sumerian state.

Contents [hide]
1 Ubaid period
2 Uruk period
3 Jemdet Nasr period
4 Early Dynastic periods
Ubaid period[edit]

An example of Ubaid pottery

ca. 5300 - 4000 BC
Saw the settlement of the first town in lower mesopotamia, Eridu, ca. 5300 BC, by a group which
brought with them the Samarran culture from the north.

First settlement beyond the 5 inch rainfall isohyet - there was not enough rain to grow crops, but the
water table was high enough to allow for manual irrigation of the rich alluvial soil - a project which was
labor intensive and necessarily centrally coordinated.

Eridu was not the first city - well-known cities such as Jericho and atalhyk already existed as yearround trading colonies or for seasonal protection.

Farming also existed, but was seasonal - when not farming, people continued to be mobile huntergatherers.

Ancient History/Mesopotamia/Babylonia/Old Babylonian period

Uruk period[edit]
ca. 4000-3000 BC
Archaeological sites show a gradual shift from fine quality pottery of the Ubaid period (which were often
made with the help of a turntable), to plain pottery mass-produced on a true fast potter's wheel. The
technology used to make the fast potter's wheel would then be used for the mill-wheel and for vehicular
wheels.

Ca. 3500, the need for record keeping led to the development of writing - starting with number symbols,
pictograms were added to represent what was being counted. This quickly developed into a full
logographic script to represent the full range of language, not just counted objects, and the ancient
Egyptians and the ancient Elamites soon developed their own logographic writing systems. At first
symbols were simple carved in a medium or drawn in clay. By the end of the millennium, a triangular
stylus came into use to make impressions in clay, creating the characteristic cuneiform script. With the
use of the stylus, symbols became more abstract.

Jemdet Nasr period[edit]

ca. 3000-2900 BC
Archaeology shows the Jemdet Nasr period is followed by a layer of riverine sediment throughout the
Sumerian area in lower Mesopotamia, indicating what was probably a devastating flood event for the
Sumerians. The Sumerian king list then picks up the "kingship" in Kish, far to the north.

Early Dynastic periods[edit]

ca. 2900 - 2334 BC (short chronology)
Ca. 2600, the cuneiform symbols started being used to represent the sounds of individual word syllables,
independent of cuneiform symbols' meanings. This syllabary would be adopted by the Akkadians,
Eblaites and Elamites, and later by the Hittites and Uragitic speakers. This wide dissemination has
allowed the cuneiform script, and the Sumerian language to be deciphered by modern linguists. The
previously used logographic scripts, both Sumerian and Elamite, remain undeciphered, unlike the
ancient Egyptian, which retained their logographic hieroglyphs well into the Hellenistic period. The
Rosetta Stone, a text written in both hieroglyphs and in classical Greek was the key to deciphering
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Because Egyptian hieroglyphs had remained essentially the same since the
beginning, we are able to read Egyptian texts going back to ca. 3100 BC. But for Sumer, the historical
record only opens for us starting ca. 2600 BC, when the syllabary came into use.

Ancient History/Mesopotamia/Babylonia/Old Babylonian period