7. Write a note on food and agriculture of the babylonians
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Answer:
Agriculture was the main economic activity in ancient Mesopotamia. Operating under harsh constraints, notably the arid climate and the poor soil, the Mesopotamian farmers developed effective strategies that enabled them to support the development of the first states, the first cities, and then the first known empires, under the supervision of the institutions which dominated the economy: the royal and provincial palaces, the temples, and the domains of the elites. They focused above all on the cultivation of cereals (particularly barley) and sheep farming, but also farmed legumes, as well as date palms in the south and grapes in the north.
In reality there were two types of Mesopotamian agriculture, corresponding to the two main ecological domains, which largely overlapped with cultural distinctions. The agriculture of southern or Lower Mesopotamia, the land of Sumer and Akkad, which later became Babylonia received almost no rain and required large scale irrigation works which were supervised by temple estates, but could produce high returns. The agriculture of Northern or Upper Mesopotamia, the land that would eventually become Assyria, had enough rainfall to allow dry agriculture most of the time, so that irrigation and large institutional estates were less important, but the returns were also usually lower.