Mesopotamian civilization CW.. Answer in detail 1st Answer.
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Answer:
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Explanation:
history of Mesopotamia, history of the region in southwestern Asia where the world’s earliest civilization developed. The name comes from a Greek word meaning “between rivers,” referring to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but the region can be broadly defined to include the area that is now eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and most of Iraq. The region was the centre of a culture whose influence extended throughout the Middle East and as far as the Indus valley, Egypt, and the Mediterranean.
Answer:
Explanation:
“Mesopotamia” is a Greek word meaning “Land between the Rivers”. The region is a vast, dry plain through which two great rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris, flow. These rivers rise in mountain ranges to the north before flowing through Mesopotamia to the sea. As they approach the sea, the land becomes marshy, with lagoons, mud flats, and reed banks. Today, the rivers unite before they empty into the Persian Gulf, but in ancient times the sea came much further inland, and they flowed into it as two separate streams.
History map of Mesopotamia in 3500 BC
Map of Mesopotamia in about 3500 BCE
(The first of a sequence of maps covering Mesopotamia’s history)
The land has too little rainfall to grow many crops on. As a result, much of it has been – and is still – home to herders of sheep and goat. These nomads move from the river pastures in the summer to the desert fringes in the winter, which get some rain at this time of year. At various times they have had a large impact on Mesopotamian history.
Near the rivers themselves, the soil is extremely fertile. It is made up of rich mud brought down by the rivers from the mountains, and deposited over a wide area during the spring floods. When watered by means of irrigation channels, it makes some of the best farmland in the world.
The marshy land near the sea also makes very productive farmland, once it had been drained. Here, the diet is enriched by the plentiful supply of fish to had from the lagoons and ponds.
It is this geography which gave rise to the earliest civilization in world history. Agriculture is only possible in the dry climate of Mesopotamia by means of irrigation. With irrigation, however, farming is very productive indeed. A dense population grew up here along the Tigris and Euphrates and their branches in the centuries after 5000 BC. By 3500 BC, cities had appeared. The surplus food grown in this fertile landscape enabled the farming societies to feed a class of people who did not need to devote their lives to agriculture. These were the craftsmen, priests, scribes, administrators, rulers and soldiers who made civilization possible.
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Language and Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia
At the time when civilization first arose in Mesopotamia, the population was divided into two distinct groups: those who spoke Sumerian (a language unrelated to any modern language), and those who spoke Semitic dialects (related to modern Arabic and Hebrew). It was the Sumerian-speakers who lived near the great rivers, and it was they who built the first cities. Their language therefore became the first to be written down in world history.
The first script to be used was based on pictures, and is therefore known as “pictographic”. They first appeared around 3500 BCE. By 3000 BCE the pictograms (of which there were more than a thousand) had become highly stylized, and were losing their original meanings. They were gradually becoming more “phonetic” – that is, reflecting spoken words. Finally, around 2500 BCE, the script had evolved into “cuneiform” – or wedge-shaped – writing. This was written by means of triangular-tipped stylus tools being pressed onto wet clay, and the symbols (which had been reduced to a more manageable 600 or so) were highly stylized and abstract.
Early Mesopotamian writing
Early Mesopotamian writing (The Schoyen Collection)
Learning to write in cuneiform was a long and rigorous process, and literacy was confined to a small elite of priests and officials.
(Click here for more on the historical context in which writing first developed.)
Cuneiform was at first written in the Sumerian language. For more than a millennium Sumerian retained importance as the language of administration, religion and high culture. However, in the centuries after 2000 BCE, it increasingly fell out of everyday use. In its place, a Semitic dialect, Akkadian (also known as “Old Babylonian”) became widespread. Later still, in the early 1st millennium BCE, another Semitic dialect, Aramaic, took its place. The waxing and waning of these languages reflected population movements within Mesopotamia, and to the rise and fall of ruling kingdoms and empires with which they were linked.
As each language fell into decline in everyday use, it retained its usage amongst the conservative temple priests – much like Latin was used in the monasteries of Medieval Europe long after the rest of society had moved on. The cuneiform script, first developed by the Sumerians, remained in use, adapted for each successive language.
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