Mesopotamia+by+Taylor+Slivka

Ancient Mesopotamia  **Mesopotamia (from a Greek term meaning "between rivers") is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is Iraq today.Also commonly known as the Valley of the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia was the birthplace of the first civilizations and a leading region of the world for 3,000 years. ** The earliest communities developed to the north but since rainfall in that area was so unpredictable, by 5000 B.C. communities had spread south to the rich alluvial plain. The economy of these communities was primarily agricultural and approximately 100-200 people lived in these permanently well-known villages. Southern Mesopotamia also had its share of flash floods which could destroy crops, livestock and village homes. Civilization emerged in Mesopotamia because the soil provided a surplus of food. With this surplus, people could settle down to village life and with these new settlements, towns and cities began to make their appearance, a process known as urbanization. With settlements and a surplus of food came an increase in the population, a well-defined division of labor, organization, cooperation and kingship. The emergence of cities involved interaction between people. Most cities evolved from smaller farming villages and with the practice of irrigation, which was necessary for villages distant from the Tigris and Euphrates, a stable food s upply was produced. This, in turn, allowed increases in the number of people who inhabited each settlement. Mesopotamian villages and towns eventually evolved into independent and nearly self-  Because the land closest to the river was the most fertile, there was a variation in terms of the wealth of these early farmers, which led to distinct social classes. At the same time, the construction of canals, ditches and dikes essential to irrigation demanded cooperation between different social groups. Decision-making, regulation and control of all food production and herding meant cooperation. And because more food could be produced by less people, some people gave up farming and became craftsmen, laborers, merchants and officials and this too required cooperation. The Mesopotamians built massive temples which housed the priestly class, the human representatives of the gods. The priests controlled the religious life of the community, the economy, land ownership, the employment of workers as well as the management of long distance trade. By 3000 B.C., Mesopotamian civilization had made contact with other cultures of the Fertile Crescent (a term first coined by James Breasted in 1916), an extensive trade network connecting Mesopotamia with the rest of Ancient Western Asia. Again, it was the two rivers which served as both trade and transportation routes. Math and Science Because baked clay tablets with cuneiform symbols impressed are easily preserved, especially in a dry climate, much is known about Mesopotamian mathematics. Some historians think that it is likely that a great deal of the mathematical knowledge of the ancient world, ranging from Rome to China, diffused from Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian numeration system was based on 60 as well as 10, and scholars can trace this division through many different languages. The most notable reflections of this system today are in the divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds in time calculations and in the divisions of degrees, minutes, and seconds for angle measurements. The break at 10 in Mesopotamian notation was purely additive (that is, three tens is shown by repeating the tens symbol three times), as in many simple and inconvenient numeration systems, such as the Egyptian and Greek; but the break at 60 represented true place value, making the Mesopotamians one of the four cultures that developed place value. The Sumerians inhabited southern Mesopotamia from 3000-2000 B.C. The origins of the Sumerians is unclear -- what is clear is that Sumerian civilization dominated Mesopotamian law, religion, art, literature and science for nearly seven centuries. The greatest achievement of Sumerian civilization was their CUNEIFORM ("wedge-shaped") system of writing. Using a reed stylus, they made wedge-shaped impressions on wet clay tablets which were then baked in the sun. Once dried, these tablets were virtually indestructible and the several hundred thousand tablets which have been found tell us a great deal about the Sumerians. Originally, Sumerian writing was pictographic, that is, scribes drew pictures of representations of objects. Each sign represented a word identical in meaning to the object pictured, although pictures could often represent more than the actual object.
 * Ancient Summer **