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Current theories and findings identify the Fertile Crescent as the first and oldest cradle of civilization. Examples of sites in this area are the early Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe (9500–8000 BC) and Çatalhöyük (7500–5700 BC).
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- Overview
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- How Environmental Change Made Mesopotamian Civilization Evolve
Environmental factors helped agriculture, architecture and eventually a social order emerge for the first time in ancient Mesopotamia.
While human civilization developed in many places around the world, it first emerged thousands of years ago in the ancient Middle East.
“We see the first cities, the first writing and first technologies originating in Mesopotamia,” says Kelly-Anne Diamond, a visiting assistant history professor at Villanova University, whose expertise includes ancient Near Eastern history and archaeology.
Mesopotamia’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “the land between the rivers.” That’s a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the twin sources of water for a region that lies mostly within the borders of modern-day Iraq, but also included parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran.
The presence of those rivers had a lot to do with why Mesopotamia developed complex societies and innovations such as writing, elaborate architecture and government bureaucracies. The regular flooding along the Tigris and the Euphrates made the land around them especially fertile and ideal for growing crops for food. That made it a prime spot for the Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, that began to take place almost 12,000 years ago.
That revolution “transformed human life across the planet, but it was in Mesopotamia where this process began,” Diamond explains.
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Civilization didn’t develop in exactly the same way throughout the region, according to Hervé Reculeau, an associate professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago and an expert in the history of ancient Mesopotamia. As he explains, urban societies developed independently in Lower Mesopotamia, an area in what is now southern Iraq where the early civilization of Sumer was located, and Upper Mesopotamia, which includes Northern Iraq and part of present-day western Syria.
One factor that helped civilization to develop in both places was the climate of Mesopotamia, which 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, was wetter than that part of the Middle East is today.
“The earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia developed on the margins of a great marsh that provided an abundance of natural resources for construction (reed) and food (wild game and fish), with water easily accessible for small-scale irrigation that could be organized at a local level and did not require the supervision of large-scale state structures,” Reculeau writes. Additionally, he notes, the marsh provided a connection to sea routes on the Persian Gulf, which made it possible for people who lived in the south to eventually develop long-distance trade with other places.
17th century map featuring Mesopotamia and the Tower of Babel.
In Upper Mesopotamia, the rainfall was reliable enough that farmers didn’t have to do much irrigation, according to Reculeau. They also had access to mountains and forests, where they could hunt for game and cut down trees for wood. Their areas also had land routes to places to the north beyond the mountains, where they could obtain materials such as obsidian, a type of rock that can be used in jewelry or for making cutting tools.
According to the British Museum, early Mesopotamian farmers’ main crops were barley and wheat. But they also created gardens shaded by date palms, where they cultivated a wide variety of crops including beans, peas, lentils, cucumbers, leeks, lettuce and garlic, as well as fruit such as grapes, apples, melons and figs. They also milked sheep, goats and cows to make butter, and slaughtered them for meat.
According to Reculeau, climate shifts may have played a role in the development of Mesopotamian civilization. Roughly around 4,000 B.C., “the climates slowly became drier and the rivers more unpredictable,” he explains. “The marsh retreated from Lower Mesopotamia, leaving behind settlements now surrounded by lands that needed to be irrigated, requiring added work, and possibly greater coordination.”
Because they had to work harder and in a more organized fashion to survive, Mesopotamians gradually developed a more elaborate system of government. As Reculeau explains: “The bureaucratic apparatus that appeared first to manage the goods and people of the temples in the marshland cities increasingly became the tools of a royal power [that] found its justification in the support of the gods, but also in its ability to get things done.”
That all led to the development of a social structure in which the elites either coerced workers or obtained their labor by providing meals and wages.
“In a sense, the famed Sumerian agrarian system, its city-states and the associated control of land, resources and people were in part the result of people adapting to more adverse conditions, because the riches of the marshes had started to become more scarce,” Reculeau says.
In Upper Mesopotamia, by contrast, people coped with a drier climate by going in the opposite direction socially. That area saw “the devolution to a less complex social organization, relying on villages and their small-scale solidarity,” Reculeau explains.
Mesopotamia eventually saw the rise of empires such as Akkad and Babylonia, whose capital city of Babylon became one of the largest and most advanced in the ancient world.
Jun 15, 2023 · Mesopotamia, located in present-day Iraq, is renowned as the Cradle of Civilization. This ancient region witnessed the emergence of influential civilizations that laid the foundations for human progress.
Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (in modern day Iraq), is often referred to as the cradle of civilization because it is the first place where complex urban centers grew.
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Mar 28, 2018 · Known as the Cradle of Civilization, the Fertile Crescent is regarded as the birthplace of agriculture, urbanization, writing, trade, science, history and organized religion and was first populated c. 10,000 BCE when agriculture and the domestication of animals began in the region.
- Joshua J. Mark
Nov 23, 2018 · The Fertile Crescent is a region stretching from northern Egypt across to the Persian Gulf and was the home to the oldest civilizations in history such as the Sumerians, earning it the common name of the 'Cradle of Civilization'.
The cradle of civilization. Some of the earliest complex urban centers can be found in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (early cities also arose in the Indus Valley and ancient China).
