Ever been stuck at a cocktail party and some historical period comes up that you know you should have some knowledge of but it has escaped you? This section should pull you out of the abyss about various historical topics!
Mesopotamia is the dawn of civilization as we know it. As my beau informed me, “they invented things like, the wheel.” The civilization developed circa 5500 BCE (before the common era) and thrived for over 2,000 years. To put that in perspective, our culture as we know it, post industrialization is little over 300 years old. The name means the land between the rivers. Which rivers you ask? The Tigres and Euphrates.
Just the Facts:
55000-45000 BCE The Mesopotamians invented farming through the use of the plow and irrigation.
3400 Mesopotamians developed a sophisticated form of writing called cuneiform and wrote using a stick pressed into soft clay.
2334 Sargon, king of Agade conquered all of Mesopotamia and had control of the first know empire in history.
1792-1750 During Hammurabi’s rein, he writes down the first known set of laws. These laws included harsh punishments including mutilation and death for nearly all offenses. Women and children were also written in as property. (How nice of them.)
539 BCE Mesopotamia falls to the Persian King Cyrus (559-530 BCE) who then ruled the largest kingdom the world had ever seen.