Mr. Arnold — Mesopotamian Geography and Writing

"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. The land is too dry 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. Guided Reading: Annotate the reading in order to find a deeper understanding 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 BC. By 3000 BC 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 BC, 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. Learning to write in cuneiform was a long and rigorous process, and literacy was confined to a small elite of priests and officials so only a few people in society had the ability to read and write. Although stories were eventually written with cuneiform its original purpose was to take track of the amount of livestock and crops on a daily and weekly basis. 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 BC, it increasingly fell out of everyday use. In its place, a succession of Semitic dialects became the dominant language of the region in turn: Akkadian, Amorite, Assyrian and Aramaic. 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.