Ancient Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia means “the land between the rivers”. The 2 river s are the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The area is now modern day Iraq, Syria and Turkey. In the summers they had little rain and dry land.The rivers would flood each year and that picked up silt and made the soil very rich and fertile. The rivers were very marshy.

They made wedge shaped tablets of clay called cuneiform that they wrote on with reed stylists. They also made official contracts, also on clay tablets. They also created a code of laws, one of the first written languages and a system of literature.

There earliest forms of shelter were huts of reeds tied together. But later on they used sun baked mud bricks to make their houses. The upper class citizens lived in two story houses while the lower class people lived in smaller one story houses. There were brick walls surrounding the city houses. In the center of the city they made a temples on a pyramid like structure with each level getting smaller than the last one. They were called ziggurats and were made of sun baked and fired bricks that were sometimes colored. The farmlands were outside of the city walls. They also developed a sewer and toilet system which was very advanced for about 1700 B.C.E.

They ate wheat, barley, barley cakes, flatbreads, fish, and game meats. The men were bare chested with skirt looking things on their waists. Women wore gowns that went from their shoulder to their ankles and braided their hair and put it in a ball on their heads. Their clothing was made of available natural resources like flax or wool. Wealthier citizens wore jewelry made of gold and silver.

They worshipped many gods and goddesses so they were polytheistic. Each city had its own special god or goddess that they worshipped in the ziggurats. Their government system was a monarchy and they had city-states.

They dug irrigation ditches to water their crops. They also used the wheel to transport goods. They used riverboats called turnips and developed a system of record keeping. They also used sailboats to travel. They used the plow to farm and developed a math system based on the number sixty and developed earlier systems of algebra and geometry.