These are some of the strangest facts involving the worlds first civilization!
1. Mesopotamian Religion did not believe in the after-life. They believed that all good and bad people go under-ground as ghosts and eat dirt.
2. Their religion also believed that they were servants of god. If you were to ask a person today why they are here they would say because god loves me. Back in Mesopotamia they would say to be a servant of the gods. Talk about population control!
3. Mesopotamia invented the wheel, plow, irrigation systems and the sailboat!
4. Priests would read the livers of chickens or lambs to see what the gods wanted for sacrifices.
5. Priests controlled the irrigation systems and also had more power than the king and queen!
6. Mesopotamia was the very first civilization.
7. The Mesopotamian king ordered the construction of the Hanging Gardens for his wife because she grew up in the mountains and was homesick!
8. Mesopotamia was made up of individual City-states controlled by different powers. They would eventually attack each other and end up under 1 ruler. The people would retaliate and go back to being city-states. This process was repeated many times.
9. Each City-state had its own god!
10. In the Mesopotamian religion there are 4 main gods of Earth, Water, Air and the Heavens. And there were 3,000 lesser gods and each represented an everyday item like a pickaxe. If you were mining and the pickaxe slipped and fell on your foot, the god of the pickaxe hated you!
So there you have it. The Egyptians were not the only super interesting civilization in the ancient history.