Ancient Mesopotamia is the country now called Iraq. Its northern part, down to an imaginary line running east-west slightly north of modern Baghdad, constituted ancient Assyria, with the cities of Ashur (modern Qalʾat Shergat), which was the old...

The Priest-King. Urbanism began in Mesopotamia at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E. At Uruk, the largest city in Mesopotamia, two great temples dominated the region. It has been proposed that the temple was at the center of a redistributive...

First Cities. Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) was the setting for humankind's earliest complex civilization. Among the many ways by which social scientists measure civilization are the presence of political and social organizations such as government and...

Visual Arts and Architecture. The surviving artworks of Mesopotamia relate largely to royalty, especially the male ruler, or to wealthier members of the community. These elements of Mesopotamian culture include not only sculpture and painting but also...

Communication and Locomotion. Communication and locomotion are two basic functions common to virtually all living creatures. Communication refers to the various ways in which organisms convey information to each other. Over the course of human...

History. Mesopotamian civilization existed for more than three millennia. The religious system founded by the Sumerians at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E. continued for more than a thousand years until it merged with the Semitic religions of the...

Ancient Science. The seeds of modern science are evident in the scholarly pursuits of ancient Mesopotamia; however, what modern people think of as "science" was not a concept that the Mesopotamians would have understood. They observed the physical and...

Mesopotamian Culture. In its broadest definition, Mesopotamia encompasses an enormous area from the shores of the Persian Gulf north along the alluvial plain dissected by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and their tributaries to their respective...

Location and Lifestyle. Between circa 3300 and 331 B.C.E. many ethno-linguistic groups lived both contemporaneously and successively across the length and breadth of Mesopotamia. Despite ethnic variations, however, factors such as geography, climate,...

The Origins of Agriculture. The great ice sheets that covered much of the northern hemisphere for more than one hundred thousand years during the last Ice Age reached their greatest extent about twenty thousand years ago, whereupon they slowly began to...

Region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East, constituting the greater part of modern Iraq. The region's location and fertility gave rise to settlements some 10,000 years ago, and it became the cradle of some of the world's...

Mesopotamia (from the Greek meaning 'between two rivers')[1] was a cradle of civilization geographically located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq[1][2][3]...