What was the history of Mesopotamian?

diffused was clay used as the vehicle for writing.

uch phrases as cuneiform civilization, cuneiform literature, and cuneiform law can apply

only where people had had the idea of using soft clay not only for bricks and jars and for the jar stoppers

on which a seal could be impressed as a mark of ownership but also as the vehicle for impressed

signs to which established meanings were assigned—an intellectual achievement that amounted to nothing less than the invention of writing.

Questions as to what ancient Mesopotamian civilization did and did not accomplish

how it influenced its neighbours and successors, and what its legacy has transmitted are posed from the standpoint of modern civilization and are in part coloured by ethical overtones, so that the answers can only be relative.

Modern scholars assume the ability to assess the sum total of an “ancient Mesopotamian civilization”;

since the publication of an article by the Assyriologist Benno Landsberger on

“Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt” (1926; “The Distinctive Conceptuality of the Babylonian World”)

it has become almost a commonplace to call attention to the necessity of viewing ancient Mesopotamia and its civilization as an independent entity.

Ancient Mesopotamia had many languages and cultures; its history is broken up into many periods and eras;

it had no real geographic unity, and above all no permanent capital city,

so that by its very variety it stands out from other civilizations with greater uniformity,

particularly that of Egypt. The script and the pantheon constitute the unifying factors,

but in these also Mesopotamia shows its predilection for multiplicity and variety.

ritten documents were turned out in quantities, and there are often many copies of a single text

The pantheon consisted of more than 1,000 deities, even though many divine names

may apply to different manifestations of a single god. During 3,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization, each century gave birth to the next

Thus classical Sumerian civilization influenced that of the Akkadians,

and the Ur III empire, which itself represented a Sumero-Akkadian synthesis,

exercised its influence on the first quarter of the 2nd millennium BCE

With the Hittites, large areas of Anatolia were infused with the culture of Mesopotamia

from 1700 BCE onward. Contacts, via Mari, with Ebla in Syria,

some 30 miles south of Aleppo, go back to the 24th century BCE,