What was the history of Mesopotamian?

so that links between Syrian and Palestinian scribal schools and Babylonian civilization during the Amarna period

(14th century BCE) may have had much older predecessors.

At any rate, the similarity of certain themes in cuneiform literature

and the Hebrew Bible, such as the story of the Flood or the motif of the righteous sufferer

is due to such early contacts and not to direct borrowing.

The world of mathematics and astronomy owes much to the Babylonians

for instance, the sexagesimal system for the calculation of time and angles,

which is still practical because of the multiple divisibility of the number 60;