Mesopotamia: Sumer, Akkad and Babylon

The valley between the Tigris and Euphrates was called Mesopotamia by the Greeks, “the land between two rivers”. River floods brought fertile silt and farming developed. But there was little wood, metal and stone, so people traded grain with neighbouring lands for metals and stone; silver ingots served as money. In the 4th millennium BCE the Sumerians settled in the south and called the land Sumer; the northern part was Akkad. The Sumerians invented one of the oldest scripts, cuneiform, writing on wet clay tablets with a sharpened stick. City-states such as Uruk, Umma, Lagash and Ur arose; they were ruled by kings and priests, and in the centre stood the god’s temple — the ziggurat. Famous gods: the sun god Shamash, the moon god Sin, the water god Ea, and Ishtar. The legend of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is a famous work of Mesopotamian literature. Around the 24th century BCE the Akkadian king Sargon (called Sargon I in the textbook) united the city-states, created a standing army and took the title “king of the four quarters of the world”. Later, attacks by nomadic tribes weakened the state.