CLASS XI: HISTORY (027)

CHAPTER 2 (WRITING AND CITY LIFE)

INTRODUCTION: (ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA)

Mesopotamia is derived from two Greek words mesos meaning middle and Potamas meaning river
Mesopotamia means land between two rivers-Euphrates and Tigris. Today it is part of the Republic of
Iraq. This civilization was known for its prosperity, city life, voluminous literature and its mathematical
applications.

HISTORY OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA:

• In the beginning the land, mainly the urbanized south, was called Sumer and Akkad.
• Babylonia was the southern region and became important after 2000 BCE
• Assyria was the region where Assyrians established their kingdom in the north by about 1100 BCE.
LANGUAGE:
• The first known language of the land was Sumerian.
• It was replaced by Akkadian around 2400 BCE, this language flourished till Alexander's time.

• From 1400 BCE, Aramaic also came into existence. It is still spoken in parts of Iraq.
MESOPOTAMIA AND ITS GEOGRAPHY

• Iraq is a land of diverse environments

• North east lie green undulating plains, gradually rising to tree-covered mountain ranges with clean
streams and wild flowers, with enough rainfall to grow crops. Agriculture began between 7000 and 6000
BCE.

• In North-There is a stretch of upland called a steppe, where animal herding offers people a better
livelihood than agriculture. Sheep and goats produced meat, milk and wool in abundance

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• In the East-tributaries of the Tigris provide routes of communication in to mountains of Iran

• The South is a desert-the place with the first cities and writing emerged. Euphrates and Tigris carry
loads of silt and deposited on the flood fields.

• The small channels of Euphrates and Tigris functioned as irrigation canals. Fish was available in rivers
and date-palms gave fruit in summer.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF URBANISATION

• Urban centers are involved in various economic activities such as food production trade, manufactures and
services.

• City people were not self-sufficient. The carver of stone seal requires bronze tools, coloured stones.

• The bronze tool maker needs metals, charcoal. So they depend on the products or services of other people.

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• The division of labour is a mark of urban life. There must be a social organisation in cities

• Fuel,metal,various stones, wood etc.,come from many places for city manufacturers.

• There are deliveries of grain and other food items from the village to the city

• Thus organized trade and storage is needed.

• In such a system some people command and those others obey.

• Urban economies often require the keeping of written records.

MOVEMENT OF GOODS INTO CITIES

• Food resources were abundant in Mesopotamia but lacked stones, wood, metal.

• So they imported wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell, stones from Turkey and Iran.

• They exported their textiles and food resources

• Transport is also important for urban development

• The canals and natural channels were routes for goods transport
• Euphrates became a world route.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING:
• The Mesopotamian tablets contained pictures like signs and numbers.
• Writing began in Mesopotamia in 3200 BCE.
• Writing began when society needed to keep records of transactions.
• Mesopotamians wrote on tablets of clay.
• Scribe would impress wedge shaped signs on wet clay with the sharp end of a reed.

• Once written, tablets were dried hard in the sun and it would be almost indestructible.

• Once it dried, signs could not be pressed onto a tablet.

• So each transaction required a separate written tablet.

• This is why tablets occur by the hundreds at Mesopotamian sites.
• By 2600 BCE the letters became cuneiform and the language was Sumerian.

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Writing was used for,
1. keeping records
2. making dictionaries
3. giving legal validity to land transfers
4. narrating the deeds of kings
5. announcing the changes a king had made in the customary laws of the land

6. Storing information and of sending messages

THE SYSTEM OF WRITING:
• The sound that a cuneiform sign represented was not a single consonant or vowel but syllables

• Thus the scribe had to learn hundreds of signs.

• He had to handle a wet tablet and get it written before it dried.

• So writing was a skilled craft
• It conveys the visual form of the system of sounds of a particular language.
LITERACY:
• King and Very few could read and write.
• There were hundreds of signs to learn and many of these were complex.

• If a king could read, that was recorded in his boastful inscriptions.

• Writing reflected the mode of speaking.

• It was kingship that organised trade and writing
URBANISATION IN SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA: TEMPLES AND KINGS

By 5000 BCE, Settlements began in Mesopotamia. The earliest cities emerged from some of these
settlements. THERE WAS THREE KINDS OF CITIES

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CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE OF TEMPLES IN MESOPOTAMIA
o The earliest known temple was a small shrine made of unbaked bricks.

o Temples were the residence of various gods: Moon God of Ur and for Inanna the Goddess of Love and War.
o Temples became larger over time with several rooms around open courtyards.
o Temples always had their outer walls going in and out at regular intervals.
o The god was the focus of worship.
o People brought grain, curd and fish to god.
o The god was the theoretical owner of the agricultural fields, the fisheries, and the herds of the local
community.
o Production process such as oil pressing, grain grinding, spinning and weaving of woolen cloth
done in the temple.

o Thus the temple became the main urban institution by organizing production, employing merchants and
keeping records of distribution and allotments of grain, plough animals, bread, beer, fish etc.

ROLE OF KINGS IN CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE OF TEMPLES IN MESOPOTAMIA

• Archaeological records show that villages were periodically relocated in Mesopotamian history
because of flooding in the river and change in the course of the rivers.

• There were man-made problems as well. Those who lived on the upstream stretches of a channel could
divert so much water into their fields that villages downstream were left without water.

• There was continuous warfare in Mesopotamian villages for land and water.

• The victorious chiefs distributed the loot among their followers and took prisoners from the defeated
groups.

• They were employed as their guards or servants. The chiefs also offer precious booty to the gods to

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beautify temples.

• He organizes the distribution of temple wealth by keeping records. This gave the king high status and
authority
• War captives and local people had to work for the temple, or for the ruler. Those who were put to
work were paid rations
• Hundreds of people were put to work at making and baking of clay cones for temples

LIFE IN THE CITY OF UR

• From the legal texts we came to know that in Mesopotamian society the nuclear family system was the
norm.

• The father was the head of the family.

MARRIAGE
• We know a little about the procedures of marriage
• A declaration was made about the willingness to marry by the bride's parents.

• When the wedding took place gifts were exchanged by both parties who ate together and made offerings
in a temple.

• The bride was given her share of inheritance by her father

• The father's house, herds, fields etc. were inherited by the sons.

UR: THE EARLIEST CITIES EXCAVATED IN THE 1930S (Will compare this system with IVC in Class XII)
• Narrow winding streets indicate the wheeled carts could not have reached many of the houses.
• Sacks of grain and firewood would have reached on donkey back

• Town planning and street drains were absent at Ur.

• Instead of drains clay pipes were found in the inner courtyards of houses.
• House roofs sloped inwards and rainwater was channelled via the drain pipes into sumps in the inner
courtyards.
• People had swept their household refuse into the streets. This made street level rise, and overtime
the thresholds of houses had to be raised. So that no mud would flow inside after rains.

• Light came into the rooms not from windows but from doorways opening into courtyards.

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SUPERSTITIONS ABOUT HOUSES (As recorded in omen tablets at Ur)
• .A raised threshold brought wealth;

• . A front door that did not open towards another house was lucky;

• . If the main door of a house open outwards, the wife would be a torment to her husband
TOWN CEMETERY AT UR
• The graves of royalty and commoners have been found there. Very few individuals were
found buried under the floors of ordinary houses.

A TRADING TOWN IN A PASTORAL ZONE (LIFE IN THE CITY OF MARI)

• After 2000 BCE the royal city of Mari flourished. Mari was located on the upstream of Euphrates.
• Agriculture and animal rearing were carried out in this region. Most of the region was used for pasturing
sheep and goats.

• Herders exchanged animals, cheese, leather and meat in return for metal tools etc. with the farmers.

• Nomadic groups of the western desert filtered into the prosperous agricultural land. Such groups would
come as herders, harvest labourers or hired soldiers and settle down.

• These included the Akkadians, Amorites, Assyrians and Armenians.

• The kings of Mari were Amorites and raised a temple at Mari for Dagan, god of steppe.

• Mesopotamian society and culture were open to different cultures. Thus the vitality of the civilization was
of course an inter mixture culture

• Mari is a good example of an urban centre prospering on trade.

• Wood, copper, wine, tin, oil,etc. were carried in boats along the Euphrates between the south and Turkey,
Syria and Lebanon.

• Boats carrying grinding stones, wood, and wine and oil jars, would stop at Mari on their way to southern
cities.

• Officers of this town would go abroad, inspect the cargo and levy a charge of about one tenth the value of
the goods.

• Thus, although the kingdom of Mari was not militarily strong, it was exceptionally prosperous.
CITIES IN MESOPOTAMIAN CULTURE

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• Mesopotamians valued city life .Many communities and cultures lived side by side. After cities were
destroyed in war, they recalled them in poetry.
• The Epic of Gilgamesh remind us the pride of the Mesopotamians who took in their cities
• Gilgamesh was the ruler of Uruk and a great hero who subdued people far and wide. • He got a shock
when his heroic friend died .He then set out to find the secret of immortality.

• After a heroic attempt, Gilgamesh failed, and returned to Uruk. There he consoled himself walking along
the city wall, back and forth.
THE LEGACY OF WRITING:
• Perhaps the greatest legacy of Mesopotamia to the world is its scholarly tradition of time reckoning and
mathematics.

• Dating around 1800 BCE are tablets with multiplication and division tables, square and square root tables,
and tables of compound interest.

• The Division of the year into 12 months according to the revolution of the moon around the earth, the
division of the months into 4 weeks, the day into 24 hours and the hour into 60 minutes.

❖ An Early Library: Assurbanipal collected a library at his capital, Nineveh in the north. He made great
efforts to gather tablets on history, epics, omen literature, astrology, hymns and poems.

❖ An Early Archaeologist: Nabonidus was the last ruler of Babylonia. He explored his dream of God. He
also repaired the statue of King of Akkad, Sargon.

KEY WORDS TO REMEMBER:

Utnapishtim: In the story of the great flood, Ziusudra or Utnapishtim was the main character in
Mesopotamian Tradition.
Cuneiform: Cuneiform is derived from the Latin words cuneus, meaning wedge and forma meaning shape.
The first form of writing invented by the Sumerians around 2500B.C.E. that was written on clay tablets
Steles: Steles are stone slabs with inscriptions or carving.
Sump: A Sump is a covered basin in the ground into which water and sewage flow.

Fertile Crescent:the boomerang-shaped region of the Middle East that was home to some of the earliest
human civilizations. Also known as the “Cradle of Civilization,”

Mesopotamia:Greek word meaning, “land between two rivers.” The world’s first civilization.

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Scribes–People trained to write cuneiform and record many of the languages spoken in Mesopotamia.

Polytheism: The belief and/or worship of more than one god

Hammurabi’s Code: the most famous written law codes, founded by Hammurabi in Babylon.Written on
Clay Tablets or Stone Pillars so that everyone in public could see.

Sumer: The first major civilization in Mesopotamia

Ziggurats: A religious temple built to house the gods.Were the religious and economic centers of early
Sumerian city-states

Civilization: These are complex societies. They have cities, organized governments, art, religion, class
divisions, and a writing system.

ASSIGNMENT

Questions to be answered in 100-120 WORDS

1. What is the contribution of the Mesopotamian Civilization to the World?

2. What was the role of kings in Construction and maintenance of temples in Mesopotamia?

3. Explain the System of Writing in Mesopotamia.

4. Define the following terms:
(a) Planning of UR (b) Mesopotamian Seals
5. How did a pastoral zone become a Trading Town in the northern part of Mesopotamia?
6. What are the different Names used for the Mesopotamian civilization? Also explain the meaning of the
word “Mesopotamia’?
7. What are the sources available to understand Mesopotamian civilization?

8. Explain THE Mesopotamian geography.

9. What is the significance of Urbanism in Mesopotamia?

NEELANSHU KAUSHIK
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