The First Empires: Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia means “the land between the rivers”: the Tigris and the Euphrates, in what is now Iraq.

Here, by around 3200 BC, cities such as Uruk had grown to tens of thousands of people, and scribes began to write, pressing marks into clay.

Writing let rulers count grain, record taxes and send orders. Those tools would one day make empires possible.

For centuries Sumer was a patchwork of independent city-states: Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish, Umma and others.

They fought over fields and canals. Kings made treaties, built temple platforms, and boasted of their victories in stone.

Shortly before 2300 BC, King Lugalzagesi of Uruk brought many of these cities under his control. But his realm would not last long.

Around 2334 BC, by the usual dating, a ruler called Sargon founded a new capital, Akkad. Later legend said he began as cupbearer to the king of Kish.

He defeated Lugalzagesi and conquered Ur, Umma and Lagash, “as far as the sea”.

Then he marched up the Euphrates to Mari and Ebla, toward the cedar forests and the silver mountains of the west.

An inscription claims that 5,400 men ate bread daily in his presence: a standing royal army, something new.

Sargon’s grandson Naram-Sin ruled from about 2254 BC. He called himself “king of the four quarters” of the world.

He was even worshipped as a god while still alive, something new for a Mesopotamian king.

At its height the empire covered perhaps 800,000 square kilometres, from the Gulf to the Mediterranean.

Its language, Akkadian, became the common language of the Near East for some two thousand years.

After Naram-Sin, the empire shrank. Cities revolted, and the Gutians, people from the Zagros mountains, raided the plain.

Some researchers link the fall to a severe drought around 2200 BC, known from soils and lake sediments. Others think the evidence is weaker.

By about 2154 BC, Akkad’s power was gone. The first empire had shown both how an empire could be built and how quickly it could break.

In 2112 BC Ur-Nammu of Ur reunited the south. His dynasty, the Third Dynasty of Ur, built the great ziggurat whose ruins still stand.

A law code bearing his name is the oldest surviving collection of laws, known from later copies.

Ur ran its provinces with scribes and records. About 120,000 administrative tablets from this period have been dug up.

Around 2004 BC, attackers from Elam, in today’s south-west Iran, sacked Ur and carried off its last king.

In 1792 BC Hammurabi became king of Babylon, then a modest city. Late in his reign he conquered his rivals, including Larsa and Mari.

He is remembered for his law code: 282 laws carved on a black stone stele more than two metres tall.

Many laws set punishments that varied by social class: an eye for an eye, but only between equals.

The stele was found at Susa in 1901, probably carried off as war booty, and is now in the Louvre. His dynasty ended when the Hittites sacked Babylon in 1595 BC.

In the north, on the Tigris, lay Assyria. From 911 BC its kings began to reconquer lands lost in the troubled centuries before.

They moved the capital from Assur to Nimrud, and decorated their palaces with carved scenes of war and hunting.

From 745 BC, Tiglath-pileser III built a professional standing army and turned conquered kingdoms into provinces, ruled by governors.

Assyria’s armies used iron weapons, cavalry and siege engines. Conquered peoples were often deported, tens of thousands at a time, to break resistance.

In 722 BC Samaria fell and the kingdom of Israel ended. In 671 BC Esarhaddon invaded Egypt.

At about 1.4 million square kilometres, Assyria was the largest empire the world had yet seen.

At Nineveh, King Ashurbanipal gathered a great library of clay tablets, which preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh.

After Ashurbanipal died, civil war split Assyria. In 626 BC Nabopolassar made Babylon independent again.

Babylon allied with the Medes of Iran. In 612 BC their armies sacked Nineveh.

The last Assyrian king held out at Harran until 609 BC. Assyria, feared for three centuries, simply disappeared from the map.

In 605 BC the crown prince Nebuchadnezzar defeated Egypt at Carchemish and became king. He ruled for over forty years.

He besieged Jerusalem twice. After 587 BC many of its people were taken to Babylon, the Babylonian Exile.

He rebuilt Babylon with the blue glazed Ishtar Gate and a great ziggurat. The famous Hanging Gardens have never been proven to exist.

In October 539 BC, the Persian king Cyrus took Babylon. The age of Mesopotamian empires was over.

For about 1,800 years, empires rose and fell between the rivers: Akkad, Ur, Babylon, Assyria and Babylon again.

Each fell to revolts, rival powers, and sometimes a changing climate. Yet their inventions spread far beyond them.

Writing, written law, kingship and imperial provinces were copied by later empires. Their counting in sixties survives in our sixty seconds and sixty minutes.

Next, we travel west to the Nile, and the pharaohs of Egypt.