Is Mesopotamia the Real Cradle?
With a sedentary lifestyle based on agriculture, spiritual practices that once were spread out became more centralized and refined, leading to organized religion. People built huge temples, and a priestly ruling class took its place high up in the power structure. After all, these were the people who knew the intentions of gods like Enlil (wind) and Utu (sun).
Organized religion also produced moral codes of conduct, which gave birth to formal laws. Legal concepts like restitution, retaliation and punishment for false accusations were streamlined.
Freedom from the necessity of foraging for food also allowed early agricultural societies to engage in other pursuits with less tangible rewards. Chief among these is science. The Babylonians are believed to be the first civilization to document time. They created minutes and seconds, and produced a calendar. This breakthrough provided the foundation for astronomy and math [Britannica].
But Mesopotamian civilization is also credited with negative innovations, like expansionism, empires, slavery and war. In 2300 B.C., the independent cities of Sumer were brought together under a single ruler. The capitol city, Ur, was invaded and leveled by another Mesopotamian group, the Elamites, just a few hundred years later. And epidemics and plagues were now viable, since, with so many people living together in a small area, they could be transmitted easily from person to person. Prior to cities and agriculture, epidemics couldn’t take hold among the hunter-gatherer bands that lived spread out and far apart.
 Hulton Archive/Getty Images Civilization also spawned war, as is depicted in this 7th-century B.C. carving of an Assyrian invasion. |
Gonur-depe, a vast city of about 1,000 square miles located in present-day Turkmenistan, has re-emerged from a forgotten past. These people farmed, built irrigation canals and palaces, and are believed to have traded with people as far away as Egypt [source: Eurasianet].
Catal Huyuk in southern Turkey is another city that some archaeologists think may have been the true origin of civilization. This city was home to about 10,000 people who raised livestock and farmed here about 7000 B.C. They also built shrines for worship and created art [source: Stockton]. But there is no evidence of a hierarchy or a social stratification, which, unfortunately, is necessary for a civilization to exist.
If simply living in a city is the only criterion for civilization, then other groups may have the Mesopotamians beaten. But there's more to civilization than building cities, and until more evidence comes to light, Sumer, Assyria, Babylon and the other cities of Mesopotamia will stand as the groups who gave birth to civilized life.
It's difficult to say whether civilization would have developed without the work of the Mesopotamians and prior groups. Do we as humans have a natural urge to live together in large groups? It's interesting to note that people seemed to have experienced the same impulse to band together in cities around the same time in different places. But what do we make of the fact that for the first several million years of human existence, people lived together only in small wandering bands? Is civilization a natural process of human evolution? If so, what's our next step?
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