In a few months when the spring floods arrive, it will be very different. For now though it is a peaceful scene. Boats laden with trade goods float lazily down the Euphrates River. Beside the river, children play in the shade beneath date palms that wave gently in the breeze. Farmers work in their fields, finishing up the barley harvest and praising the gods for the bounty they provided. Beyond the fields stands a great wall that protects the city from invaders and the floods, and inside the wall is a city unlike any other. Once the largest city in the world. This is the great Mesopotamian City of Babylon.
Religion of Ancient Mesopotamia
Religion was an important part of daily life of ancient cultures going all the way back to the earliest hunter-gatherers. Why are we here? Why do the rivers flow? Where do the animals come from? What is that bright thing in the sky that warms us? Questions such as these led to the beginnings of organized religion. The Ancient Mesopotamians had one of the first organized religions ever, and it dominated daily life for them too.
Stone Age Inventions
The old saying, “necessity is the mother of all invention,” certainly applies to inventions in the Stone Ages. After all, Stone Age people were preoccupied with simply trying to find food, water, shelter, and survive the many dangers they faced from day-to-day. So, all of their inventions were tied to survival. How can we become more efficient hunters? How can we gather wild foods more effectively? How can we stay warm? These questions led to inventions.
Stone Age Farming
The earliest crops that were farmed in the Neolithic or New Stone Age were likely barley, wheat, peas, and flax. This probably took place first in Mesopotamia, India, and Egypt. Farming then also began in China (rice) and North and South America (corn, beans, and tomatoes, potatoes), and central and southern Africa.
Stone Age Clothes
A Stone Age (Paleolithic) woman worked on a mammoth hide to prepare it to be used as clothing or a blanket. After scraping the meat off of the hide, she rubbed the animal’s brains on the hide to “tan” it. Tanning is a process, still used today, by which animal hides are preserved and turned into leather. Tanned hides last much longer than untanned ones. Bone or antler was used to make pins that could hold animal hides together for use as clothing.
What is the Paleolithic Age?
The Paleolithic Age is a time period from prehistory when humans and their ancestors primarily used stone tools. The word Paleolithic comes from the Greek words for old and stone, hence the term Old Stone Age. This period started about 2.5 million years ago and lasted until about 10,000 years ago. For most of human history, we were Paleolithic people.
Economic Geography - a definition
An executive at Amazon.com stared at a computer screen. On the screen was a map of the world with an innumerable
number of dots. Each dot represented an
order by a customer of Amazon. Clicking
on a dot brought up a screen that showed the order, the shipping information,
how much it cost Amazon to acquire and deliver the order, and how much Amazon’s
profit would be when the order was complete.
By clicking on a country, the executive could see the orders in that
particular country. This allowed her to
see what was “hot” in that country and what merchandise needed more promotion there.
Climate of Mesopotamia
One can tell just from looking at a satellite image of
Mesopotamia that it is mostly desert. A
climate map tells us that most of the region is considered arid or semi-arid,
just what we would expect. One way to
look at Mesopotamia’s climate is to examine different factors that affect
climate.
Location of Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is located in Southwest Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In fact, the word Mesopotamia means “land between the rivers.” Much of the region of Mesopotamia is in modern-day Iraq, but it also includes parts of Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, and several other countries. Its location helped shape Mesopotamia’s history.
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