Civilizations of Ancient Iraq

Benjamin R. Foster, Karen Polinger Foster

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400832873
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

In Civilizations of Ancient Iraq, Benjamin and Karen Foster tell the fascinating story of ancient Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements ten thousand years ago to the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Accessible and concise, this is the most up-to-date and authoritative book on the subject. With illustrations of important works of art and architecture in every chapter, the narrative traces the rise and fall of successive civilizations and peoples in Iraq over the course of millennia--from the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians to the Persians, Seleucids, Parthians, and Sassanians. Ancient Iraq was home to remarkable achievements. One of the birthplaces of civilization, it saw the world's earliest cities and empires, writing and literature, science and mathematics, monumental art, and innumerable other innovations. Civilizations of Ancient Iraq gives special attention to these milestones, as well as to political, social, and economic history. And because archaeology is the source of almost everything we know about ancient Iraq, the book includes an epilogue on the discovery and fate of its antiquities. Compelling and timely, Civilizations of Ancient Iraq is an essential guide to understanding Mesopotamia's central role in the development of human culture.

1. IN THE BEGINNING

Marduk created wild animals, the living

creatures of the open country.

He created and put in place Tigris and

Euphrates rivers,

He pronounced their names with favor.

Marduk, Creator of the World

Of Tigris and Euphrates

Ancient Iraq is the gift of two rivers. The Euphrates rises on the Anatolian plateau in Turkey, flows southwest into Syria and then turns southeast across Iraq, emptying into the Gulf. Its broad, shallow channel makes it an ideal source for irrigation water, and in many stretches the Euphrates is easily navigable. As the river moves across the southern alluvial plains and approaches the Gulf, it merges with the Tigris, amidst a network of smaller rivers, lakes, and marshes. To a Babylonian poet, the Euphrates seemed a mighty canal, divinely made:

O River, creator of all things,

When the great gods dug your bed,

They set well-being along your banks.¹

The Tigris, though it too rises on the Anatolian plateau, passes through more rugged terrain, at one point disappearing into a natural tunnel. A Sumerian poet mythologized the volcanic origin of the Tigris headlands as an epic battle between a hero-god and a personified, erupting volcano that “gashed the earth’s body . . . bathed the sky in blood . . . and till today black cinders are in the fields.”² Both rivers flood when the snows melt in the highlands, but the Tigris often does so in violent, destructive onslaughts of water, swelled by its three main tributaries—the Upper and Lower Zab and the Diyala—pouring down from deep gorges in the Zagros Mountains. By contrast, the two principal tributaries of the Euphrates—the Khabur and Balikh, which join it in northeastern Syria—enclose a swath of fine agricultural land known as the Jezira, whose productivity is augmented by sufficient annual rainfall for crops.

Map 1. (left) From Rome to the Indus (after Collon 1995)

Map 2. (above) Ancient Iraq (after Lloyd 1978)

The rivers of Iraq have determined its history in three crucial ways. The Euphrates was an important route of communication with Syria, central Turkey, and the Mediterranean; the Tigris and its tributaries afforded links with eastern Turkey and the Iranian plateau. Above all, both rivers made possible human life on the plains, annually renewing the soil with flood-borne silts and bringing the water that farmers needed to till their fields and herdsmen to sustain their flocks.³

During the Pliocene and early Pleistocene epochs, the earth’s great tectonic plates began shaping the main geographical features of Iraq. As the Arabian and African plates moved slowly northward, they encountered the more intransigent Iranian and Turkish plates and were forced to grind beneath them, resulting in the uplift of the Zagros on Iraq’s eastern border and the Anatolian ranges and plateau on its northern border. Where the Arabian plate thrust under the Iranian plate, subduction pressures also formed the trough of the Gulf and the alluvial plains of Iraq’s river systems. Ongoing tectonic activity accounts for the Middle East’s frequent earthquakes and numerous volcanoes.

Over the eons, Iraq’s major hydrological and environmental changes have been brought about primarily by worldwide cooling and warming trends, which have caused the waters of the Gulf to fall and rise, respectively. At the height of the last Ice Age, the Gulf was a plain through which the ancestral Tigris and Euphrates meandered. As the glaciers melted, the Gulf reached approximately its current level, with temperature fluctuations over the millennia causing repeated advances and retreats of the coastline. Studies of pollen preserved in the sediments of ancient lakes have shed considerable light on the region’s climate and vegetation, from the last glaciation to early historical times. Millennia of dry cold seem to have given way to a warmer, moister period about ten thousand years ago, which in turn ended in renewed desiccation, producing the desert and steppe we recognize as salient features of Iraq’s present landscape. Grazing, agriculture, and the deforestation of the Zagros woodlands have affected the region’s ecosystems as well.⁴

Today, as in historical antiquity, forbidding deserts stretch to the west of the plains of Iraq for hundreds of kilometers. To the east and north, the foothills ascend swiftly to mountains with peaks “sharp-tipped as a spear point,” as an Assyrian writer put it.⁵ To the south is the Gulf. Small wonder, then, that the people of ancient Iraq thought that the alluvial plains were the center of the inhabited world, ringed by deserts, mountains, and seas. For them, all that lay beyond was foreign and strange, the source of exotic materials and strange beasts, the abode of brutish folk. The farthest reaches the plains dwellers knew were the “Upper and Lower Seas,” the Mediterranean and the Gulf.⁶

No one knows what the earliest names for the region signify. Kengir or Sumer (biblical Shinar) referred to the southern half of the alluvial plains, while the northern half was called Wari, later Akkad. After about 1700 B.C.E., Sumer and Akkad together constituted what came to be known as Babylonia. A thousand years later, the southern marshes were called the Sealand, later Chaldea. The region north of Baghdad, along the Tigris, was known as Assyria. The word Subir was sometimes used to refer to northern Mesopotamia as a whole.⁷

The modern name Iraq was first regularly used after the Muslim conquest of 637. Though it appears to be an Arabic word, its meaning and etymology are obscure. The various proposals by medieval Arab geographers show only that they were making them up. One of the most widely accepted explanations is that it means “arable land along a major river,” vaguely corresponding to English “alluvium,” but this may have been reasoned backwards from the reality of Iraq itself.⁸

The ancient Greek term Mesopotamia, now generally understood to mean “Land Between Rivers,” has also been used to refer to Iraq, especially by European scholars and twentieth-century colonial administrators. Mesopotamia originally denoted the land enclosed by the big bend of the Middle Euphrates River, east of modern Aleppo in Syria, but it soon came to mean the expanse of plains and uplands between the Tigris and Euphrates, from the Gulf to the Anatolian plateau.⁹ Many writers today use the term Mesopotamia when discussing the region before the Muslim conquest, and Iraq thereafter. Although this may be a convenient historical distinction, others prefer not to separate the pre-Islamic and Islamic past of Iraq. In this book, we use Mesopotamia and Iraq interchangeably.

To visitors from parts of the earth with more temperate climates and more varied scenery, the hot, featureless plains of southern Iraq may seem a place inhospitable to the development of civilization. Nor are there splendid ruins to admire or reflect on, such as might evoke a glorious past. In fact, the only hints on the landscape attesting to the remote antiquity of human habitation are mounds covered with potsherds, broken bricks, and other debris, sometimes lying amongst faint outlines of walls and dwellings, all that remain of once bustling cities and towns, home to a vibrant and long-lived literate culture. This early Victorian traveler’s experience still rings true:

He has left the land where nature is still lovely, where, in his mind’s eye, he can rebuild the temple or the theatre. . . . He is now at a loss to give any form to the rude heaps upon which he is gazing. . . . The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating; desolation meets desolation; a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder; for there is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone by.¹⁰

The ancient visitor would have had a very different view, largely because the Tigris and Euphrates, like other restless waterways, are prone to carving out new courses, sometimes shifting their riverbeds by many kilometers. Today in southern Iraq, the Euphrates flows far to the east of its course in historical antiquity, so that what were once riverside or canalside cities, towns, and villages became the “rude heaps” of remote deserts. As a result, many of the important ancient cities in southern Iraq were left unmolested and uninhabited for thousands of years. Unhampered by modern development, archaeologists have been able to investigate these sites in depth, recovering most of what we know about the history and culture of ancient Iraq. In more recent times, these isolated fields of ruins have fallen easy prey to large-scale looting and destruction. Much of their vast and rich historical record is now lost forever. In the north, where the river channels are more stable, ancient settlements and cities often underlie modern ones, making them more difficult to excavate, but less vulnerable to looters. We return to these matters in the Epilogue.

Still, one may well ask, why was civilization born on these alluvial plains, so far in advance of all other places in the world? There are at once many answers and no answer to this simple question. Intensive archaeological research in Iraq and in neighboring lands has given us numerous responses, and we may draw these proposals and theories together into a narrative that seems reasonable and convincing in its outline, even if specifics remain frustratingly elusive. At the same time, there is no answer, for we often describe events and changes without really knowing how or why they came about, and refer to people about whom we know very little. New discoveries and reinterpretations of old ones give us fascinating evidence to work into the story, but ultimately leave the reader wishing to know more than we can say at present.

The First Villages

Of the many ways to describe human beings of former times and how they lived, one long popular has been with reference to their technology. We may speak of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic), implying that people mostly used stone tools, or the Bronze Age, when people mostly used bronze weapons. Or we may focus on religious belief, referring to pagan, Christian, or pre-Islamic societies. In older books, one wrote of races: Oriental and Occidental peoples, the “great white race,” the Indo-Europeans, the Semites. Since the 1960s, anthropologists and archaeologists have used a more inclusive system referring to modes of subsistence, that is, by what means people obtained the food they needed to survive.¹¹

For almost its entire history, the human race subsisted by hunting game and gathering naturally occurring plants. This mode was so successful and so undemanding as a way of life that it ensured human survival for hundreds of thousands of years. To judge from present-day hunting cultures, hunters need exercise their skill only two or three days out of seven to provide sufficient meat for their community. They kill and collect only what they need to live, and do not reduce their resources for sport or entertainment. Hunter-gatherer populations, moreover, tend to remain fairly stable. They usually have small families; their children, especially girls, mature late; and some groups even abandon infants to control population.¹²

About ten thousand years ago, peoples in the Middle East evolved a radically different subsistence pattern based on agriculture and the management of domesticated animals. Some historians refer to this momentous development as a revolution, thereby implying sweeping change.¹³ But the change was abrupt only in comparison with the manner in which people had interacted with the natural world for all the preceding millennia. We see the transition vividly in Iraq and also, at about the same time, in Iran, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Palestine.¹⁴ How and why did it occur, and what did it mean for the human race?

Archaeological work in the foothills of the Zagros has shown that people began settling in small villages in areas where certain wild grains, such as...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. In the Beginning
• 2. The Birthplace of Civilization
• 3. Early City-States
• 4. Kings of the Four Quarters of the World
• 5. The Age of Hammurabi
• 6. Babylonia in the Family of Nations
• 7. The Assyrian Achievement
• 8. The Glory of Babylon
• 9. Mesopotamia between Two Worlds
• 10. Sassanian Iraq
• Epilogue Discovery and Destruction of Ancient Iraq
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index