Mesopotamia

Sometime around 5000 BCE, groups of farmers began settling the flat, sun-scorched plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now modern Iraq. The land was brutally hot, prone to unpredictable flooding, and almost entirely without stone, timber, or metal. By any reasonable measure, a terrible place to build a civilization.

And yet this is exactly where what we call "civilization" began. The term is worth pausing over. When historians use "civilization," they typically mean a state-level society with cities, writing, and social stratification. But the word carries an implicit value judgment: calling some societies "civilizations" and others not can suggest that non-state peoples were somehow less accomplished. They were not. "Civilization" in this course means complex, state-level society, a description, not a ranking.

The Greek word Mesopotamia literally means "between the rivers," and those two rivers, the Tigris to the east and the Euphrates to the west, made everything possible. When they flooded, they deposited rich, fertile silt across the floodplain. The soil was extraordinary. The challenge was controlling the water: too much and your fields drowned, too little and your crops died.