The Sumerians were the first known people to settle in Mesopotamia over 7,000 years ago. Located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (modern day Iraq), Sumer was often called the cradle of civilization. By the 4th millennium BC, it had established an advanced system writing, spectacular arts and architecture, astronomy, and mathematics. The Akkadians would follow the Sumerians, borrowing from their culture, producing a new language of their own, and creating the world’s first empire.
Who Were the Sumerians? The origin of the Sumerians remains a mystery till this day. They called themselves Saggiga (the "black-headed" or "bald-headed ones") and their country, Kengi ("civilized land"). Some believe they came from around Anatolia or modern day Turkey. Others suggest they might have come from India and were Caucasian in origin. They were established in southern Babylonia, in what is now Iraq, by at least 3500 BC.Located in what the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia, meaning "the land between the rivers;" the rivers being the Tigris and Euphrates. Sumer was a collection of city-states or cities that were also independent nations, some of which endured for 3,000 years. Beginning around 3500 BC, the Sumerians began to build walled cities, including Ur, the capital of the civilization. Each of these cities contained public buildings, markets, workshops, and advanced water systems, and were surrounded by villages and land for agriculture. Political power originally belonged to the citizens, but as rivalry between the various city-states increased, each adopted the institution of kingship. The Sumerian Temple and Key Inventions Each city-state was believed to be under the rule of a local god or goddess and their temples dominated the towns architecture. The most famous temple, the Ziggurat of Ur was a three-storied, 15m (49 ft) high building constructed from mud bricks in the form of pyramidal graduated terraces. It formed a complex of temples and included the royal palace. On top of the structure was a shrine dedicated to the god of that city. The nature of the famous Ziggurat of Ur has been described in a previous Ancient Origins article: “The Great Ziggurat of Ur was dedicated to the moon god Nanna, who was the patron deity of the city. As the Mesopotamian gods were commonly linked to the eastern mountains, the ziggurat may have functioned as a representation of their homes. Thus, the people of Ur believed that their ziggurat was the place on earth where Nanna chose to dwell […] The people of ancient Mesopotamia believed that their gods had needs just like their mortal subjects. Hence, a bedchamber was provided for Nanna in the shrine on top of his ziggurat. This chamber was occupied by a maiden chosen to be the god’s companion. On the side stairway of the ziggurat’s north western part is a kitchen, which was likely used to prepare food for this god. The god’s mortal servants had to be provided for as well, and the outer enclosure of the ziggurat contained a temple storehouse, the houses of the priests and a royal ceremonial palace.” The Sumerians were among the first known cultures to develop many benchmarks that are used to define a "civilization”. They are credited with the establishing codes of law, the plow, the sailboat, and a lunar calendar. They also developed a numerical system, based on the number 60 that is still used to measure seconds and minutes. However, probably the most famous legacy is their writing system. The Sumerians devised one of the earliest writing system known as cuneiform or wedge-shaped symbols. The earliest known cuneiform inscriptions were found in the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley in what is now southeastern Iraq and date from about 3,000 BC. Writers made the symbols by pressing a pointed instrument called a stylus into wet clay tablets . The tablets were then dried in the sun to preserve the text. Hundreds of thousands of these tablets have survived, providing a window into Sumerian culture, economy, law, literature, politics, and religion. Their writing system would influence the style of scripts in the region for the next 3,000 years. While the cuneiform writing system was created and used at first only by the Sumerians , it didn’t take long before neighboring groups adopted it for their own use. By 2,500 BC, the Akkadians, a Semitic-speaking people that dwelled north of the Sumerians, starting using cuneiform to write their own language. However, it was the ascendency of the Akkadian dynasty in around 2,300 BC that positioned Akkadian over Sumerian as the primary language of Mesopotamia. While Sumerian did experience a short revival, it eventually became a dead language used only in literary contexts. Akkadian would continue to be spoken for the next two millennium and evolved into later forms known as Babylonian and Assyrian. Where is Akkad? The Sumerians may have been one of the first known civilizations, but it was the Akkadians that formed one of the first known empires. A Semitic group, they moved into southern Mesopotamia during the early part of the third millennium and gained political control of the area. The civilization was founded by Sargon the Great , and was a collection of city states under the control of Sargon’s city, Akkad. Sargon reigned from approximately 2334-2279 BC and conquered all of southern Mesopotamia as well as parts of Syria, Anatolia, and Elam (now western Iran) establishing the region's first Semitic dynasty. Sargon is known almost entirely from the legends that followed his reputation through 2,000 years of Mesopotamian history, but not from documents written during his lifetime. This lack of contemporary record is explained by the fact that the capital city of Akkad, which he commissioned, has never been located and excavated. It was destroyed at the end of the dynasty that Sargon founded and was never inhabited again, at least under the name of Akkad. The Curse of Akkad “The Curse of Akkad ” was written within a century of the empire’s fall and attributes Akkad’s downfall to an outrage against the gods after the temple of Enlil was plundered: "For the first time since cities were built and founded, The great agricultural tracts produced no grain, The inundated tracts produced no fish, The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine, The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum did not grow. At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only one-half quart, One shekel’s worth of grain was only one-half quart. . . . These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities! He who slept on the roof, died on the roof, He who slept in the house, had no burial, People were flailing at themselves from hunger." The Rise and Fall of a Mesopotamian Empire In 2350 BC, Sargon conquered all the Sumerian city-states, uniting them under his rule, creating the first Mesopotamian Empire. He defeated the armies of Sumer in two battles and captured Lugalzagesi, the Sumerian king who had united (or conquered) all of Sumer and earned the title of “King of Kish”. For the next two centuries the Akkadians would rule Sumer, during which time the cities carried out many revolts against them. Around 2,100 BC, as Akkad declined, the city of Ur took its place rising to prominence a century after its fall, and the city-states once again became independent.
The Akkadian empire collapsed sometime after 2,200 BC. Historians blame its downfall on tribes of mountain people called Gutians who conquered many parts of Sumer, or possibly point at administrative incompetence, a poor harvest, provincial revolt, or perhaps even a giant meteor. Climate change has of course been thrown into the mix as well and evidence of a long drought, and changing winds and ocean currents have been provided to support that idea. In a 2019 study , fossil coral records from Oman were given as new evidence that frequent winter shamals, or dust storms, and a prolonged cold winter season also contributed to the collapse of the ancient empire . Assyria and Babylon would grow to dominate the area afterwards. From 2112 to 2004 BC, a dynasty based at the city of Ur revived Sumerian culture to its greatest height, even though the Sumerian language had begun to fall out of use. By 2,000 BC, it was no longer being used and was replaced as a spoken language by Semitic Akkadian. Although Sargon’s dynasty only lasted around 150 years, it created a model of government that influenced all of Middle Eastern civilization and left a permanent imprint on Mesopotamian civilization for the millennia that followed.
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At the center, the tumultuous life of Seneca, ancient Rome’s preeminent writer and philosopher, beginning with banishment in his fifties and subsequent appointment as tutor to twelve-year-old Nero, future emperor of Rome. Controlling them both, Nero’s mother, Julia Agrippina the Younger, Roman empress, great-granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus, sister of the Emperor Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Emperor Claudius.
James Romm seamlessly weaves together the life and written words, the moral struggles, political intrigue, and bloody vengeance that enmeshed Seneca the Younger in the twisted imperial family and the perverse, paranoid regime of Emperor Nero, despot and madman. Romm writes that Seneca watched over Nero as teacher, moral guide, and surrogate father, and, at seventeen, when Nero abruptly ascended to become emperor of Rome, Seneca, a man never avid for political power became, with Nero, the ruler of the Roman Empire. We see how Seneca was able to control his young student, how, under Seneca’s influence, Nero ruled with intelligence and moderation, banned capital punishment, reduced taxes, gave slaves the right to file complaints against their owners, pardoned prisoners arrested for sedition. But with time, as Nero grew vain and disillusioned, Seneca was unable to hold sway over the emperor, and between Nero’s mother, Agrippina—thought to have poisoned her second husband, and her third, who was her uncle (Claudius), and rumored to have entered into an incestuous relationship with her son—and Nero’s father, described by Suetonius as a murderer and cheat charged with treason, adultery, and incest, how long could the young Nero have been contained? Dying Every Day is a portrait of Seneca’s moral struggle in the midst of madness and excess. In his treatises, Seneca preached a rigorous ethical creed, exalting heroes who defied danger to do what was right or embrace a noble death. As Nero’s adviser, Seneca was presented with a more complex set of choices, as the only man capable of summoning the better aspect of Nero’s nature, yet, remaining at Nero’s side and colluding in the evil regime he created. Dying Every Day is the first book to tell the compelling and nightmarish story of the philosopher-poet who was almost a king, tied to a tyrant—as Seneca, the paragon of reason, watched his student spiral into madness and whose descent saw five family murders, the Fire of Rome, and a savage purge that destroyed the supreme minds of the Senate’s golden age.
The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world’s surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire? And how did they lose it all?
This is the intimate story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance, with a global cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries and poets, from Ivan the Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin, to Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria and Lenin. To rule Russia was both imperial-sacred mission and poisoned chalice: six of the last twelve tsars were murdered. Peter the Great tortured his own son to death while making Russia an empire, and dominated his court with a dining club notable for compulsory drunkenness, naked dwarfs and fancy dress. Catherine the Great overthrew her own husband (who was murdered soon afterward), enjoyed affairs with a series of young male favorites, conquered Ukraine and fascinated Europe. Paul I was strangled by courtiers backed by his own son, Alexander I, who in turn faced Napoleon’s invasion and the burning of Moscow, then went on to take Paris. Alexander II liberated the serfs, survived five assassination attempts and wrote perhaps the most explicit love letters ever composed by a ruler. The Romanovs climaxes with a fresh, unforgettable portrayal of Nicholas II and Alexandra, the rise and murder of Rasputin, war and revolution—and the harrowing massacre of the entire family. Dazzlingly entertaining and beautifully written from start to finish, The Romanovs brings these monarchs—male and female, great and flawed, their families and courts—blazingly to life. Drawing on new archival research, Montefiore delivers an enthralling epic of triumph and tragedy, love and murder, encompassing the seminal years 1812, 1914 and 1917, that is both a universal study of power and a portrait of empire that helps define Russia today.
When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict -- much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events.
As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month after the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand's murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in Europe. The primary culprits, moreover, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war's outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on surprising new evidence from archives across Europe to show that the worst offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that war was inevitable. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involved -- from Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincaré- sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of Europe's countdown to war from the bloody opening act on June 28th to Britain's final plunge on August 4th, showing how a single month -- and a handful of men -- changed the course of the twentieth century.
In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. But the Sea Peoples alone could not have caused such widespread breakdown. How did it happen?
In this major new account of the causes of this "First Dark Ages," Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, and the cutting of international trade routes. Bringing to life the vibrant multicultural world of these great civilizations, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires and globalized peoples of the Late Bronze Age and shows that it was their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse and ushered in a dark age that lasted centuries. A compelling combination of narrative and the latest scholarship, 1177 B.C. sheds new light on the complex ties that gave rise to, and ultimately destroyed, the flourishing civilizations of the Late Bronze Age—and that set the stage for the emergence of classical Greece. The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France and the Creation of Europe in the 10th Century12/13/2020
The tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne's empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. To many historians, it was a prime example of the ignorance and uncertainty of the Dark Ages. Yet, according to historian Paul Collins, the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture's birth, of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day.
The Birth of the West tells the story of a transformation from chaos to order, exploring the alien landscape of Europe in transition. It is a fascinating narrative that thoroughly renovates older conceptions of feudalism and what Medieval life was actually like. The result is a wholly new vision of how civilization sprang from the unlikeliest of origins, and proof that our tenth-century ancestors are not as remote as we might think.
n this real-life historical treasure hunt, the bestselling author Graham Robb―"one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet (New York Times)"―reveals the mapping of ancient Gaul as a reflection of the heavens, demonstrates the lasting influence of Druid science and recharts the exploration of the world and the spread of Christianity. This "fascinating" (Los Angeles Times) history offers nothing less than an entirely new understanding of the birth of modern Europe.
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present10/29/2020
Image: Scythian dress ornaments
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, by Christopher I. Beckwith The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization. Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans's migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization. |
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