Page 4 - Istorie_History_Orientul_Antic_Ancient_East

3. Ancient East

To the cradle of our civilisation

Mesopotamia, cca 6000 B.C. Irak, present
Did you know that where once was the cradle of our civilization, in Mesopotamia,
today is a country called Iraq? It is one of the poorest countries in the world, destroyed
by wars from which people desperately want to leave.

The time machine takes us back 6,000 years in the past to the place where history was born. Where our
ancestors built the first cities, invented the wheel, writing and literature, created the first schools and laid the
foundation for the first human civilization. This is where antiquity began!
Mesopotamia means “țara dintre râuri” ( the land between the rivers).
Here people built the first cities: Ur, Uruk, Sumer (Kish), and later Assur,
Nineveh, Babylon and others. These were city-state (“orașe-state”).

Niniv e
Ninive
Assur
A ssur Do you wonder how that works?
Well, cities - states functioned as small independent
Kiș kingdoms. They were not ruled by a mayor, as today, but by
Kiș
Babilon Uruk a king. He considered himself the son of the deities and his
Babilon
Uruk
Ur
Ur judgments could not be contradicted. Each city-state had
its deities and its own laws.
Mesopotamia

The common people lived in small houses, built of sun-
dried brick and covered with reeds.
In contrast to these, the rich people lived in large houses,
built of stone or burnt and enameled brick. Cities were real
architectural jewels. Stepped
pyramids, called ziggurats
(“zigurate”), had temples at their
top that served as astronomical
observatories. Do not imagine
that they had telescopes or modern observation instruments! They
looked at the sky with the unaided eye and tried to understand the
will of the gods looking at the stars’ position.