Historical Context

Mesopotamia, the region occupied today by Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of present-day Iran, Syria and Turkey, experienced a revolution in human civilization starting around 5,500 years ago. Already the site of some of the earliest developments of the agricultural revolution and the first domestication of cereal crops, it was here that a new material was developed which leant its name to an entire Age of humanity: Bronze.  A few hundred years later came the the development of writing and the dawn of history.  The world changed.  It was now possible to encode a message and have that message heard by people in distant lands, or by subsequent generations.  Knowledge no longer needed to be handed down orally, no longer needed to be memorized.  Ideas, previously only expressed through spoken language, were now given concrete form.

To understand the impact this had on humanity, consider the following timeline:  Around 300,000 years ago, the earliest members of the species Homo Sapiens appeared in Africa.  Around 130,000 B.C.E., after 170,000 years had passed, the first humans migrations out of Africa occurred.  They later repeated the trick after another 30,000 years had passed.  In this second wave, starting 70,000 years ago, humans made their way down the coasts of Asia, with some eventually arriving in Australia after a journey of about 5,000 years.

It wasn’t until about 260,000 years after the appearance of  first anatomically modern humans that the peoples of the Earth began the widespread exhibition of what anthropologists call “behavioral modernity.”  One of those behaviors was the development of figurative art, with the earliest undisputed examples being dated to around 40,000 B.C.E., as you’ll recall from the last chapter. These dates are approximate, of course.  We’re dealing with such a long stretch of time that “give or take a few thousand years” becomes a reasonable margin of error.

It wasn’t until the after end of the end of the Ice Age, around 10,000B.C.E., that people began to plant crops and established permanent settlements.  After another 7,000 years, people finally developed writing.  So, it took around 260,000 years to make figurative art.  Around 288,000 years to plant crops and build permanent homes, and 295,000 years to develop writing. Five or six hundred years *after* writing, workers were putting the finishing touches on the Great Pyramid of Giza.

And around five thousand years later, people were walking on the moon.

If you were to imagine all of the time that has passed since the very first anatomically modern humans as  a single calendar year, writing would appear some time on December 25. Happy holidays, humanity.

Writing meant the development of written literature, some of which, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem written as early as 2,100 B.C.E., contained elements elements later absorbed into subsequent religious traditions which today count billions of people as adherents.  These include the building of a boat to survive a coming great flood, and the idea that humans were born into a idyllic garden, which they left after succumbing to temptation. The ability to record culture meant that literary, philosophical, religious and legal traditions could be established.  Which meant it was now possible for people to have a stronger sense of shared cultural identity, a necessary precursor to the kingdoms and empires that followed.

Writing meant the birth of academic disciplines. It was now possible to pass on much more detailed, precise and extensive bodies knowledge.  Very quickly, the people of Ancient Mesopotamia undertook the development of astronomy and mathematics as fields of study. Simple addition and subtraction rapidly developed into a discipline which scholars learned through advanced study. That system of advanced study was, of course, also an important innovation. Ancient Mesopotamia saw the development of geometry, fractions, early algebraic concepts, early quadratic equations. Examinations of Babylonian mathematical texts have revealed that they beat Pythagoras to his theorem by by over a millennia.

The innovations in mathematics that occurred in Mesopotamia were so important that we still feel their influence every day, even if we do not know it.  If you’ve ever wondered why there are 60 minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute, or why a circle is divided into 360 degrees, the answer lies in the Babylonian sexagesimal number system.  While we use a base-10 system, the Babylonians used a base-60 system, and every time we’re late for work, or change our mind and do a 180 on something, we’re counting by using a number system developed by the Sumerians around 3,000 B.C.E., passed on to the Babylonians a thousand years later, and still use after 5,000 years.

It probably worked out for the best, this way. Since 60 is what is known as a highly composite number, with twelve factors, an hour can be easily divided by 30 minutes, or 15 minutes, or five minutes.  Ten, meanwhile, can only be divided by 1, 2 and 5, so if we used a base-10 clock you would find yourself telling people that you were running late, your alarm didn’t go off, but you’d be there soon, around 20% after the hour.

This era saw the construction of the earliest stone megastructures, the ziggurats, the writing of the earliest known codes of law, the establishment the first major urban cities with highly specific divisions of labor.  It saw the development  the invention of the chariot, the development of general education, followed by specialized education for professions such as the law or medicine. It saw the establishment of the world’s first library. They also found the time to develop the earliest known philosophical theories of planetary motion. They also developed, much to the annoyance of many, many generation of children, math homework. 

And, of course, Ancient Mesopotamia saw a revolution in art. Sculpture, painting, jewelry making, stone relief carving, and architecture reached new levels of sophistication and specialization. There was the development of stringed instruments, musical theory and sheet music. (Click here to listen to the oldest known piece of sheet music played, the Hurian Hymn, written in 1,400 B.C.E.) There was the the development of early narrative art. This furious era of innovation and change was aided by the way in which the region functioned a crossroads of trade and culture that connected Egypt, modern-day Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Indus Valley civilization.  Trade, ideas, art, people and gold travelled through Mesopotamia on their way to distant lands. Small agricultural villages became cities, which became city states. Finally, from that cluster of city states spread along the Tigris and Euphrates,  Mesopotamia saw the birth of empires, and the birth of organized, large-scale warfare.

When the age of the ancient Mesopotamian empires finally came to an end with the fall of Babylon to the Persian Empire, in the 7th century B.C.E., the world was very different from how it was in 3,200 B.C.E. when the Sumerians started pressing reeds into clay tablets to fix ideas in place place,  to enable those ideas to be sent to distant places, and to have those ideas suddenly live again in the mind of the person who read them. And while that may seem intuitive, that humans would experience dramatic changes over the course of 2,400 years, it was in reality unprecedented.

The first 290,000 or so years (give or take a few millennia) after the emergence of early modern humans passed at a more leisurely pace than we’re used to now.  Migrations happened over tens of thousands of years. In the beginning of that period, humans were using flake stone tools.  At the end of it,  they were using (more sophisticated) stone flake tools. A timespan corresponding to the rise and fall of 150 Roman Empires passed before the agricultural revolution saw people begin to transition away from being hunter gatherers to being farmers and building permanent settlements.  And then another 7,000 years passed until the development of writing and the dawn of history. To put that in perspective, more time passed between the establishment of the earliest permanent settlements and the development writing than has passed *since* the development of writing, than has lead to you reading this on a screen.

Compared to the years that came before, the rapidity of change seen during the next 2,400 years was breathtaking.

It should be noted that many of the innovations and developments mentioned above did not happen solely in ancient Mesopotamia.  Often, they occurred contemporaneously with but separately from similar innovations elsewhere, such as writing in Egypt or astronomy in the Indus Valley. Other innovations appeared elsewhere first, such as the construction of a Nubian astronomical megalith built as many as 2,000 years before its more-famous cousin, Stonehenge.  Elsewhere, Chinese scholars developed sophisticated mathematics on their own around 1,600 B.C.E. Mayan astronomers calculated the length of a year more accurately than the figure used by Europeans more a thousand years later, when the latter arrived in the Americas in the form of a Spanish invasion. What makes this era so important is that none of those cradles of civilization were as highly connected to the rest of the world as was ancient Mesopotamia. The trade, ideas, art and people that passed between early civilizations through the region meant that Mesopotamia was, for a time, arguably the center of the world.  And, thanks to these same connections, the cultural and scientific innovations developed there spread far and wide, all the way to the present day.

And, with that, let’s delve into our exploration of Mesopotamian art.