Overview of Ancient Mesopotamia

I want to do now is start thinking about ancient civilizations, and we're going to start with Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia, the word, is literally referring to the fact that this region is, for the most part, between two rivers. You have the Tigris River and the Euphrates River.

When we talk about ancient Mesopotamia, most people are referring to the period between around 3,000 BCE or maybe even going a little bit before that, so 3,000 before the Common Era and then going up to about the time of Christ or a little bit before that. So we might go to a 1,000 BCE or maybe a little bit later, maybe around 500 BCE.

What I've done here is we clearly have a map of the region. I also have timelines for different geographies. So this timeline that I have right here in blue, this is my timeline for Mesopotamia—Mesopotamia right over here. You can see that I have different colors along this timeline. You can also see what other civilizations were around at the same time in history.

This is not a comprehensive list here. So what we have in this yellow, this is ancient Egypt. You could see them sprouting out around the Nile. It's no coincidence that these are around rivers. The rivers flood and provide fertile ground where you can have agriculture, where you can support population centers.

So it's no coincidence that you have a civilization around the Nile; you have a civilization in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This is the Egyptians right over here, this is ancient Mesopotamia right over here. I have the Indus Valley civilization, and then we have China. Once again, not comprehensive. We have other civilizations going on, but these are ones that you will often hear being spoken about.

Now in Mesopotamia, especially when we're talking about ancient Mesopotamia, you will hear about different groups and different languages. You'll hear about the Sumerians. Oftentimes, they are most famous today for their uniform writing. We'll do a whole—probably a whole series of videos—as it's one of the original ways of symbolic writing that the Sumerians developed.

You might also hear about the Akkadians. The Akkadians were both Akkadian; it could be referring to an actual Empire or it could be referring to the Akkadian language. Same thing about Sumerian. You might hear about the Assyrians. You might hear about the Babylonians—Babylonians.

All of these groups are associated with Mesopotamia. The Sumerians lived generally in this area right around here. In a future video, we might talk about Abraham from the Old Testament, who is from Ur, which is a Sumerian city. Sumerian is also a language, and it's a language that's not related to the languages that we now associate with the region or the languages that were spoken by the Akkadians.

So if we're talking about languages that are similar to modern spoken languages, Akkadian was a Semitic language. Let me write that down. It was Semitic. So Akkadian is related to Arabic and Hebrew. If we think about more ancient times, Aramaic. So all of these things were related, and the Assyrians and Babylonians, they were Akkadian or they spoke the Akkadian language.

Or if we go later on, they spoke Aramaic, but they were in constant contact with the Sumerians. They even have Akkadian being written in a uniform type of script. The general geographies were that these different civilizations, these different empires, sprung up from.

You have Nineveh right over here; that is the historical capital of the Assyrian Empire. On my little line here—and this isn't exact, and we're learning more and more about this time period all of the time—you have to realize this: we're talking about, you know, 3,000 BCE; that's over five thousand years ago.

So we're still trying to put all the puzzle pieces together, but we believe around 3,000 BCE, there was a somewhat unified Akkadian Empire. Then it started to break up and split up at some points. You had the Assyrians, you had the Assyrians more or less in control of the region. At other points, you had the Babylonians with the capital at Babylon.

We will talk about famous Babylonian kings like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar. Actually, Babylon gets referred to a lot more, but for most of this time period, we're talking about the Assyrians were actually the dominant Empire with their capital at Nineveh.

You see that here, where Abraham is from. That was more often part of these other empires. This is just a start to get us acquainted with this region of the world—with Mesopotamia. As we go off into the next few videos, we'll continue to dig deeper.

We'll talk a little bit about—we'll talk more about the uniform writing; we'll talk more about Hammurabi and his famous code of laws that seems to have influenced the Old Testament. We'll talk more about Nebuchadnezzar and his role—and he actually has a role in the Old Testament as well—and the interactions between these different civilizations. It gets quite interesting.