this emily, namely zilch, studies linguistics. i rarely speak on the subject, but today i had a hankerin' to splain to all you em'lys and henrys what are unfamiliar with the history of mesopotamia about its ancient history.
first, the early cultures from that area are known from archaeological remains. the habitation of the middle east dates back, naturally, to the most ancient of times. homo sapiens neandertalensis bones have been found in these regions back in the 30k range - coterminal with homo sapiens sapiens.
but today we are talking about the periods when people wrote. the sumerians and the speakers of east semitic were the earliest writers; while sumerian has no known relatives (it's what we call a "linguistic isolate"), east semitic is a member of the giant afrasian (or "afro-asiatic") language family, which has some 370 living languages in it. east semitic died out about 300 ce ("common era", i.e. = anno domini), but its most familiar nieces are the arabic languages, hebrew-aramaic-phoenician ("the canaanite dialect continuum"), amharic and other ethiopic languages, ancient egyptian, coptic, sudanese and the south arabian or yemenite languages.
sumerian ceased being a living language in the early bronze age - it remained the language of officialdom for several thousand years but prolly the last native speaker lived before 2500 bce, at which point east semitic eclipsed it.
in the third millennium bce, there were three "urban" east semitic languages:
+ eblaite from modern syria, assyrian from northern iraq & babylonian from southern iraq. there are also written forms for rural east semitic, which is called amurru; the amurri were assimilated by the urban elites and eblaite was a trader's tongue that eventually was eclipsed, leaving two main languages in the late bronze age: assyrian and babylonian, each named for the capital of the country in which each was principally spoken (assur and godsgate [baab-il])
we should start at the beginning of "modern mesopotamia", which is to say the ubaïd culture beginning about 5900 bce. in ancient times, the gulf was larger than it was today - the tigris and euphrates hadn't yet dumped eight thousand years of silt into it so what are now landlocked archaeological sites were once ports. also, river shift over time; some sites are now isolated that once were on the river. one example is the ancient holy site of eridu, in what is now far southern iraq, south of the modern euphrates. the mesopotamians considered it the first city ever built, and perhaps with good reason - it was founded at the beginning of the ubaïd period and remained important for cultural and geographic reasons for a very, very long time.
the ubaïd marked a change to a commercially-oriented culture. it seems the early ubaïd was an innovative time; local populations were organised communally, with all work done in common areas. houses had beds and that's about it; you brought your food to the public kitchen, where you could cook in communal ovens and then eat it there.
this changed. later times show the kind of ancient societies familiar to us from museums: king-priests ruling societies focused on large kin groups.
assyria was most innovative. seeking the crucial tin that enabled bronze-smelting, assyrians traversed the long route to what is now turkey and set up colonies. the locals in turkey were part of the anatolian subfamily of the indo-european language family - english, french, spanish, german, russian, persian and the languages of northern india are members of it. assyrian culture gave great power to women; they had equal legal status to men and effectively ruled the corporation-families that the men represented. this situation somewhat resembled that of historic iroquoian society in that henrys were away from the centers of power for most of the year; emilys therefore had full legal rights and ran things on all levels under that of the bureaucracy.
babylonian society was different; traders plied as far as the far coasts of africa, along modern iran's coastline and even reached what is now north india for spices and such, but many of them were foreigners bringing the goods to babylonia. babylonian emilys had less freedom.
there are words from this ancient time that still remain in our vocabulary. the french word for a ragamuffin, mesquin, is a borrowing through a canaanite language (probably aramaic, important for jews and christians alike) from eblaite muskên-, which means a poor person or someone who has fallen on bad times. the sumerians used a base-12 system rather than the base-10 common to, say, most semitic languages and indo-european ones; their learning gave us the astronomy and the 12 houses of the zodiac (passed also to ancient india and ancient china), twelve months, twelve hours, sixty (12x5) minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute.
iraq means war, arab, islam to so many people. it is important to remember it has a cultural history as rich as egypt's and more important. science was born there. civilization's cradle is there. standard babylonian was maintained as a written standard for the international community of the time for four thousand years - and was supplanted only by another local language, aramaic, which remains spoken to this day. iraq is not just a place to shoot people. it's one of the most historically important places on the earth.
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