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From Mesopotamia to Iraq

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................vii1 Landscape, Climate, Population......................................................................12 The Beginnings of Sedentary Life (Ca. 10,000–4000 BCE)........................................73 The First Urban Society and the Use of Writing (Ca. 4000–3200 BCE)............................214 City-States and the Way toward the Central State (Ca. 3200–2350 BCE)..........................425 The First Central States (Ca. 2350–1595 BCE)..................................................596 Babylonia as Part of the Near Eastern Community of States (1595–1200 BCE).....................777 The Empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians (1200–539 BCE)...............................908 The Achaemenid Empire (539–331 BCE)...........................................................1079 Alexander and the Seleucids in Babylonia (331–141 BCE)........................................11410 The Empires of the Parthians and the Sasanians (141 BCE to 642 CE).................................12011 The Islamic Conquest (622–1258)..............................................................13412 Iraq as Part of the Ottoman Empire (1258–1918)...............................................14413 Iraq under the Monarchy (1921–1958)..........................................................15114 The Republic of Iraq (1958–2008).............................................................155Chronology, 1600 BCE to 1900 CE.......................................................................165Selected Bibliography.................................................................................171Illustration Credits..................................................................................175Index.................................................................................................177

Chapter One

The name "Mesopotamia" (from the Greek, "between the rivers") was coined by the Romans for the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris, which for some centuries was Rome's easternmost province. Though the area then included part of today's Syria, "Mesopotamia" now is widely used to denote the territory of Iraq within its modern confines. The vast plains formed partly by the alluvial fill of the rift valley separating the African and the Eurasian tectonic sheets characterize the landscape. Mesopotamia includes the western foothills of the huge range of the Zagros Mountains, pushed up by those sheets. The Tigris follows an almost straight course through the original valley, while the Euphrates, having originated in almost the same area as the Tigris, joins this valley only after a wide loop through modern Syria. Ultimately the two rivers flow jointly into the Persian Gulf, the lower part of the valley. For millennia, the sediments carried by the rivers gradually filled the valley, forming a vast alluvial plain. We assume that this process ended about ten thousand years ago, though minor changes may have occurred later.

The filling occurred at irregular intervals: during relatively warm periods, abundant precipitation in the source areas caused the rivers to carry more water and consequently more debris and sediment than during cooler phases. These major or minor changes, however many there were, occurred in times when nonsedentary humans were hardly affected. A shift to a slightly cooler climate in the course of the fourth millennium BCE, however, had a major impact on subsequent development. Around 2000 BCE, the climate seems to have settled down to conditions not much different from what we have now.

One of the more important climatic differences within Iraq is that the northern and eastern parts receive enough rain for plants to flourish, while the western and southern parts never have enough for crop cultivation. To be sure, water may be diverted from the rivers, but wide areas in west are beyond the reach of irrigation schemes. The potential fertility of the region becomes evident when a spring rain transforms steppe and desert into a carpet of flowers.

Climatic changes have shifted the border between cultivable and uncultivable areas, but it is unlikely that the southern alluvial plain, or any part of it, ever lay in the rain-fed area. The agriculture of Babylonia—as we shall call, after its later political capital Babylon, the area between modern Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf—always had to rely on artificial irrigation. Assyria, or the northern part of modern Iraq, could largely do without.

Most early civilizations, such as the Egyptian, the Chinese, or the Indian, are centered on mighty rivers. In describing, so we might apply to other cultures Egypt as "the gift of the Nile," Herodotus was alluding to the fact that the Nile deposits its fertile sediment on the land just before the sowing season, guaranteeing a high yield every year without the need to fertilize artificially or to let the land lie fallow. But Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley lack that advantage, because in these regions the rivers overflow only when they pose a great danger to the harvest. While the Nile flows south to north, the twin rivers of Mesopotamia, like the Indus, flow in the opposite direction. Since these rivers run high as a result of melting snow and ice in their catchment basins, the melting phase in Ethiopia occurs much earlier in the year than it does in southeastern Anatolia, the source of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Still, there can be no doubt that only abundant water in the rivers enabled the intensive agriculture so essential for early civilizations. In Mesopotamia, the positive use of water had to be wrested from nature, a task that presented no small challenge for Mesopotamian society.

Because the plains had been formed by sedimentation, the terrain offered no raw materials such as metal; nor, at least in the south, was there was any usable stone. The only exception was a spot on the southwestern Euphrates close to the modern city of Samawa, where limestone is found close to the surface. Its inferior quality, however, prevented its use for vessels or ornaments, and only during a brief period in the fourth millennium BCE was it used for building purposes: slabs of limestone form the lower parts of walls of the so-called Limestone Temple in Uruk. Nowadays, this limestone is quarried for cement. It is found here because the parallel chains of the Zagros extend below the flood plain, their peaks occasionally reaching close to the present surface. Unlike the south, the northern and eastern areas have plenty of stone. Of particular interest is a fine-grained alabaster from the northeastern mountains, which was used in neo-Assyrian palaces for the colossal bulls guarding the entrances and for the reliefs covering the walls.

Both building material and technique always pertained to what was possible within a particular region. Thus, stone and especially wood were used in the northern and eastern areas, while brick drawn from the local soil, whether sun-dried or, less often, fired, was used in the alluvial plains. Stone of various colors and hardness, used for jewelry and vessels, came primarily from the Zagros Mountains. One example was carnelian, a semiprecious stone used...