1.3: Mesopotamia and Civilization

“The West” as a concept is rooted in the geography of Greece, but “civilization” is not.  The word is linked to the Latin word for city, civitas, and it suggests a way of life centering on the products of an urbanized culture.  Likewise, as noted above with the Greeks, civilization was usually seen as the opposite of barbarism, and historically it was nomadic, non-urbanized peoples who were most likely to be labeled as “barbarians.”  For the sake of historical analysis, however, we can set aside the pejorative distinction between civilization and barbarism and instead consider civilization as a set of essential technological advances and examine how those technologies altered human life on an enormous scale.  That process began in the Middle East thousands of years before the first cities of ancient Greece existed.

  The most ancient human civilizations arose in the Fertile Crescent, an area stretching from present-day Israel - Palestine through southern Turkey and into Iraq.  Closely related, and lying within the Fertile Crescent, is the region of Mesopotamia, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq.  In these areas, people invented the most crucial technology necessary for the development of civilization: agriculture.  The Mesopotamians also invented other things that are central to civilization, including towns and cities, the earliest writing systems, mathematics, engineering, and both organized religion and complex political systems.  Similar advances happened in key regions across the globe, including China, India, and Mesoamerica, but it happened first in Mesopotamia, and it was from Mesopotamia that civilization spread to the rest of western Eurasia.

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