The land where civilisation began

Nick Morrison looks at the history of the land we now call Iraq.

WHILE the tribes of ancient Britain were getting to grips with agriculture and erecting circles of standing stones, two-and-a-half thousand miles away the people of Mesopotamia had taken communal living to a new level. Some 3,000 years before the idea reached Britain, the city had been born.

Long before the Roman Empire, the Greek city states and even the Egyptian pharaohs, the land now known as Iraq was home to a flourishing culture, shaped by an accident of geography but producing an astonishing series of advances: giving birth to writing, agriculture, accounting and the wheel, and laying the foundations for mathematics, navigation and law - and, perhaps inevitably, providing the site of the first wars.

Mesopotamia also holds its place in both Christianity and Islam. Said to be the site of the Garden of Eden and the birthplace of Abraham and Noah, it also was the base of Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Mohammad and seen by Shia Muslims as his true successor.

Occupying the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Mesopotamian plain was known as the Fertile Crescent, and was the birthplace of a series of civilisations which moved us from pre-history to history, earning it the accolade of the Cradle of Civilisation.

But the early inhabitants of this plain, the Sumerians, owe their place at the fount of history to a geographical quirk, which produced two conflicting forces. The Tigris and Euphrates were unpredictable: unleashing devastating floods capable of wiping out entire settlements at any time. They also ensured the river valleys were extraordinarily fertile, as centuries-old soil deposits provided ideal conditions for growing crops.

Migrating tribes were attracted to settle in these valleys, capable of producing more than enough food to sustain them; but the volatility of the rivers meant some form of management was needed to stop the land from flooding. As crop cultivation increased, and this management became more sophisticated, so the Sumerians began to form themselves into towns and then cities.

Agriculture was the beneficiary of the first flowerings of this civilisations. The Sumerians developed sophisticated irrigation systems and what is seen as probably the earliest cereal production. The invention of the wheel and the plough soon followed.

In order to pass on their agricultural techniques to future generations, they created a way of communicating by using a section of reed to stamp and impress into clay, and then arranging these impressions to convey information. This became known as cuneiform and is the earliest form of writing.

As crops and livestock began to be traded, this writing evolved to keep pace. Tokens representing specific goods or transactions were stored in clay envelopes marked with the owner's seal. These envelopes and tokens were later discarded and symbols recording the transactions were scratched into clay. These pictures were replaced by lines, allowing the writer to make many different strokes without changing his grip. By 3,000BC this had become the first full alphabet.

As trade became an increasingly important facet of life for the Sumerians, temples and palaces were used to store valuables: at first it was grain, then livestock and tools and then precious metals - thus banking was born. To keep track of their transactions, they created double entry accounting, still the standard for record keeping today.

Their maths system was based on the number 60, bequeathing us the legacy of 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.

But in the third millennium BC the Sumerians came up against the Akkadians, a people from the Arabian peninsular who gradually won control over the city-states of Mesopotamia. The Akkadians ruled their new kingdom from Akkad, later to become known as Babylon and the most important city in the Middle East for the next 2,000 years, but their hegemony was brief in the face of a Sumerian revival, before their empire was replaced by the Assyrians. This clash of cultures means Mesopotamia was also the site of the first wars.

By 1792BC, the land was under the control of King Hammurabi and had become known as Babylonia, a huge empire which now extended from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, and entered a lengthy period of peace and prosperity.

Hummurabi's most significant contribution was to preside over the introduction of legal concepts which were adopted by many other societies, including affording legal protection for the poor; giving the state responsibility for enforcing the law, and making the punishment fit the crime. The Hammurabi Code is still in common use - 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'.

After Hummurabi's death, Babylonia fell under the control of the Cassites and then the Assyrians, who divided the circle into 360 degrees and were among the first to come up with the idea of longitude and latitude to aid navigation, as well as developing the emerging science of medicine, with Ninevah as their capital city.

The flowering of Mesopotamian culture reached its height with Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned in the sixth century BC. To please his wife Amyitis, who was homesick for her mountain homeland, he turned the roof of his palace into a tropical garden, using a sophisticated system to take water from the Euphrates 23 metres above ground. These Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

But after Nebuchadnezzar's death, Babylonia suffered a swift decline. Invaded in 539BC by Cyrus the Great and in 331BC by Alexander the Great, who died there eight years later, it was then to become part of the Persian Empire until the seventh century AD, when it was conquered by Arab Muslims, who founded Baghdad in 762AD, turning it into their capital.

Despite being handed from one empire to another, there was still time for another burst of glory, when Baghdad became the acknowledged cultural centre of the Islamic world, a centre of scientific, philosophical and literary prowess and second in size only to Constantinople.

This renaissance saw the discovery of algebra and the invention of zero, as well as the introduction of Hindu numbers to the Arab world, where they were renamed Arabic numbers before being adopted by European civilisations.

But turmoil was not far away, as internal strife and power struggles weakened the caliphate of Baghdad, before the invasion of the Mongols in the 13th century. Baghdad lost its commercial importance, as did the port of Basra after the Portuguese found an alternative route to the East. Mesopotamia then came under the sway of the Ottoman Empire until that too collapsed, at the end of the First World War.

Mesopotamia was put under British administration by the League of Nations, but an initial refusal to grant independence was reversed after an Arab uprising in 1920, forcing the British to create the state of Iraq.

The history of 20th century Iraq is one of internal strife and external interference, of coups and counter-coups, of wars and rebellions. But in the 7,000 years since civilisation first sprang from its fertile land, its century of torment will come to seem but the blinking of an eye.

31/03/2003