More on Mesopotamia

In class on Friday we took more notes on Mesopotamia:

More on Mesopotamia

• a pantheon of Sumerian gods and goddesses emerged, with many of the deities representing the natural elements of the world 
• the world’s first (surviving) epic was the Sumerian “Epic of Gilgamesh,” which told of a great flood 
• Sumerians first divided the hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds; they also organized a calendar based on moon cycles 
• the Ziggurat was a Sumerian temple built on top of a “mountain” of earth

Civilization in Mesopotamia

• Wandering nomads drove herds of domesticated animals in many areas, especially to the south of Sumer in Arabia
• Sumer was conquered by the Akkadians c. 2350 B.C. - their gods took the place of previous gods and all were forced to worship them
• King Hammurabi of Babylon created a series of laws known as “Hammurabi’s Code” - laws that included “an eye for an eye” and regulations of marriage, divorce, and punishments for all sorts of crimes

Mesopotamia - the expansion

• Indo-Europeans were people from the grasslands of the Russian steppe who introduced the horse to the Near East
• the warlike Indo-European tribe known as the Hittites settled in Asia Minor
• the Hittites had a lucrative trade in metals and conquered nearly all of their neighbors, even threatening Egypt

After we copied the rest of our notes, we looked at some of Hammurabi's Code. There was some pretty gross stuff on there. I found one that says "If a man give his child to a nurse and the child die in her hands, but the nurse unbeknown to the father and mother nurse another child, then they shall convict her of having nursed another child without the knowledge of the father and mother and her breasts shall be cut off."  It sounds pretty confusing, but it's basically saying that if a man gives his baby to a nurse, and the baby dies because she was taking care of another baby, the nurse's breasts will be cut off.  Thankfully we don't have laws like those anymore.