Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 55

Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was an inviting place to stop and settle. The lower rivers, as they neared the Persian Gulf, formed a great marsh with plentiful fish, birds, and other wildlife. Late Stone Age people lived there in reed huts. As hunter-gatherers and herders who lived around the swamp and in the hills to the north turned increasingly toward the hot new farming lifestyle (a gradual change that probably took thousands of years), the fertile valley to the northwest of the marshland beckoned.

By about 5000 BC, barley and flax farmers dug networks of irrigation canals from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their tributaries and built villages along those canals. These communities fueled a hot real estate market, becoming fashionable neighborhoods that grew into about a dozen impressive cities of the Sumerian civilization, followed after 2000 BC by the great city-state of Babylon and its successive empires. (A city-state is a city that’s a nation in itself, like modern-day Singapore and Monaco.)

From about 2700–2300 BC, the leading city-state in southern Mesopotamia was Ur, home to the Bible’s Abraham. Like other cities in the region, Ur was built of mud bricks. Besides fertilizing the fields and inspiring epic mud-wrestling battles, the mud of the river valley proved the best building material in an area with little stone or wood.