Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia, from the Greek for "between rivers," is the ancient region located largely in present-day Iraq and extending into parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. It is home to some of the world’s earliest urban civilizations and was inhabited from the late fourth millennium BCE onward. The term describes a cultural and geographical area rather than a single political entity.

The two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, flow through an alluvial plain that supported irrigation-based agriculture in an arid climate, enabling surpluses, craft specialization, and urban growth. Important early settlements included Uruk, Ur, Lagash, and Nippur. Writing emerged there in the late 4th millennium BCE as cuneiform, initially used for record-keeping and later for literature and law.

Over millennia the region hosted successive polities, including Sumerian city-states, the Akkadian Empire under Sargon, the Old Babylonian and Assyrian empires, and the Neo-Babylonian realm. In 539 BCE the Persian Achaemenid Empire conquered Babylon, and Mesopotamia became part of a larger imperial system.

Mesopotamian contributions include the development of writing (cuneiform), legal codes such as Hammurabi’s, advances in mathematics based on a sexagesimal system, early astronomy, and sophisticated irrigation and urban planning that supported large-scale economies.

The region’s legacy persists in archaeology and in the study of the ancient Near East, informing understandings of urban development, state administration, and early literate societies across subsequent cultures in the Middle East and beyond.