Mesopotamia is the first place we talk about in our book. Two rivers flow through it, and those are the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Because of those rivers, farming was a really big part of the surrounding areas’ lives. Due to the common flooding of those rivers, inventions arose. Some of the inventions included reservoirs and irrigation systems. Those inventions are very much in use today. For example, a very large reservoir in today’s world is the Franklin D. Roosevelt reservoir.
Although it is extremely modern as to what it would have been like thousands of years ago, it is still a common thing that was invented in Mesopotamia. All around Nebraska there are examples of irrigation systems. Examples are ditches or a sprinkler system.
In addition to the irrigation systems used in Ancient Mesopotamia, farming was also very advanced compared to other places in the Mesopotamia area. For farming, they had irrigation systems. As I mentioned earlier, the irrigation system was ditched where water flowed down the rows to water the crops.
They also had villages that all farmed together. To help the farming be so advanced, they had help from their slaves.
Another example of inventions we still use today that were created and/or heavily used in Mesopotamia is the road system and the writing system. They used roads to help traveling become easier. They did have a form of transportation, and those were wagons. Along with wagons, people walked to travel. Creating roads made the walk a lot less hard and more organized.
The writing system is next. In Mesopotamia, the writing was called a “cuneiform”, which is a symbol that usually looked like what they mean. The cuneiform system helped play into our modern language, today.
To touch on ancient writing again, not only did places in Mesopotamia have their writing, but so did Egypt. Egypt used a method with “hieroglyphs”, which is extremely similar to the “cuneiform”, as Egypt also used symbols. The cool thing about the “hieroglyphs” is that it was way more complex and often the hieroglyphs had different pronunciations if they meant a different thing.
One of the innovations that Mesopotamia created was the code of Hammurabi. The code is very similar to what today’s written laws are. The code talked about a range of things, including items dealing with business, intimate relationships, slave treatment, and social classes. This was one of the first forms of written “law.” I am unsure if we based today’s laws off of the code, as they were probably not discovered before the founding of our country.
Lastly, there was lots of advancement in the Aegean war life. They had a lot of weapons, including daggers, helmets, and arrowheads. They also had a great form of protection, a wall. I believe this early form of protection helped influence the Great Wall of China and even possibly the Berlin Wall and all other walls in the world.
The Ancient Near East holds Mesopotamia. (2022, May 14). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/the-ancient-near-east-holds-mesopotamia/