Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The history of Sumer spans through the 5th to 3rd millennia BCE in southern Mesopotamia, and is taken to include the prehistoric Ubaid and Uruk periods. Sumer was the region's earliest known civilization and ended with the downfall of the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2004 BCE.
Map showing the extent of Mesopotamia. The Civilization of Mesopotamia ranges from the earliest human occupation in the Paleolithic period up to Late antiquity.This history is pieced together from evidence retrieved from archaeological excavations and, after the introduction of writing in the late 4th millennium BC, an increasing amount of historical sources.
Sumer (/ ˈ s uː m ər /) is the earliest known civilization, located in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (now south-central Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC.
Early in Mesopotamia's history, around the mid-4th millennium BC, cuneiform was invented for the Sumerian language. Cuneiform literally means "wedge-shaped", due to the triangular tip of the stylus used for impressing signs on wet clay.
The center of Sumerian culture remained in southern Mesopotamia, even though rulers soon began expanding into neighboring areas. Neighboring Semitic groups, including the Akkadian speaking Semites (Assyrians, Babylonians) who lived alongside the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, adopted much of Sumerian culture for their own.
The Akkadian Empire (/ ə ˈ k eɪ d i ən /) [2] was the first known ancient empire in the world, succeeding the long-lived civilization of Sumer.Centered on the city of Akkad (/ ˈ æ k æ d /) [3] and its surrounding region, the empire united Akkadian and Sumerian speakers under one rule and exercised significant influence across Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia, sending military ...
Mesopotamia. A handful of before and after events pulled human beings out of the food chain — the domestication of fire, the domestication of plants and animals through agriculture, written ...
Before the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 24th century BC, Mesopotamia was fragmented into a number of city states. Whereas some surviving Mesopotamian documents, such as the Sumerian King List, describe this period as one where there was only one legitimate king at any one given time, and kingship was transferred from city to city sequentially, the historical reality was that there were ...