PREHISTORY AND NEAR EASTERN CIVILIZATIONS
...g in the Age of Metals. Mesopotamia is a Greek word meaning land between two rivers. By the beginning of the Bronze Age the family had replaced the tribe or clan as the basic unit in society. The Sumerians were probably the most influential from Sumer came writing the lunar calendar a mathematical computation system, medical and scientific discoveries and architectural innovations. The earliest symbols were pictograms or pictures carefully drawn to represent particular objects. To these they added ideograms pictures drawn to represent ideas or concepts. Sumerian scribes and writers identified the syllabic sounds spoken words and created phonograms symbols for separate speech sounds borrowing from the building on the earlier pictograms and ideograms. The Sumerian writing system had been labeled cuneiform a term which means wedge. Preserved for thousands of years in hardened clay and stone cuneiform writing has provided invaluable insight into ancient Mesopotamian culture. Mesopotamian religion had three important characteristics. It was polytheistic many gods and goddesses existed and often competed with one another; it was anthropomorphic the deities possessed human form and had their own personalities and unique traits and it was pantheistic hundreds of divinities were found everywhere in the nature of the universe. Of the surviving epics, tale and legends the one that offers glimpses into the Mesopotamian mind the most famous is The Epic of Gilgamesh. King Gilgamesh became a larger than life hero in Sumerian folk tales. The laws concerning punishment for crimes are based on the judicial principle of lex talionis or retaliation which demands an eye for an eye although Hammurabi’s code often substitutes payments in kind of damages done. The basic post and lintel construction of two vertical posts capped by a horizontal lintel or beam or entranceways. The clay bricks used in construction limited the builders in styles and decorations notably on the exterior. The most prominent structure in each Sumerian city was the ziggurat a terraced brick and mud brick pyramid that served as center of worship. The zig...