Explanation of Ur, Sumer, Babylon, Mesopotamia...

Mesopotamia (from the Greek, meaning 'between two rivers’) was an ancient region in the eastern Mediterranean bounded in the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and in the southeast by the Arabian Plateau, corresponding to today’s Iraq, mostly, but also parts of modern-day Iran, Syria and Turkey. The 'two rivers' of the name referred... [continue reading]

The word civilization is related to the Latin word, civitas ”city”. The term is used in several ways, generally denoting complex human cultural development. Some scholars restrict the use of the term to urbanized societies, in other words, cultures that have achieved a development that has allowed them to create large and permanent settlements... [continue reading]

Babylon was probably the most famous city of ancient Mesopotamia. Until today the city is a symbol for wealth, power, and sin (largely due to its treatment in the Bible). The name Babylon is the Greek form of Babel of Babili, which means "the gate of the god" in Semitic, which again is the translation of the original Sumerian name Ka-dimirra... [continue reading]

Assyria was a Mesopotamian empire that grew out of the city-state of Ashur. It was one of the greatest empires in Mesopotamia, together with the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great and the Babylonian Empire under Hammurabi. At its height, the Assyrian Empire extended from Anatolia in the west, to Armenia in the... [continue reading]

No one knows where the city of Akkad was located, how it rose to prominence, or how, precisely, it fell; yet once it was the seat of the Akkadian Empire which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia. It is known that Akkad (also given as Agade) was a city located along the western bank of the Euphrates River possibly between the cities... [continue reading]