The history and cultural legacy of ancient Mesopotamia is central to the history and development of humanity in general, especially Western societies and those of the Middle East, called the Near East when used to describe ancient or medieval societies. This is partly because large-scale agriculture first developed in the Fertile Crescent, the arc-shaped region bordering Mesopotamia’s northern rim sometime around 10,000 to 9000 b. c. Before this time there were likely no settled villages anywhere in the world. Historians generally refer to the long period of human culture before the advent of agriculture as the Paleolithic Age, or “Old Stone Age.” The Neolithic Age, or “New Stone Age,” when people in the area lived in villages but still used mainly stone tools and weapons, is usually dated from about 9000 to 6000 b. c. or somewhat later. Indeed, before farming began almost all people were nomads who moved from place to place, sustaining themselves through hunting, fishing, and gathering wild edible plants and fruits.
The Emergence of Towns and Cities Once
Farming began to develop in the Fertile Crescent, people settled into permanent villages; eventually, probably sometime between 6000 and 5000 b. c., some of them moved southward onto the Mesopotamian plains. There, agricultural villages were established. Some of these steadily grew into towns with populations of a few thousand people. Trade among these towns developed, stimulating increased cultural activities and still further expansion. Among the thriving communities were Tepe Gawra and Choga Mami, which featured the earliest-known irrigation canal, in northern Mesopotamia; and Ur, Eridu, Uruk, and Tell al-Ubaid in the south, near the Persian Gulf. Based on discoveries made at Tell al-Ubaid, modern scholars came to call the era lasting from roughly 5000 to 3500 b. c. the Ubaidian period.
Part of the importance of ancient Mesopotamia to world culture in general is the fact that these early villages and towns influenced people in neighboring regions to build similar settlements. In turn, the idea spread farther and farther, reaching many parts of Asia and Europe. Moreover, various logistical and cultural developments that originated in Mesopotamian towns—including artificial irrigation of crops, pottery making, and the erection of shrines and temples to honor the gods— also spread far and wide.
Meanwhile, within Mesopotamia itself, the march of civilization continued apace. Sometime in the late Ubaidian period, the first high culture arose in the southern part of the region, near the Persian Gulf. Its people, the Sumerians, may have been local Ubaidians who had reached a higher level of development; or they may have been outsiders who migrated into the region. Whatever their origins, they expanded some of their towns into full-fledged cities, some attaining populations in the tens of thousands. Though often referred to simply as cities, these were more accurately city-states, each consisting of a moderate-to-large expanse of farmland and villages controlled by a central urban area; the central city was usually surrounded by a large defensive wall made of dried mud-bricks. Among the leading Sumerian cities were Uruk, probably the first; Ur; Lagash; Sippar; and Nippur.
Each city-state thought of itself as a tiny nation. Other city-states, at the time mostly smaller, also emerged farther north, around the Tigris River and its tributaries. Each Mesopotamian city-state was ruled by a king who claimed to be somehow connected to or favored by the gods whom all Sumerians worshipped. These cities and their kings became quite territorial and frequently fought with one another. Fortunately for those involved, these early wars were not catastrophic and usually did not result in the complete destruction of population centers.
Meanwhile, when not fighting one another, these cities engaged in vigorous trade. Furthermore, commercial activities were not confined to Mesopotamia itself. Local merchants reached outward and either created or tapped into trade routes stretching far and wide. These routes were destined to keep the peoples of the Mesopotamian plains centrally connected, like the hub of a vast wheel, to a much greater world for many centuries to come. In the words of noted scholar A. Leo Oppenheim:
During the nearly three millennia of
Its documented history, Mesopotamia
Was in continuous contact with adjacent civilizations and, at times, even
With distant civilizations. The region with which Mesopotamia was in contact, either directly or through [middlemen], stretched from the Indus Valley [i. e., India], across and at times even beyond Iran, Armenia, and Anatolia to the Mediterranean coast and into Egypt, with the immense coastline of the Arabian peninsula and whatever civilization it may have harbored. (Ancient Mesopotamia, p.
Modern scholars call the era in which the Sumerian cities exploited this vast trade network and reached their height of power and influence the Early Dynastic Period, lasting from about 3000 to 2350 b. c.
The First Empires It was perhaps inevitable that one of these early, burgeoning city-states would take the next step and try to conquer and rule most or all of its neighbors. The first Mesopotamian ruler to do so—in the process creating the world’s first empire—was Sargon of Akkad (a town lying north of the cities of Babylon and Kish in central Mesopotamia). During his reign (ca. 2340-2284 b. c.) he seized most of the cities in the region one by one and absorbed them into his growing realm. For the first time in history, the lower and upper halves of Mesopotamia had been united into one large political unit ruled by a central administration. Sargon’s realm was successful for a while because he and his immediate successors used what are often termed strong-arm tactics. Not only did they maintain a strong, well-trained army, but they also dismantled parts of the defensive walls of captured cities so that these places could no longer adequately defend themselves. Sargon and his heirs also placed their own trusted nobles and other operatives in positions of power in the subject cities to discourage feelings of independence and rebellions among the locals. In addition, the Akkadian monarchs took effective control of foreign trade in the region.
Despite these measures, the Akkadian Empire was fairly short-lived compared to many other ancient empires. In addition to various political instabilities that set in over time, a warlike people from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains lying east of the plains—the Guti—invaded. As Akkadian control disappeared, many of the old Sumerian cities became independent again, and soon they drove out the Guti. From among the rulers who led the campaigns against the Guti arose a ruler of Ur, Ur-Nammu (reigned ca. 2113-2094 B. C.). Under his guidance, Ur became the major power in the region and there emerged the second Mesopotamian empire, today referred to as the Third Dynasty of Ur, or “Ur-III” for short. That realm expanded outward under Ur-Nammu’s successors; however, like the Akkadian Empire, it proved to be short-lived, lasting from circa 2113 to circa 2004 b. c. The Ur dynasts felt themselves pressed from the northeast by the Elamites, whose center of power lay in southwestern Iran; and from the northwest by the Amorites, a Semiticspeaking people who originated in the Syrian highlands. The Elamites eventually besieged and captured Ur, and the empire quickly dissolved.
In the two centuries following the fall of Ur-III, some large individual city-states vied for power in various parts of Mesopotamia. Among the most successful were Isin and Larsa in the south, located in the region still widely called Sumer; Mari, a prosperous trading city on the upper Euphrates; and Ashur and Eshnunna, which fought each other for control of northern Mesopotamia, generally called Akkad or Assyria. At one point, an early Assyrian king, Shamshi-Adad (reigned ca. 18131781 B. C.) captured Mari and installed his son as its ruler. This marked the beginning of the first and shortest of three periods of Assyrian expansion in the region. Eventually the rightful king of Mari, Zimri-Lim (ca. 1775-1761 b. c.) made a comeback. But he and the other local rulers in the region soon had a rude awakening. A dynasty of Amorite kings had established themselves in the large city of Babylon in about 1900 B. C. The sixth member of that dynasty, Hammurabi (ca. 1792-1750 b. c.), turned out to be an avid imperialist and conqueror who, like Sargon and Ur-Nammu before him, dreamed of ruling all of Mesopotamia. Hammurabi’s troops swept across the plains, capturing cities and carving out an empire almost as large as the Akkadian realm.
Although this new Babylonian superstate was also short-lived, it and its ruler established important precedents for future generations of Mesopotamians. In particular, after Hammurabi’s reign Babylon permanently became the most envied and coveted city in the region. As scholar Karen R. Nemet-Nejat puts it:
Hammurabi’s reign left a lasting impression on future generations of Babylonians, thus making him one of the major figures of Mesopotamian history. . . . Hammurabi’s nation-state did not survive him, but he did make Babylon the recognized [major] seat of kingship, a position that remained uncontested until the Greeks [took control of the region later and] built [the city of] Seleucia. Babylon even survived as a [premiere Mesopotamian] religious center until the first century a. d. (Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 31)
Hatti, Mitanni, and Assyria Partly because of Babylon’s ascendancy in these years, the period lasting from the fall of Ur-III, shortly before 2000 b. c. to roughly 1600 B. c. is often referred to as the Old Babylonian period. After Hammurabi’s empire declined in the latter years of this period, a number of foreign peoples vied for control of parts of Mesopotamia. Among them were the Hurrians, the Kassites, and the Hittites. The Hurrians may have originated in the Asian region lying west of the Caspian Sea; the Kassites most likely entered Mesopotamia from the east, from or through the Zagros Mountains; and the land of the Hittites, called Hatti, was centered in Anatolia.
The Old Babylonian period ended when, in about 1595 b. c., the Hittites suddenly and boldly entered Mesopotamia, marched across the plains, and captured Babylon. For reasons that are still unclear, they did not follow up on this victory, however. Instead, they returned to Hatti, leaving a vacuum in central Mesopotamia that the Kassites swiftly filled. A Kassite dynasty now ruled Babylon and much of southern Mesopotamia from about 1595 to about 1155 b. c. The once culturally backward and unsophisticated Kassites very quickly adopted the local culture; like so many other Mesopotamian peoples over the course of time, they became “Babylo-nianized” in speech, dress, and political and religious customs.
Meanwhile, even as the Kassites were settling down in Babylon, many miles to the west the Hurrians were establishing their own strong foothold in the region. Located in the area lying between the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the new kingdom became known as Mitanni. The more well-to-do Mitannians raised horses and developed a formidable chariot corps, which they employed in their attempts to expand into southern
Syria. But these endeavors were largely fruitless. This is because the Mitannians increasingly found themselves part of a new and often dangerous political real-ity—an international balance of power in which at first four, and later five, major kingdoms vied for dominance in the Near East. In addition to Hatti to the north, Kassite Babylonia to the east, and Mitanni itself, there was Egypt, lying southwest of Palestine. The Egyptians had been invaded by a Near Eastern people of uncertain origins two centuries before, but they had expelled the intruders. And during Mitanni’s formative years, Egypt was vigorously expanding its power and influence into the region of Syria-Palestine. This naturally brought the Egyptians into competition, and on occasion into armed conflict, with Hatti and Mitanni, both of which also had designs on Syria-Palestine. The climax of the Egyptian-Hittite rivalry was the great Battle of Kadesh, fought in Syria in about 1274 b. c.
The fifth member of the Near East’s new major players, and the last to join the group, was Assyria. After the Babylonian king Hammurabi captured and absorbed the major towns of Assyria in the 1700s b. c., that area had fallen more or less into political obscurity. But the Assyrians were a proud and resilient people who retained their traditional culture during the centuries they were ruled by others. Under a strong and ambitious king, Ashur-uballit I (reigned ca. 1365-1330 b. c.), and his successors, they steadily began their second phase of expansion. By this time, Mitanni was already in decline, and some of its territories fell into Assyrian hands. Assyria also began moving into Armenia and developed a running rivalry with Babylonia, highlighted by the capture of Babylon by Assyria’s King Tukulti-Ninurta I in the late 1200s b. c. In addition, the Assyrians launched many military expeditions into northern Syria.
The Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires The Assyrian dominance of Babylon initiated by Tukulti-Ninurta turned out to be brief. This was because the era of the Near East’s “big five,” so to speak, was finally ending. Kassite rulers managed to regain power in Babylon, but soon afterward they were defeated and their dynasty was extinguished by the Elamites, who attacked in about 1155 b. c. Not long before this, the Hittites and the Assyrians had brought Mitanni to its knees, aided partly by civil disputes within Mitanni itself, which had weakened it and left it vulnerable to foreign enemies. The Hit-tites, too, were suddenly eliminated from the corridors of Near Eastern power. Sometime in the early 1200s b. c. large groups of peoples from southeastern Europe, and perhaps other areas, launched a massive folk migration that swept across Greece, the Aegean Islands, Syria-Palestine, and Anatolia. The invaders, whom modern historians collectively call the Sea Peoples, burned numerous cities to the ground, including the capital and other major population centers of Hatti. The Sea Peoples attacked Egypt as well. And only with a great deal of difficulty were the local pharaoh, Ramesses III, and his soldiers, able to repel them.
Fortunately for the Assyrians, their homeland was located far enough inland from the Mediterranean to keep them largely insulated from the main thrust of the Sea Peoples. Thus, while large portions of the Near East had undergone unprecedented upheaval, most of Mesopotamia survived. Still, interruptions in the flow of trade and other factors caused Assyria to suffer a period of serious decline. Meanwhile, in the years following Babylon’s fall to the Elamites, Babylonia was equally hurt by disruptions in trade, as well as by internal political instability, and it, too, went into decline. Thus, by the early 900s b. c. all of Mesopotamia was politically fragmented and militarily weak. Historians sometimes call this Mesopotamia’s “dark age.”
As history has repeatedly demonstrated, such power vacuums in major centers of population and culture never last very long. Sure enough, before long a new imperial state rose to prominence in the already ancient Mesopotamian plains. Once more, it was the Assyrians who took the initiative. In their third and most successful period of expansion, they created the largest and most feared empire that Mesopotamia, and indeed the world, had witnessed to date. This realm is sometimes referred to as the Neo-Assyrian Empire to differentiate it from earlier phases of Assyrian empire building. The new drive for power began with two strong and ambitious kings—Ashur-dan II (reigned ca. 934-912 b. c.) and Adad-nirari II (ca. 911891, b. c.). They and their successors seized all of Mesopotamia and many neighboring areas, including Babylonia, Elam, and parts of southern Iran, Armenia, southeastern Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, and eventually Egypt.
Particularly successful in their conquests were Ashurnasirpal II (reigned ca. 883-859 b. c.); his son, Shalmaneser III (ca. 858-824 b. c.); Tiglathpileser III (ca. 744727 b. c.); and the four Sargonid rulers, so called because their dynasty was founded by the vigorous ruler Sargon II (ca. 721705 b. c.). Sargon’s son, Sennacherib (ca. 704-681 b. c.), was, like a number of Assyrian monarchs, both a ruthless conqueror and a great builder. When Babylon rebelled during his reign, Sennacherib swiftly and violently put down the insurrection and punished that city by laying waste to large sections of it, an act that people across the Near East remembered with horror for generations to come. Yet the same man who ordered this atrocity spent much time, effort, and money on domestic and cultural projects; most notably, he beautified the mighty Assyrian city of Nineveh and constructed a splendid new palace there. Sennacherib was succeeded by one of his sons, Esarhaddon (reigned ca. 680669 B. C.), who, to the relief of the Babylonians, rebuilt much of Babylon. Then Esarhaddon’s own son, Ashurbanipal (ca. 668-627 B. C.), brought Egypt into the Assyrian fold and defeated the Elamites, whose repeated attacks on Babylon and other cities on the plains had long plagued Mesopotamian rulers.
However, despite its strong start, Ashurbanipal’s reign ended in abject failure. The last major ruler of the Assyrian Empire, he was defeated in the late 600s B. C. and his realm was torn asunder by a coalition of Babylonians and Medes, whose homeland was centered in western Iran. The Babylonians were led by a king named Nabopolassar; commanding the Medes was their talented ruler Cyaxares II.
The new empire established by Nabopolassar and expanded by his immediate successors is now often called the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Although it lasted less than a century—from about 626 to 539 B. c.—it was large and rich and witnessed Babylon’s rise to a level of splendor and prestige greater than it had ever known or would ever know again. Nabopolassar’s son, Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned ca. 605-562 B. C.), erected new palaces, temples, canals, and the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built for his wife. This sumptuous monument came to be listed among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Though these efforts may have been partially inspired by the king’s love of culture and finery, they also had an underlying political dimension. Nebuchadnezzar recognized that the key to success for the new Babylonia was for it to become a worthy successor to the now-defunct Assyrian realm. Thus, he must appear to be an even greater builder than Sennacherib and other accomplished Assyrian builders. “The Assyrians had always deployed vast sums in building themselves new palaces and administrative capitals,” scholar Gwendolyn Leick points out.
But Babylonia... had suffered neglect during the centuries of [Elamite and Assyrian] occupation. Now was the time to make good the scars of Assyrian aggression and Babylon was to eclipse the former glory of Nineveh, now in ruins. . . . The new [Babylonian] dynasty was seen not only as the avenger of Babylon’s humiliation [by the Assyrians], but as the rightful heir of Assyrian power. [Nebuchadnezzar’s great works were designed] to demonstrate the unrivaled position of Babylon as the capital of a world power which had triumphed over its rivals. (The Babylonians, pp. 63-64)
The Sudden Rise of Persia Nebuchadnezzar seems to have envisioned his efforts as the groundwork for a powerful and magnificent imperial realm that would rule Mesopotamia for centuries, perhaps forever. In fact the realm outlived him by only twenty-three years. The last NeoBabylonian king, Nabonidus (reigned 555539 B. C.), was defeated by Cyrus II of Persia, an event that permanently ended Babylonia’s status as an independent nation-state.
One of the most talented, ambitious, and successful men ever to rule Mesopotamia and neighboring regions, Cyrus had become ruler of the Persian region of Fars, in southern Iran, in about 559 b. c. At the time Fars was a province of the Median Empire, which had coexisted with the NeoBabylonian realm in the period following the destruction of Assyria. Under Cyrus, the Persians, who before this had been a fairly obscure people, suddenly rose to prominence as masters of the known world. They easily overthrew the Medes and then proceeded to conquer Anatolia, including the kingdom of Lydia and the Greek cities on the peninsula’s western coast. The Persians next seized the regions of what are now eastern Iran and Afghanistan; Babylonia and the rest of southern Mesopotamia; and most of Palestine. Cyrus also planned to absorb Egypt, but he died in 530 b. c., before this dream could be realized. So his son, Cambyses (cam-BEE-seez), took on the task of defeating the Egyptians.
Under Cyrus, Cambyses, and the next major Persian ruler, Darius I (reigned ca. 522-486 b. c.), the Persian army was widely respected and feared, much as the Assyrian military had once been. In fact, the Persians modeled their military organization in a number of ways on the Assyrian army. The Persians also copied many of the Assyrians’ best political and administrative ideas. Like the Assyrian Empire, for example, the Persian Empire, the largest imperial realm in the world to date, was divided into provinces, each run by a local governor who answered to the king.
Because Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius were strong, skilled rulers, the Persian realm got off to a good start and for a while promised to grow even larger and more powerful. Darius had designs on
Europe, and in 512 b. c. he led an expedition into the forests and steppes lying north of Greece and west of the Black Sea. But eventually the Persian monarch came face-to-face with an obstacle that was to become his realm’s biggest nemesis and the eventual instrument of its destruction. This obstacle was Greece, at the time consisting of a collection of many small city-states rather than a coherent, unified nation. (In fact, Greece never became a unified country in ancient times.) First, the Anatolian Greeks rebelled against Persian rule, and it took Darius more than five years to put down the revolt, which ended in 494 b. c. Four years later he sent a Persian army to destroy Athens, on the Greek mainland, to punish the city for helping the Anatolian Greek rebels. But the much smaller Athenian army crushed the Persian invaders at Marathon, located northeast of Athens. After Darius’s death, his son, Xerxes (ZERK-seez), sought revenge for the Marathon debacle. In 480 b. c. the new Persian king led an enormous army into Greece, but in a series of epic battles the Greeks inflicted heavy casualties on the invaders and drove them away.
In retrospect, the failure to capture Greece and use it as a base from which to conquer Europe proved a major turning point for Persia. Xerxes turned out to be a mediocre ruler. After he was assassinated in 465 b. c., almost all of his successors proved to be no better; in fact, some were downright corrupt and/or ineffectual. They were unable to effectively reverse the empire’s steady decline, caused partly by internal power struggles as well as by rebellions by subject peoples and the increasing menace of the militarily more formidable Greeks. The last Persian king, Darius III, whose reign began in 336 b. c., simply folded under these mounting
Problems and pressures. Two years after he ascended the throne, Alexander III (later called “the Great”), the young king of Macedonia, a kingdom located in northern Greece, invaded Persia and swiftly defeated it. This initiated nearly two centuries of Greek rule in Mesopotamia and many of the lands on its borders.
The Seleucid Empire After the fall of Persia in the 320s b. c., Alexander’s empire stretched from Greece in the west to the borders of India in the east, incorporating not only Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria-Palestine, and Anatolia but Egypt as well. However, Alexander died unexpectedly at age thirty-three, perhaps of alcohol poisoning, in Babylon in 323 b. c. His vast realm quickly disintegrated as his leading generals (and some of their sons), the so-called Successors, vied with one another for its control. After many years of bloody warfare, most of the Successors were killed. The major survivors established three huge new Greek-ruled kingdoms: the Macedonian kingdom, centered in Greece; the Ptolemaic kingdom, centered in Egypt; and the Seleucid Empire, centered in Mesopotamia. The Seleucid realm also incorporated several other Near Eastern lands that had been part of the Persian Empire, including Syria and parts of Anatolia.
The founder of the Seleucid realm, Seleucus I (reigned 305-281 b. c.), and his successors worked hard to make Mesopotamia prosperous and successful in international relations. In particular, the Seleu-cids exploited all the old trade routes that ran through the region and attempted to open new ones. In this way, they became rich. They used the money partly to build new cities, the most important and splendid of which was Seleucia, located on the Tigris River not far north of Babylon. Due to its location, the city was sometimes literally called Seleucia-on-the-Tigris. Tens of thousands of administrators, soldiers, builders, artisans, and homesteaders migrated from Greece to Seleucia and other Mesopotamian cities and towns during these years. And Greeks came to form the upper crust of society on the plains. With a few exceptions, the local natives, especially those who could not speak Greek, were viewed and treated as inferiors.
Despite these successes, the Greeks were unable to maintain control of Mesopotamia and surrounding regions for very long. This was partly because the Seleucid rulers spent large portions of their great wealth on raising large armies, including many mercenary (hired) soldiers. These troops were used partly to prosecute costly border wars with the rulers of the Ptolemaic realm, mostly over possession of parts of Syria-Palestine. The Seleucid military was also used for defense because over time the realm came under increasing threats from outside powers. In the west, the Romans, masters of the Italian peninsula, conquered mainland Greece, the Aegean Islands, and most of Anatolia in the second century b. c. The Seleucid king An-tiochus III (reigned 222-187 b. c.) was disastrously defeated by the Romans in western Anatolia. Meanwhile, in the east, the Parthians, who inhabited much of northern Iran, repeatedly attacked Seleu-cid towns and outposts, steadily capturing and absorbing pieces of the empire. The Parthians also captured the main trade route that connected Mesopotamia to Afghanistan, India, and other eastern lands, a huge blow to the Seleucid economy.
The Parthian and Sassanian Realms Eventually the Seleucid rulers lost so much territory, wealth, and power that their realm—which, at the end, consisted only of parts of Syria—simply ceased to exist. Mesopotamia and parts of the rest of the former Seleucid Empire came under Parthian control. The Parthians, who spoke an Indo-European language, built a new capital, Ctesiphon, located on the Tigris near the old Seleucid capital of Seleu-cia. Yet they made no effort to suppress Greek commerce, or even the Greek language, in Seleucia and other Mesopotamian cities. In fact, in some ways the local Parthian and Greek cultures merged, even though the Parthians were firmly in charge.
Unlike the Greeks, Persians, and Assyrians before them, however, the Parthians did not maintain a strong central administration, nor even a national standing army. Instead, local nobles oversaw large estates or tiny vassal kingdoms; they gave their allegiance to the Parthian king, seen as the chief noble, and supported him when necessary with money, goods, and troops. This feudal society, which resembled the one that existed centuries later in medieval Europe, worked well enough within the confines of Mesopotamia and other parts of the Parthian realm. And for a while the Parthian lords were able to effectively pool their resources when attacked by foreign powers. Parthian armies soundly defeated two large Roman forces that invaded Mesopotamia in the first century b. c., for example. These forces were commanded by Marcus Crassus, who lost his life in his
Anti-Parthian campaign, and Marcus An-tonius, or Mark Antony, who became the ally and lover of the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, the famous Cleopatra VII. However, the Parthian realm’s lack of a strong central organization eventually began working against it. In a. d. 116 the Roman emperor Trajan (reigned 98-117) invaded Mesopotamia and sacked Ctesiphon. Several later Roman rulers followed suit. In the year 224 a Parthian noble named Ar-dashir, who had charge of Fars, the old Persian homeland, led a rebellion. He defeated the weak Parthian king Artabanus IV and installed a new government.
This change of regime created what was in effect a new realm, which became known as the Sassanian Empire, named for an earlier local nobleman named Sas-san. The Sassanian rulers were great admirers of the old Achaemenid Persian realm and its social, artistic, and religious customs. So the imperial state they administered became a kind of second Persian Empire. For this reason, some modern scholars have called the Sassanian Empire the Neo-Persian Empire. Like the Persians, and very much unlike the Parthians, the Sassanians maintained a strong central government that closely oversaw the affairs of its outlying provinces.
Also like the Persians, the Sassanians sought to expand their territory and influence through the use of force. Ardashir’s son, Shapur I (reigned 241-272), invaded Roman-controlled Anatolia, Armenia, and Syria and sacked the prosperous Syrian city of Antioch. Shapur also defeated and captured the Roman emperor Valerian (reigned 253-260). Later, another Sassa-nian king, Shapur II (reigned 309-379), led military expeditions in the east, including parts of northern India and southcentral Asia.
But as time went on, Sassanian rulers found it increasingly difficult to maintain their enormous realm. As has been the rule with all empires, no matter how great, throughout human history, theirs was doomed ultimately to collapse and make way for new rulers and peoples. During the reign of the last Sassanian king, Yazd-gird III (632-651), Muslim armies from Arabia invaded southern Mesopotamia. In 651 the Muslim period of Mesopotamia began. The exact reasons for the decline and fall of the Sassanian Empire “are not clear,” scholar John Curtis writes.
However, one important factor must be that the Arabs had previously made inroads into Mesopotamia, but their potential threat was largely ignored. Also, by the mid-seventh century, the Sassanian state must have been exhausted by its long years of struggle with Rome and Byzantium [a strong state centered on the southern shores of the Black Sea]. And oppressive taxation, coupled with a rigid class system, would have made Islam seem an attractive alternative to many disaffected subjects of the... [Sassanian] king. (Ancient Persia, p. 67)
The Cradle of Civilization Whatever the causes of the Sassanians’ decline, their fall marked the end of ancient Mesopotamia, as reckoned by modern historians. For many millennia, that region had witnessed the rise and fall of seemingly countless cities, nations, peoples, and empires. And their societies had produced some of the most crucial cultural milestones in the human saga; these included the first implementation of large-scale agriculture, the first writing systems, the first cities, and the first empires. Certainly Western society would not have developed as it did without the profound cultural influences that Mesopotamian nations and cultures made on the Egyptians, Jews, Phoenicians, and especially the Greeks and Romans.
Meanwhile, the ruins of Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian cities still dot the landscape of modern Iraq. On the one hand, they continue to beckon scholars and those fascinated by humanity’s past. On the other, they serve as a constant reminder to the Iraqis and their neighbors that they are the shepherds and guardians of the precious remains of the cradle of civilization.
See Also: Akkadian Empire; Assyrian Empire; Parthian Empire; Persian Empire; Sassanian Empire; Seleucid Empire; Sumerians; Ubaidian culture
World History
