Ancient Mesopotamia and Literature notes

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to yet another blog.

My university semester starts next week, so I have been given some work to prepare. In today’s (rather short) blog, I will be going over some work assigned by my ancient history class. The class will be looking at Ancient Mesopotamia next week, and I’m pretty excited, because my high school history classes never taught me about Mesopotamia!

So, let’s get into it!

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To start, my tutor had linked us to a video we could watch if we were unfamiliar with Ancient Mesopotamia. The first two pages are notes that I took while watching this video.

The video gave me a brief summary of Mesopotamia, including things such as the socialist system used, their religious beliefs, and one of their key inventions (writing). So, without Ancient Mesopotamia… these notes might not even exist. Or, somebody else could have invented writing. Who knows?

So, until around 2000 BC, this was how things worked in Mesopotamia… and then the Nomads came. They brought the first taxes, and a much harsher legal system.

I don't think I explained that legal code too well when I wrote these notes, so I’m going to give an example (from the video) here to help both you guys and myself.

Say a house collapses and kills the son of the owner. As punishment for this, the legal code would require the son of the builder to be executed. Hence, the punishment (the death of a son) matches the crime (also the death of a son).

In summary, hardly a fair code.

Oh, look. Eventually, they realised that this wasn't right at all. Cue the invention of ’innocent until proven guilty’! Or just... presumed innocence.

Next up, we have Assyria and the Assyrian Empire! I has heard a little about Assyria before this... mostly from the Horrible Histories audiobook on Ancient Egypt… so I knew they were definitely a force to be reckoned with in Ancient History. And… honestly, a little gruesome, which I won’t go into here.

Trust me, it wasn't pleasant.

So, what made the Assyrian Empire so powerful?

Essentially, they believed that losing a battle would cause the apocalypse. Because of this belief, they had to be strong fighters - losing wasn't an option. Unlike other armies, Assyria chose their generals based on a soldier’s skills, not whether their father was also a general or not. This could have easily improved the strength of the Assyrian army compared to an army with a weak general, who was only a general because his father had been one too.

The other resource that my tutor gave us was a website telling us how to read historical literature.

Well.

Not entirely how to read it, but more things to consider. In other words, things that can stop the reader having a full view of ancient societies.

So, here is the list of things that can affect the portrayed view of society:

✯ Societal position of the writer

Were they upper-class? Lower-class? How does this affect their views of society?

✯ The type of society they lived in and where their information came from

You can’t write about middle or lower class society if you don't have information on it, after all.

✯ What the audience wanted to read

People don't read or listen to something that bores them, do they? Writers would filter out information that wouldn't interest their audience.

Then we have ’historiography’, or the writing of history. This is generally considered to be more truthful than a poem written by Homer. However, that doesn't mean we can trust every word they say.

Ancient historian Herodotus, for example, often provided conflicting information. As stated by the website I was linked to, any study of history requires an enquiry into provided information. Not every source is reliable, so additional research is generally recommended.

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That brings me to the end of this blog! As always, I hope you enjoyed reading it, and please feel free to comment or message me if you have any questions!

Please don’t use photos of my notes without my permission, and don't claim them as yours. Thank you!

~ Goldie ♡