Iraq’s plain taught the world cities, writing, and law
Modern Iraq overlaps ancient Mesopotamia—the so-called cradle of civilization. Sumer rose between about 6000 and 5000 BC in the Ubaid Neolithic. There the first cities, cursive script, and monumental building appeared before Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria ruled the Near East.
Shanidar Cave yielded Neanderthal skeletons (excavated 1957–1961) suggesting care for the injured; pre-Neolithic burials near 11,000 BC and PPNA farming from about 10,000 BC at sites such as M'lefaat place Iraq inside the Fertile Crescent’s Neolithic Revolution—wheel, cereals, writing, mathematics, astronomy. Tell al-'Ubaid defines the Ubaid period (about 6500–3800 BC). In the late fourth millennium BC Sumerians in the Tigris–Euphrates south invented the earliest known writing, harnessed the wheel, and built city-states such as Uruk, Ur, Lagash, and Nippur. Their isolate language recorded early math, law, medicine, and religion.
Eannatum of Lagash and Lugal-Zage-Si briefly imperialized the south before Sargon of Akkad (empire about 2335–2124 BC) united Sumerians and Akkadians—the first true Mesopotamian empire after Sumer. After Gutian disruption, Ur III kings including Shulgi rebuilt southern unity and finished the Great Ziggurat of Ur. Hammurabi of Babylon rose in 1792 BC, conquered south and center, fought Assyria, and left a short-lived empire that fixed the name Babylonia on the south while the north had long been Assyria. By the mid-eighteenth century BC Sumerians had lost a separate cultural identity.
Kassites later held Babylon; the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365–1020 BC) under kings such as Ashur-uballit I and Tukulti-Ninurta I stretched from the Caucasus toward Bahrain and the Mediterranean. Indigenous rule ended in 539 BC when Cyrus the Great took Neo-Babylonian lands and styled himself King of Babylon. Greeks, Parthians, Romans, and Sasanians followed; after the 636 Battle of al-Qadisiyyah Islam remade the region, and Abbasid Baghdad (founded 762) became a Golden Age capital before Mongol ruin in 1258 and later Ottoman centuries.
Source: History of Iraq
