Between two rivers, Mesopotamia hosted three thousand years of rising and falling empires
The land between the Tigris and Euphrates saw some of humanity's first farming around 10,000 BC and is credited with the wheel, cursive writing, mathematics and astronomy. Then, for three millennia, it became the prize every ambitious empire wanted, from Sargon of Akkad to Cyrus, Alexander and the Sassanids.
Mesopotamia sits in the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent and corresponds roughly to modern Iraq, with the Persian plateau rising just beyond in southwestern Iran. The Neolithic Revolution got under way here very early, and the region is counted as a cradle of some of the first civilisations anywhere, credited with cereal cultivation as well as the wheel and early science.
From the start of written records around 3100 BC, two peoples of different origins, the Sumerians and the Akkadians, held sway. Sargon of Akkad began the age of empire around 2350 BC, opening some 2,000 years in which one kingdom succeeded another. By the early second millennium BC the land had split into two poles: Assyria in the north and Babylonia in the south. The Neo-Assyrian Empire dominated much of the Near East from 900 to 612 BC, after which Babylon, long in Assyria's shadow, ruled for a century as the last independent Mesopotamian power before modern times.
Outsiders then took turns. Cyrus the Great's Achaemenid Persians conquered it in 539 BC, and Alexander the Great in 332 BC; after his death his generals fought over it, with the Seleucids winning. By about 150 BC the Parthians were in charge, and the region became a battleground with Rome. In 226 AD the Sassanid king Ardashir I took the east, and a Roman and Sassanid division lasted until the Muslim conquests of the 7th century. Small native kingdoms such as Hatra and Osroene flourished in the gaps.
Source: Mesopotamia
