Questions as
to what ancient Mesopotamian civilization did and
did not accomplish, how it influenced its
neighbours and successors, and what its legacy
has transmitted are posed from the standpoint of
20th-century civilization and are in part
coloured by ethical overtones, so that the
answers can only be relative. Modern scholars assume
the ability to assess the sum total of an
"ancient Mesopotamian civilization";
but, since the publication of an article by the
Assyriologist Benno Landsberger on "Die
Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt" (1926; "The
Distinctive Conceptuality of the Babylonian World"), it has become
almost a commonplace to call attention to the
necessity of viewing ancient Mesopotamia and its
civilization as an independent entity.
Ancient
Mesopotamia had many languages and cultures; its
history is broken up into many periods and eras;
it had no real geographic unity, and above all no
permanent capital city, so that by its very
variety it stands out from other civilizations
with greater uniformity.
The script and
the pantheon constitute the unifying factors, but
in these also Mesopotamia shows its predilection
for multiplicity and variety. Written documents
were turned out in quantities, and there are
often many copies of a single text. The pantheon
consisted of more than 1,000 deities, even though
many divine names may apply to different
manifestations of a single god. During 3,000
years of Mesopotamian civilization, each century
gave birth to the next. Thus classical Sumerian
civilization influenced that of the Akkadians,
and the Ur III empire, which itself represented a
Sumero-Akkadian synthesis, exercised its
influence on the first quarter of the 2nd
millennium BC.
With the
Hittites, large areas of Anatolia were infused
with the culture of Mesopotamia from 1700 BC
onward. Contacts, via Mari, with Ebla in Syria,
some 30 miles south of Aleppo, go back to the
24th century BC, so that links between Syrian and
Palestinian scribal schools and Babylonian
civilization during the Amarna period (14th
century BC) may have had much older predecessors.
At any rate, the similarity of certain themes in
cuneiform literature and the Old Testament, such
as the story of the Flood or the motif of the
righteous sufferer, is due to such early contacts
and not to direct borrowing.
We still have
told you some of the achievements of Mesopotamian
still exist at present....Right? We should take a
look at past to explore the culture we came
from...After all, it was our home.
|
