The
Magi were Wise Men from the East..
"Now
when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of
Herod the king, behold, there came Wise Men from the
East..." Mt.2:1a
Mesopotamia
is the land of the earliest known civilization. Ur, the
capital of Sumer is located in Mesopotamia near the
junction of the Tigris and Euphrates just north of the
Persian Gulf.
The Sumerians
gave us our first calendar, the first writing
(Cuneiform), codified law, city - state government and
invented the wheel. Ur was the Ancestral home of Abraham,
the Father of Jews, Christians and
Muhammadans.
Mesopotamia: In
Aramaic, Mesa means "middle" (as in our word mezzanine)
and potamus means "river" (as in our word hippopotamus),
meaning "river horse" or land between the two rivers. The
name is used for the area watered by the Euphrates and
Tigris and its tributaries, roughly comprising modern
Irak and part of Syria. South of modern Bagdad, the
alluvial plains of the rivers was called the land of
Sumer and Akkad in the third millennium.
The Tigris and
Euphrates are mentioned as the location of
Eden...Genesis 2:14-15.To emphasize this the ancient
village of Al-Qurna singled out a tree ("Adam's tree")
with a sign - in Arabic and English on the spot where the
Tigris meets the Euphrates.
Mesopotamia has
always been a center of astrology and astronomy. Our
present constellations were named here. Knowledge of the
seasons was essential for agriculture, irrigation and
surveying. Our present day calendar is divided into
twelve sections or months patterned after the agriculture
cycle.
The Fertile
Crescent is a rich food-growing area in a part of the
world where most of the land is too dry for farming. The
Fertile Crescent begins on the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean Sea, and curves around like a quarter moon
to the Persian Gulf. Some of the best farmland of the
Fertile Crescent is in a narrow strip of land between the
Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
Mesopotamia
covers the country of Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey.
This region is very diverse with undulating plains in the
North, where wheat can be grown and cattle raisied;
further South, the rivers were rich in marine life and
the river banks full of vegetation where wildlife could
be hunted. This first attracted humans to the
Mesopotamian plain. For materials such as wood, stone and
metals people had to look North and East to the
mountains. Temples and ordinary houses were built using
the reeds and mud that line the river banks. Centuries of
rebuilding using sun-dried mud-bricks resulted in high
mounds, or Tells, rising above the fields and canals.
These now dominate the Mesopotamian plain and are the
sites chosen by archaeologists for their
excavations.
At the end of
the fourth millennium, Uruk was probably the largest city
in the world (estimated at 400 hectares (the size of
Rome.) Of significance is the discovery at Uruk of the
world's earliest recorded writing. Using a reed
stylus to draw on tablets of clay, the temple
administrators recorded the movement of agricultural
produce and from of the temple storerooms including beer,
bread and sheep. Initially the records took the form of
pictures of the objects being counted together with signs
representing numerals. Gradually, these pictographs
became more stylish and wedge-like or cuneiform (Latin
for wedge is cuneus) and were adapted to the local
language ( Sumerian.) This was the start of recorded
history.
Uruk was not
the only large settlement in Southern Mesopotamia. The
wealth was demonstrated by the Royal Graves of Ur, which
date to around 2600 BC. Of the thousands of graves
excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur in the 1920s,
sixteen were particularly rich. Woolley called them
'Royal' because he believed they were the graves of Ur's
queens and kings.
Around 2350 BC.
the southern city states were united into one empire by
Sargon, king of the city of Akkad (also read as Agade).
and the Semitic language Akkadian (named after Sargon's
capital) was introduced as the official language of the
Sumerians. Sargon and his sons ruled Mesopotamia for 150
years. The last of the great Akkadian emperors was
Naram-Sin.
When the
Akkadian Empire collapsed and Mesopotamia was in turmoil.
The southern cities began to assert their independence.
Chief among these was the city of Ur. Under king
Ur-Nammu, the city established itself as the capital of
an empire that rivalled that of the Akkadian rulers.
Sumerian (although no longer a spoken language) the
official written language of the dynasty known to
historians as the Third Dynasty of Ur.
Ur-Nammu was a
prodigious builder. The most impressive monument of his
reign was the Ziggurat at Ur. Although similar in
shape to the pyramids of Egypt, ziggurats were not tombs
but made of solid brickwork. Often, as at Ur, three
staircases led up one side of the tower to several
stages. Under Ur-Nammu's grandson, Ibbi-Su (around
2028-2004 BC. ), the empire collapsed as Amorite and
Hurrian tribes established themselves throughout
Mesopotamia. At the same time, the Akkadian language
replaced Sumerian, which continued to be used by scribes
for monumental inscriptions.
Further North
lay the city of Ashur on a rocky promontory overlooking a
crossing of the River Tigris. From here the city
dominated the caravans of donkeys carrying metals and
rare materials from the east and west, and the boats
moving to and from the cities of Sumer to the South.
Ashur established commercial colonies in Anatolia (modern
day Turkey). Cloth and Iranian tin were exchanged for
Anatolian silver.
As king of
Babylon, Hammurabi united Southern Mesopotamia into a
single empire. Hammurabi's death caused his empire to
fall apart. The city of Babylon remained the capital of a
Southern kingdom. Hammurabi is best remembered for his
code of laws (the famous stela of Hammurabi is now in the
Louvre in Paris).
Around 1350
B.C. Assyria asserted her independence and began a
process of consolidation which would lead create a vast
empire during the first millennium BC.
Within 20 years of
Ashurbanipal's death around 627 BC., Assyria was faced
with internal strife and destruction. To the East, In 614
BC. a Median (Iran) army under Cyaxares invaded the
Assyrian homeland, attacked Nineveh and destroyed the
ancient city of Ashur. Two years later the combined
forces of Cyaxares and the king of Babylon, Nabopolassar,
captured Nineveh. The Assyrian court fled west to the
town of Harran where they were finally defeated in 609
BC. by Nabopolassar's son, Nebuchadnezzar. While the
Medes withdrew to consolidade their conquests in the
east, the Assyrian empire passed into the hands of the
kings of Babylon.
In 539 BC., the
armies of the Persian king Cyrus (a member of the
Achaemenid family) marched upon Babylon and captured the
city and with it all the Babylonian Empire. This, in
effect, brought to an end three thousand years of
self-rule in Mesopotamia. While many of the traditions
and way of life in the region continued under the new
rulers, Mesopotamia was now part of the much greater
empire of the Persians which stretched from Egypt to
India. In the next 200 years the region would see the
eventual destruction of the Persian Empire at the hand of
the Macedonian king Alexander the Great.
The ancient
Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the palace of
Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC) is one of the Seven
Wonders of the World. The Hanging Gardens were built
on top of stone arches 23 metres above ground and watered
from the Euphrates by a complicated mechanical system.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built by King
Nebuchadnezzar II about 600 BC, were a mountainlike
series of planted terraces terraces filled with plants.
Excavations have found an elaborate tunnel and pulley
system that brought water from the ground level to the
top terrace.
Detailed
descriptions of the Gardens come from ancient Greek
sources, including the writings of Strabo and Philo of
Byzantium. Here are their accounts:
"The
Garden is quadrangular, and each side is four plethra
long. It consists of arched vaults which are located on
checkered cube-like foundations.. The ascent of the
uppermost terrace-roofs is made by a stairway..." "The
Hanging Garden has plants cultivated above ground level,
and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper
terrace rather than in the earth. The whole mass is
supported on stone columns... Streams of water emerging
from elevated sources flow down sloping channels... These
waters irrigate the whole garden saturating the roots of
plants and keeping the whole area moist. Hence the grass
is permanently green and the leaves of trees grow firmly
attached to supple branches... This is a work of art of
royal luxury and its most striking feature is that the
labor of cultivation is suspended above the heads of the
spectators".
SEE
ALSO LITERAL BABYLON AND SPIRITUAL BABYLON
