Geography
- Mesopotamia – Modern Day Iraq
- Babylonia to the south
- Hittites – Modern Day Turkey /Anatolia
- Asyria to the north
- Persia – Modern Day Iran
- Bactria – Modern day Afghansitan
Conquest
- Mesopotamia hardly ever unified, often under control of Persia via Cyrus the Great
- Alexander the Great gets it after the Persians
- Persians take over again after fall of Alexander’s empire
- 3500 BC: Egyptian calendar
- 3300 BC: Bronze Age begins in the Near East
- 3200 BC: Rise of Proto-Elamite Civilization in Iran
- 3100 BC: First dynasty of Egypt
- c. 3000 BC: Sumerian cuneiform writing system.
- 3000 BC: First known use of papyrus by Egyptians
- 2700 BC: Minoan Civilization ancient palace city Knossos reach 80,000 inhabitants
- 2700 BC: Rise of Elam in Iran
- 2700 BC: The Old Kingdom begins in Egypt
- 2600 BC: Oldest known surviving literature: Sumerian texts from Abu Salabikh, including the Instructions of Shuruppak and the Kesh temple hymn.
- 2560 BC: King Khufu completes the Great Pyramid of Giza.
- 2000 BC: Domestication of the horse
- 1800 BC: alphabetic writing emerges
- 1600 BC: Minoan civilization on Crete is destroyed by the Minoan eruption of Santorini island.
- 1600 BC: Mycenaean Greece
- 1600 BC: Beginning of Hittite dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean region
- c. 1180 BC: Disintegration of Hittite Empire
- 1020 to 930 BC: The beginning of the Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) occurred sometime between these dates
- 890 BC: Approximate date for the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey
- 800 BC: Rise of Greek city-states
EXPANDED
Mesopotamia/Fertile Crescent/Cradle of Civilization
- Modern day Iraq
- Occupied by the Summerians of Sumer
- Eridu – 1st city
- City states without clear borders
- Pantheon of Gods much like Greek gods, but who also owned and ran the city
- First to develop writing – cuneiform – to record financial transactions
- Bribery was common (could bribe school teachers for better grades, could bribe ghosts)
- Utnapishtim – allegory story of Noah
- Priest & Priestess ran the city – En & Nin
- King – Lugal – foreign affairs, fortress, military –
- Culture of general fear and pessimism due to unpredictable flooding of the rivers
- First maths, 60 minute divisions, first writing, first laws (Hammurabi’s code)
- Semidic peoples that united the area after Sumer
- Epic of Gilgamesh – built walls of Uruk
Pantheon of Gods
- Anu – God of everything
- Ishtar Goddess of everything
- Shamash – Sun God
- Enlil – Storm & wind
Periodization
- Pre- and protohistory
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (10,000–8700 BC)
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (8700–6800)
- Hassuna (~6000 bc–? BC), Samarra (~5700 BC–4900 BC) and Halaf (~6000 BC–5300 BC) cultures
- Ubaid period (~5900–4400 BC)
- Uruk period (~4400–3100 BC)
- Jemdet Nasr period (~3100–2900 BC)[13]
- Early Bronze Age
- Early Dynastic period (~2900–2350 BC)
- Akkadian Empire (~2350–2100 BC)
- Ur III period (2112–2004 BC)
- Early Assyrian kingdom (24th to 18th century BC)
- Middle Bronze Age
- Early Babylonia (19th to 18th century BC)
- First Babylonian Dynasty (18th to 17th century BC)
- collapse: Minoan Eruption (c. 1620 BC)
- Late Bronze Age
- Middle Assyrian period (16th to 11th century BC)
- Assyrian Empire (c. 1365 BC–1076 BC)
- Kassite dynasty in Babylon, (c. 1595 BC–1155 BC)
- collapse: Bronze Age collapse (12th to 11th century BC)
- Iron Age
- Neo-Hittite or Syro-Hittite regional states (11th to 7th century BC)
- Neo-Assyrian Empire (10th to 7th century BC)
- Neo-Babylonian Empire (7th to 6th century BC)
- Classical Antiquity
- Persian Babylonia, Achaemenid Assyria (6th to 4th century BC)
- Seleucid Mesopotamia (4th to 3rd century BC)
- Parthian Babylonia (3rd century BC to 3rd century AD)
- Osroene (2nd century BC to 3rd century AD)
- Adiabene (1st to 2nd century AD)
- Hatra (1st to 2nd century AD)
- Roman Mesopotamia, Roman Assyria (2nd century AD)
- Late Antiquity
- Persian Mesopotamia, Persian Asuristan (Assyria) (3rd to 7th century AD)
- Arab Muslim conquest of Mesopotamia (mid-7th century AD)
Babylon
– Semitic Akkadian city-state of ancient Mesopotamia founded in 1894 BC
Assyrians
– Assyrians under Sargon II conquer Israel and there is a second mass exodus to southern Judah
Neo-Babylon – Chaldean Empire
– Post Assyrian Rule
– Nebuchadnezzar II (604–561 BC) made Babylon into one of the wonders of the ancient world, ordered the complete reconstruction of the imperial grounds, including rebuilding the Etemenanki ziggurat and the construction of the Ishtar Gate, Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Hitittes
– from Asia Minor (Turkey)
- Discovered iron
Phoenicians
Libians (Asia Minor)
The Persians
– United much of the middle east under Cyrus the Great
– Darius & the Achaemanids, son of Cyrus
– Xerxes, son of Darius & the battle of Thermopolese
Seleucid Dynasty
- Macedonians via Alexander the Great
The earliest civilizations in history were established in the region now known as the Middle East around 3500 BC by the Sumerians, in Mesopotamia (Iraq), widely regarded as the cradle of civilization. The Sumerians and the Akkadians (later known as Babylonians and Assyrians) all flourished in this region.
“In the course of the fourth millennium BC, city-states developed in southern Mesopotamia that were dominated by temples whose priests represented the cities’ patron deities. The most prominent of the city-states was Sumer, which gave its language to the area and became the first great civilization of mankind. About 2340 BC, Sargon the Great (c. 2360–2305 BC) united the city-states in the south and founded the Akkadian dynasty, the world’s first empire.”
Soon after the Sumerian civilization began, the Nile valley of ancient Egypt was unified under the Pharaohs in the 4th millennium BC, and civilization quickly spread through the Fertile Crescent to the west coast of the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the Levant. The Elamites, Hittites, Amorites, Phoenicians, Israelites and others later built important states in this region.
Assyrian empires
Mesopotamia was home to several powerful empires that came to rule almost the entire Middle East—particularly the Assyrian Empires of 1365–1076 BC and the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911–605 BC. The Assyrian Empire, at its peak, was the largest the world had seen. It ruled all of what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Cyprus, and Bahrain—with large swathes of Iran, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Sudan, and Arabia. “The Assyrian empires, particularly the third, had a profound and lasting impact on the Near East. Before Assyrian hegemony ended, the Assyrians brought the highest civilization to the then known world. From the Caspian to Cyprus, from Anatolia to Egypt, Assyrian imperial expansion would bring into the Assyrian sphere nomadic and barbaric communities, and would bestow the gift of civilization upon them.”
Persian empires
From the early 6th century BC onwards, several Persian states dominated the region, beginning with the Medes and non-Persian Neo-Babylonian Empire, then their successor the Achaemenid Empire known as the first Persian Empire, conquered in the late 4th century BC. by the very short-lived Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, and then successor kingdoms such as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid state in Western Asia.
After a century of hiatus, the idea of the Persian Empire was revived by the Central Asian Iranian Parthians in the 3rd century BC—and continued by their successors, the Sassanids from the 3rd century AD. This empire dominated sizable parts of what is now the Asian part of the Middle East and continued to influence the rest of the Asiatic and African Middle East region, until the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia in the mid-7th century CE. Eastern Rite, Church of the East Christianity took hold in Persian-ruled Mesopotamia, particularly in Assyria from the 1st century AD onwards, and the region became a center of a flourishing Syriac–Assyrian literary tradition.
Roman Empire
In the 1st century BC, the expanding Roman Republic absorbed the whole Eastern Mediterranean, which included much of the Near East. The Roman Empire united the region with most of Europe and North Africa in a single political and economic unit. Even areas not directly annexed were strongly influenced by the Empire, which was the most powerful political and cultural entity for centuries. Though Roman culture spread across the region, the Greek culture and language first established in the region by the Macedonian Empire continued to dominate throughout the Roman period. Cities in the Middle East, especially Alexandria, became major urban centers for the Empire and the region became the Empire’s “bread basket” as the key agricultural producer.
As the Christian religion spread throughout the Roman and Persian Empires, it took root in the Middle East, and cities such as Alexandria and Edessa became important centers of Christian scholarship. By the 5th century, Christianity was the dominant religion in the Middle East, with other faiths (gradually including heretical Christian sects) being actively repressed. The Middle East’s ties to the city of Rome were gradually severed as the Empire split into East and West, with the Middle East tied to the new Roman capital of Constantinople. The subsequent Fall of the Western Roman Empire therefore, had minimal direct impact on the region.
Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire)
The Eastern Roman Empire, today commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, ruling from the Balkans to the Euphrates, became increasingly defined by and dogmatic about Christianity, gradually creating religious rifts between the doctrines dictated by the establishment in Constantinople and believers in many parts of the Middle East. By this time, Greek had become the ‘lingua franca’ of the region, although ethnicities such as the Syriacs and the Hebrew continued to exist. Under Byzantine/Greek rule the area of the Levant met an era of stability and prosperity.
learn it all 