Mesopotamia, << `mehs` uh puh TAY mee uh, >> was an ancient region in which the world’s earliest civilization developed. Mesopotamia included the area that is now Iraq, eastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. It extended from the Taurus Mountains in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, and from the Zagros Mountains in the east to the Syrian Desert in the west. The heart of the region was the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The name Mesopotamia comes from a later Greek word meaning between rivers.
Northern Mesopotamia was a plateau with a mild climate. Parts of it received enough rain for crops to grow. In southern Mesopotamia, a plain of fertile soil left by floodwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers provided rich farmland. But the long, hot summers and little rain in this area made irrigation necessary for agriculture.
The oldest known communities in northern Mesopotamia were villages established in the Zagros foothills between 9000 and 7000 B.C. By about 5000 B.C., village settlement had spread to the lower flood plain and southern marshlands. The cultural groups that formed these early settlements were probably the indigenous (native) ancestors of the Sumerian civilization. About 3500 B.C., people living in southern Mesopotamia built the world’s first cities. They invented the first system of writing about 3300 B.C. The term Sumerian came to refer to these people, and the region they inhabited was later called Sumer. However, there is no clear evidence that the Sumerians were a distinct ethnic group.
During the 2300’s B.C., people originally from the west called Akkadians conquered Sumer. The invaders spoke a Semitic language called Akkadian, which was related to Arabic and Hebrew. The Akkadians and other groups that spoke Semitic languages helped form states and empires that ruled Mesopotamia for much of the period between 2300 and 539 B.C.
In 539 B.C., Mesopotamia became part of the Persian Empire. The Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great conquered the Persians in 331 B.C. Later, the Seleucids, Parthians, Romans, Sasanians, Arabs, and Mongols ruled different parts of Mesopotamia. In the A.D. 1500’s, the Ottoman Empire began to take control of the region. The Ottomans ruled Mesopotamia until the British occupied the area during World War I (1914-1918). In 1921, most of Mesopotamia became part of the newly created nation of Iraq.
