Civilizations Case

At the end of the Ice Age, happenings began to alter the effect upon the people and the land. When the ice melted from the Ice Age, the ice caused flooding to shield the lowland zones, new crops began to develop, and the changing weather formed an environment that made people want to live in one place. The development of agriculture aided people to live in settlements and create communities, which led to the first civilizations. The first civilizations were distinguished by a class category of rich and poor people, and a characteristic of who was an administrator, priests, ruler, or specialist. Individuals constructed the first civilizations around rivers such as Jericho, Catal Huyuk, and Stonehenge because the rivers provided resources, which in turn became a catalyst for development.

The earliest civilization established after 3000 B.C.E was Mesopotamia, the "Land between Rivers." Mesopotamia was located in the Middle East, which is the present location of Iraq. In the course of the fourth millennium B.C., city-states developed in southern Mesopotamia that were dominated by temples whose priests represented the cities' patron deities. The most protuberant of Mesopotamia was the city-state of Sumer. A priest-king ruled the monarchy by leading the military, administering trade, judging disputes, and interacting in the most important religious formalities. The main appeal of the Sumerian government was bureaucracy; the kingdom effectively held power over large areas of land and diverse people by having an efficient middle management. To be sure that the mechanism of middle management operated efficiently, record-keeping was invented to make the bureaucrat's life easier. The Sumerians were the first to create a form of writing known as pictographs on clay tablets that became known as cuneiform. The Sumerians, who built the first cities of the world on the Euphrates and Tigris River, enclosed the cities with large walls and insisted that the people residing in the cities use irrigation to water their crops. The construction of large walls around the cities resulted in the Sumerians going to war with the Akkadians. The Akkadians were Semitic people, who spoke a language related to Hebrew and Arabic. When the two monarchs clashed, the Sumerians slowly lost control of the city-states they had constructed and went under supremacy of the Akkadian kingdom, which was located in Akkad, the city that soon became Babylon.

The second major civilization was in Babylon were the infamous ruler of the Old Babylonian dynasty resided. Hammurabi created a law code, known as the Code of Hammurabi, which was the first written legal document. Sumerian law represented by the Code of Hammurabi was a law of meticulous retaliation, known as lex talionis. This vengeance is also known: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life," and reveals to humans that the law has as its essential basis of vengeance. The