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Mumbai professor to speak on ancient Ira
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) davidchibo@hotmail.com - Sunday, December 14 2003, 3:42:05 (EST)
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Mumbai professor to speak on ancient Iraq

By: Alpana Lath Sawai
December 14, 2003
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The first library and the first horoscope — these were given to us by the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation that also gave us astronomy and mathematics, says archaeologist and professor Shereen Ratnagar, who is lecturing on ancient Iraq tomorrow at Jai Hind College at 9 am.

“Mesopotamia — ancient Iraq — is one of the oldest civilisations in the world, and they invented many things, including writing,” she says.
The Mesopotamian civilisation was founded by the Sumerians.

“Mesopotamia had no high mountain frontiers on the north-west and west; there were only desert and semi-desert barriers but these were not impenetrable. However the cross-traffic of goods, migrants, trade, technology and languages due to invasions was made good use of.

So the influence of the Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians and Chaldeans who came conquering, was great.” But they were amalgamated and made part of the civilisation, and their contribution to it was great.

Here are five things to rouse your curiosity about this ancient civilisation:

1. Mesopotamians developed the earliest writing, writing on clay, which is why their writings are amongst the best preserved. “There were 500 different signs to learn, the writing was syllabic not alphabetical. Any one could learn to be a scribe, the schools were in the temples and priests’ houses,” says Ratnagar.

Public life ran on written records, and everything brought into the temple estate was recorded with the date and time. “There are substantial records of their lives,” says Ratnagar.

2. The first library of the world was created in Nineveh by Ashurbanipal, the king of all Assyria. He collected thousands of clay tablets full of stories, prayers, instructions, history, science, medicine, and law.

Says Ratnagar, “The Assyrian kings wrote elaborate notes to the gods documenting what they did each year. Many of those are still preserved.”

3. They had a sense of history, and may well have been the first archaeologists. “They had a sense of their past. They repaired temples and if they came across tablets written by people before them, they would have these repaired and restored,” says Ratnagar.

4. It was the land that saw the first cities. “Their cities were 450 hectares, while Mohenjodaro was only about 150 hectares,” says Ratnagar, “there were lots of temples to different gods, and the temple of the patron deity was the biggest.”

5. Although the land here was technically a desert, it had the highest agricultural productivity in the world. Says Ratnagar, “The seed to yield ratio in Mesopotamia was 1:76 while in Rome it was just 1:10.

The Mesopotamians had invented a technique of ploughing and seeding at the same time, and there was enormous fertility in the soil.”

The lecture is open to all.



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