Legacy of the Mesopotamians

**Cypress** · 07-09-2019, 02:37 PM

It may not be welcome news to xenophobes, bigots, and white christian nationalists, but Western civilization owes more to the ancient peoples of Iraq and Syria than I imagined.

The Mesopotamians left an incredible legacy to the world.

They invented the very idea of writing and built the world’s first cities.

They wrote down the earliest laws, and created a judicial system that prized evidence and fairness, a system that still influences us today.

They created mechanisms of diplomacy that never stopped being used.

Looking to the stars, they figured out how to calculate the dates of eclipses and anticipated the movements of the planets. Many achievements credited to the Greeks had their origins long before in Mesopotamia, like the calculation of the sides of a right angle triangle. The innovation of the phalanx formation in battle and the names of the constellations were also owed to the Mesopotamians.

One Mesopotamian innovation has an impact on our lives every single day. Mesopotamian mathematics was based on the number 60. For example, their system of weights had 60 shekels in a mina, which weighed about a pound, and 60 minas in a talent. This was convenient because 60 divides up easily into many different fractions. That influence remains today in the form of 360 degrees in a circle, 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour.

Source credit: Amanda H. Podany, Ph.D., Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University

**Cypress** · 08-22-2019, 10:55 AM

The Greeks always get the lion's share of the credit for being foundational for Western civilization, but much of what the Greeks knew and learned came from the Levant and from Mesopotamia.

Pythagoras is heralded in the pantheon of mathematics, but the Babylonians knew about the pythagorean theorem more than a thousand years before Pythagoras, and the Babylonians were solving quadratic equations with geometric methods when the ancestral-Greeks were still barbarians in the steppes of central Asia.

If I am reincarnated, my next career will be as archaeologist >>

Archaeologists at Tigris Uncover Grand Palace Ruins of a Mysterious Ancient Empire

The ruins of a palace dating back to the Bronze Age have been uncovered by archaeologists on the banks of the Tigris river – described by some as a "sensation" of a discovery, it could reveal new details about the mysterious Mittani Empire.

Although the Mittani dominated swathes of northern Mesopotamia and Syria between 1500 and 1300 BCE, we don't know much about them. This ancient palace could help fill some gaps in that period of history.

"The find is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the region in recent decades and illustrates the success of the Kurdish-German cooperation," says archaeologist Hasan Ahmed Qasim from the University of Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan.

https://www.sciencealert.com/archaeo...e-tigris-river

**evince** · 08-22-2019, 10:59 AM

ISIS has destroyed all sorts of historical sites

evil hates knowledge

**Cypress** · 08-22-2019, 11:06 AM

Originally Posted by evince

ISIS has destroyed all sorts of historical sites

evil hates knowledge

The destruction to our archaeological heritage is really disconcerting. The blame has to be put on radical extremists and terrorist gangs who falsely claim to speak for Islam.

But I am sure garden-variety looters looking to make a fast buck have caused extensive damage. That particular blame goes to George Dumbya Bush for invading and de-stabilizing the Middle EAst.