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Ancient Babylon
History of Babylonia
The city of Babylon was the capital of the ancient land of Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia. It was situated on the Euphrates River about 50 miles south of modern Baghdad, just north of what is now the modern Iraqi town of al-Hillah.

The tremendous wealth and power of this city, along with its monumental size and appearance, were certainly considered a Biblical myth, that is, until its foundations were unearthed and its riches substantiated during the 19th century. Archaeologists stood in awe as their discoveries revealed that certain stories in the Bible were an actual situation that had happened in time.
The Tower of Babel
The Bible reveals that all false systems of religion began in the land of Babylon and will have their consummation from the spirit of Babylon in the last days. It is interesting to note that every organized system of religion in the world today has traces of ancient Babylon. The Bible records in Genesis 10:10, that, after the great flood, all men spoke one common language and a man named Nimrod built a city and established a common religion. Nimrod was a descendant of Noah’s son, Ham. Genesis 11:1-9 describes the building of the city and its famous tower"whose top may reach unto heaven." It also records how God came down and punished the people’s arrogance by creating a confusion of different languages and possibly their racial distinctions. This way man would be forced to obey God’s original command to "be fruitful and fill the whole earth." It is interesting that the materials used to build the Tower of Babel were the same as those employed for the construction of the great ziggurat of Babylon and similar ziggurats, according to ancient building inscriptions.
Technology
The Babylonians inherited the technical achievements of the Sumerians in irrigation and agriculture. Maintaining the system of canals, dikes, weirs, and reservoirs constructed by their predecessors demanded considerable engineering knowledge and skill. Preparation of maps, surveys, and plans involved the use of leveling instruments and measuring rods. For mathematical and arithmetical purposes they used the Sumerian sexagesimal system of numbers, which featured a useful device of so-called place-value notation that resembles the present-day decimal system. Babylonian artisans were skilled in metallurgy, in the processes of fulling, bleaching, and dyeing, and in the preparation of paints, pigments, cosmetics, and perfumes. In the field of medicine, surgery was well known and often practiced.

Mathematics
Mathematics was another sphere in which the Babylonians excelled. Theoretical mathematics intrigued them and a large number of texts involving geometry and algebra of a quite sophisticated sort has been preserved. The theorems of Euclid and Pythagoras were already known in the Old Babylonian period.
As their civilization developed the Sumerians developed the need for a numerical system. They needed it for measurements and business transactions and for all the other requirements a civilized society has. From these beginnings Babylonian mathematics arose and was soon highly developed. The Sumerians and thus the Babylonians were one of the first peoples to have some fairly complex mathematics, some of which were not learned in parts of the world until recent centuries. Babylonian influence can still be clearly seen in such things as the measurement of time and degrees of angles.
The Babylonian numerical system was sexagesimal i.e. base sixty. This is why there are 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle. Strangely the Babylonians by the time of Hammurapi also had symbols for ten, one hundred and one thousand making their system part decimal. The Babylonians were very advanced for their time. They knew about square roots and completing the square and they knew the value of p quite accurately.
Legal System and writing
Law and justice were key concepts in the Babylonian way of life. Justice was administered by the courts, each of which consisted of from one to four judges. Often the elders of a town constituted a tribunal. The judges could not reverse their decisions for any reason, but appeals from their verdicts could be made to the king. Evidence consisted either of statements from witnesses or of written documents. To ensure that their legal, administrative, and economic institutions functioned effectively, the Babylonians used the cuneiform system of writing developed by their Sumerian predecessors. To train their scribes, secretaries, archivists, and other administrative personnel, they adopted the Sumerian system of formal education, under which secular schools served as the cultural centers of the land.
Code of Hammurapi
One of the main aspects of Babylonian culture was a codified system of law. Hammurapi’s famous code was the successor of earlier collections of laws going back to about 2050 BC. The Babylonians used art for the national celebration of great events and glorification of the gods. It was marked by stylized and symbolic representations, but it expressed realism and spontaneity in the depiction of animals.
This, the earliest known written legal code, was composed about 1780 B.C.E. by Hammurabi, the ruler of Bablyon. This text was excavated in 1901; it was carved on an eight foot high stone monolith. The harsh system of punishment expressed in this text prefigures the concept of 'an eye for an eye'. The Code lays out the basis of both criminal and civil law, and defines procedures for commerce and trade. This text was redacted for 1,500 years, and is considered the predecessor of Jewish and Islamic legal systems alike.
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Mesopotamia
The ancient Greeks named the area of the world's first civilization "Mesopotamia" which means "the land between the rivers" or "the land between two rivers." This name was appropriate because ancient Mesopotamia was located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the present-day Middle Eastern country of Iraq. The twin rivers actually begin in eastern Turkey, flow southeast, converge in southeast Iraq, and empty into the Persian Gulf. Although the hot dry climate mixed with seasonal flooding was difficult and challenging, the farmers of the area learned to control the flooding rivers and used the resulting fertility to produce crops such as barley, wheat, flax, and sesame. The fertile ground also supported many different kinds of fruit and vegetable crops.
Sumerians
The Sumerian civilization is the earliest known civilization on Earth. For the first time, people controlled their physical environments. The Sumerians knew that they had to control the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In the spring the rivers flooded, and when they receded, they left natural levees behind. The Sumerians built the levees higher and used them to keep back the floodwaters. In the summer, when the land was dry, the Sumerians poked holes in the levees. The river water ran through the holes and made irrigation channel in the soil. The Sumerians' crops were: barley, wheat, sesame, flax, fruit trees, date palms, and many different types of vegetables.
Bricks
There was no building stone and very little lumber in the desert where the Sumerians lived. To solve this problem, Sumerians use mud from the river mixed with crushed reeds to make bricks. They baked the bricks in the sun, and then used them to build their cities. Some great cities of Sumer were Ur and Uruk. The Sumerians were the first to build cities in this part of the world.
Ziggurats
Originally the temples at the center of each city-state were built on a platform. As time passed, these platform temples evolved into temple-towers called ziggurats. The ziggurat was the first major building structure of the Sumerians. Constructed of sun-baked mud bricks, the ziggurats were usually colorfully decorated with glazed fired bricks.
Plow
The plow was first introduced in Sumer. It was made of stone, and later copper. An innovation the Sumerians also invented was a plow with a seed funnel behind it. The Sumerians used hoes and spades to cultivate fields. These were made out of flint or copper. Sickles were made out of clay which was fired longer than normal. Public institutions such as the city temple and government owned most of the large land tracts and rented out their use and expensive tools like plows and animals to pull them.
References:
http://library.thinkquest.org/12096/frames/dunes/babylon.htm http://www.bible-history.com/babylonia/BabyloniaThe_Old_Babylonian_Period.htm http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa10 http://www.petoskeyschools.org/vandeventer.si.t/links/sumerian_culture_and_contributio.htm http://www.nlcs.k12.in.us/oljrhi/brown/mesopotamia/meso.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/J002807/Time%20and%20Time%20Again/Time%20and%20Time%20Again/mesosumer.html

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