The most ancient peoples of Mesopotamia created a high culture, which formed the basis of the later - Babylonian. As the diverse ties between peoples strengthened, the achievements of the Sumerians and Akkadians became the property of other countries and peoples. These achievements had a huge impact on the further cultural development of all mankind.

Writing and science.

The greatest achievement of the culture of the peoples of Mesopotamia was the creation of writing, the beginnings of which appeared among the Sumerians as early as the middle of the 4th millennium BC. e. With the birth of the state, which needed more or less orderly correspondence for administration, these rudiments turned into a genuine letter.

The beginning of Sumerian writing goes back to pictorial writing. Written characters, attested by the most ancient monuments, can be easily erected to their original pictorial image. These signs depicted a person and parts of his body, tools, weapons, boats, animals, birds, fish, plants, fields, waters, mountains, stars, etc.

The further development of writing consisted in the fact that pictograms (drawing signs) turned into ideograms, that is, such written signs, the content of which no longer coincided with their pictorial image. So, for example, the drawing of a foot began to mean as an ideogram all the actions associated with the legs - “walk”, “stand”, even “wear”, etc. Sumerian writing began to develop in another direction. Along with ideograms from pictograms, phonograms began to develop. Thus, the pictogram of a milk pot received the sound value "ga", because the syllable "ga" corresponded to the Sumerian word for milk. The abundance of monosyllabic words in the Sumerian language gave rise to several hundred characters denoting syllables and several alphabetic characters corresponding to vowels. Syllabic and alphabetic signs were used mainly to convey grammatical indicators, function words and particles.

With the development of writing, the pictorial character of the Sumerian written characters gradually disappeared. The main writing material in Mesopotamia from the very beginning was clay tiles, or tablets. When writing on clay, the drawings were simplified, turning into combinations of straight lines. Since at the same time they pressed the clay surface with the corner of a rectangular stick, as a result, these lines acquired the characteristic form of wedge-shaped depressions; a written sign in cursive was turned into a combination of "wedges". The Sumerian cuneiform script thus created was adopted by the Akkadian Semites, who adapted it to their language. Subsequently, the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform writing spread to many Asian countries of the ancient East.

The needs of temple accounting and the development of the Sumerian building art required the expansion of mathematical knowledge. The fact that mathematical thought in Sumer experienced a flourishing period is evidenced by the perfection of the reporting documents of the scribes of the III dynasty of Ur. Only the achievements of mathematics of that time can explain the subsequent development of mathematical knowledge in the scribe schools of Mesopotamia during the time of the 1st Babylonian dynasty (the first half of the 2nd millennium BC).

Sumerian scientific terms are also found in abundance in texts devoted not only to mathematics, but also to other scientific disciplines studied in the scribal schools of Babylon, such as astronomy, chemistry, etc. Therefore, we have the right to assert that the scribes of Sumer, as and Egypt, laid the foundation for the development of scientific thought in antiquity.

Religion.

Each Sumerian territorial community revered its own local patron god, who was, as it were, the universal personification of all those higher powers that rule over people's lives. Such a deity was usually considered the patron of agriculture.

In irrigated agriculture, the luminaries and observations of them played an important role, and therefore in ancient Sumer they began early to associate the gods with individual stars and constellations. In Sumer's letter, the pictogram of a star served as a designation for the concept of "god".

An important role in Sumerian religion the mother goddess played, the patroness of agriculture, fertility and childbearing, whose cult basically dates back to the time of the domination of the maternal family. There were several such local goddesses, such as Inanna, the goddess of the city of Uruk. Together with Inanna, the parent of all that exists, the god Dumuzi, the “true child”, was revered in the Semitic transmission - Tammuz. It was a dying and resurrecting god who personified the fate of the grain. The cult of the dying and resurrecting gods of vegetation dates back to the time of the established predominance of agriculture.

In the worldview of the Sumerians, and then the Akkadian Semites, an important role was played by the deification of those forces of nature, the importance of which was especially great for agriculture - sky, earth, water. These basic forces of nature in religion were personified in fantastic images three main gods. These were the sky god An, the earth god Enlil and the water god Enki or Ea.

These deities were revered throughout Mesopotamia, although the center of Enlil's veneration was Nippur, which became a common Sumerian sanctuary, the center of Enki's cult - the city of Eridu. Outside their cities, the main god of the city of Sippara, the sun god Shamash (Sumerian Utu), the main god of the city Ura-Sin, identified with the Moon, and others were also revered.

Initially, Sumerian society did not know the priesthood as a special class. The tops of the priesthood, who were in charge of the economy of the temples and performed the main rites of the cult, were representatives of the nobility, and technical performers cult, the lower temple staff, most often came out of the people. Temple scribes, who preserved and developed writing, acquired great importance.

Religion sanctified the existing social order; the ruler of the city-state was considered a descendant of the gods and the representative of the city god in the state. But the religion of the Sumerians did not yet know the desire to reconcile the oppressed masses with their hard lot on earth with the promise of rewards in the “other world”. Faith in heaven, in a heavenly reward for earthly suffering, apparently never developed in the ancient Mesopotamia. A number of myths depict the futility of man's attempts to achieve immortality.

Some myths of the ancient Sumerians (about the creation of the world, about the Flood, etc.) "had a great influence on the mythology of other peoples, in particular on the mythology of the ancient Jews, and are preserved in a slightly modified form in religious beliefs modern Christians.

The Akkadian Semites, apparently, did not have their own clearly defined hierarchy of gods. Like other Semitic tribes, they called the god of their tribe the lord (bel), and the goddess of the tribe - simply the goddess (ashtar). Having settled in Mesopotamia, they adopted all the main features of the Sumerian religion. The gods of sky and water continued to be called by their Sumerian names: Anu and Ea; Enlil, along with his Sumerian name, began to bear the name Bel.

Literature.

A large number of monuments of Sumerian literature have come down to us, mainly in copies copied after the fall of the III dynasty of Ur and stored in the temple library in the city of Nippur. Unfortunately, due in part to the difficulty of the Sumerian literary language, partly due to the poor condition of the texts (some tablets were found broken into dozens of pieces, now stored in museums various countries) these works have only recently been read.

Most of them are religious myths and legends. Of particular interest are several small poems containing legends about the origin of agriculture and civilization, the creation of which is attributed to the gods. These poems also raise the question of the comparative value for humans of agriculture and pastoralism, which probably reflects the relatively recent transition of the Sumerian tribes to an predominantly agricultural way of life.

The myth of the goddess Inanna, imprisoned in the underworld kingdom of death and freed from there, is distinguished by extremely archaic features; along with her return to earth, life that was frozen returns. This myth reflected the change of the growing season and the "dead" period in the life of nature.

There were also hymns addressed to various deities, historical poems (for example, a poem about the victory of the Uruk king over the Guteis). The largest work of Sumerian religious literature is a poem written in deliberately intricate language about the construction of the temple of the god Ningirsu by the ruler of Lagash, Gudea. This poem was written on two clay cylinders, each about a meter high. A number of poems of a moral and instructive nature have been preserved.

literary monuments folk art little has come down to us. Such folk works as fairy tales have perished for us. Only a few fables and proverbs survive.

The most important monument of Sumerian literature is the cycle of epic tales about the hero Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu. The most complete text of the great epic poem about Gilgamesh has been preserved written down in the Akkadian language. But the records of primary individual epics about Gilgamesh that have come down to us irrefutably testify to the Sumerian origin of the epic.

Gilgamesh in the epic appears as the king of the city of Uruk, the son of a mortal and the goddess Ninsun. King Gilgamesh, a representative of the first royal dynasty of the city of Uruk, is mentioned in the royal lists of the 3rd dynasty of Ur. Subsequent tradition, thus, preserved the memory of him as a historical person.

Sumerian epics about Gilgamesh indisputably prove folk character this epic. So, in the primary Sumerian epics, not only the hero Enkidu, but also representatives of the people act as associates of Gilgamesh during his exploits: 50 people from among the “children of the city”, that is, the people of the city of Uruk, help Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the campaign against the country of the cedar forest (Lebanon), guarded by the monster Huwawa. In the epic about the struggle of Gilgamesh with the king of Kish Akka, it is said that Gilgamesh rejected the demand of the king of Kish to perform irrigation work for him, and in this regard he was supported by the assembly of the people of the city of Uruk. As for the nobility, they gathered in a council of elders and cowardly advised Gilgamesh to submit to the king of Kish.

At the heart of this epic lies, apparently, the historical fact of the struggle of Uruk for its independence with the powerful city-state of Kish in the north.

The cycle of tales about Gilgamesh had a great influence on the surrounding peoples. It was adopted by the Akkadian Semites, and from them it spread to Northern Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. There were also cycles of epic songs dedicated to various other heroes.

An important place in the literature and worldview of the Sumerians was occupied by the legends of the flood, by which the gods allegedly destroyed all life, and only the pious hero Ziusudra was saved in the ship built on the advice of the god Enki. The legends about the flood, which served as the basis for the corresponding biblical legend, took shape under the undoubted influence of memories of catastrophic floods, which in the 4th millennium BC. e. many Sumerian settlements were destroyed more than once.

Architecture and art.

The wealth of the ruling class was reflected in the powerful and widespread building activity of the kings. Intensive construction, which covered the country with temples and palaces, was possible due to the presence of numerous slave prisoners of war, as well as the use of the labor of the free population. However, in Mesopotamia, unlike Egypt, due to local natural conditions, stone construction did not exist, and all buildings were built from raw brick.

Unlike Egypt, the funeral cult did not develop here to such an extent and nothing like the stone masses of the pyramids or the burial structures of the Egyptian nobility was built. But, having huge funds at their disposal, the architects of Sumer and Akkad erected grandiose stepped temple-towers (ziggurats). In the architecture of Mesopotamia, columns have been found since ancient times, which, however, did not play a big role, as well as vaults. Quite early, the technique of dismembering walls by ledges and niches, as well as ornamenting walls with friezes made in mosaic technique, appears.

Sumerian sculptors created statues of gods and representatives of the nobility, as well as reliefs (for example, the “Kite Stele”). However, if even during the period of the Dzhemdet-Nasr culture, Sumerian artists managed to achieve certain successes in conveying the image of a person, then during the existence of the early city-states, rough schematization dominates - a person is depicted either unnaturally squat or in unnaturally elongated proportions, with exaggerated eyes, nose etc. Also in the art of stone-cutting, the image is subject to geometric patterns. The sculptors of the Akkadian dynasty far surpassed the early Sumerian sculptors, being able, in particular, to depict living beings in motion. The reliefs of the time of Sargon and especially the time of his grandson Naramsin amaze with their artistic skill. One of the most remarkable artistic monuments is the Naramsin stele, dedicated to the victory over the mountain tribes. The relief depicts the drama of the battle in the mountainous terrain where this battle took place.

The applied art of Akkad also stood at a high altitude. Particularly noteworthy are the artistically executed images of plots from myths and epics, carved on cylinder seals from colored stone. Obviously, the artists of this period did not lose touch with folk art Mesopotamia.

The art of Lagash during the time of Gudea (as, for example, in the portrait statues of Gudea himself made of hard stone - diorite) and the time of the III dynasty of Ur, undoubtedly used the best examples of Akkadian art. However, since the III Dynasty of Ur, dead, canonical schemes of images have been established in art, monotonous religious plots have prevailed.

The peoples of Mesopotamia created a number of instruments - a pipe, a flute, a tambourine, a harp, etc. According to the monuments that have come down to us, these instruments were used in the temple cult. They were played by special priests who also acted as singers.

Introduction

Culture is one of the most ancient phenomena human life. It arose and developed together with man, making up what qualitatively distinguishes him from all other living beings and nature as a whole. However, interest in its study and comprehension as a special phenomenon of reality has developed relatively recently. For a long time - for millennia - culture existed as something taken for granted, unconscious, inseparable from man and society and not requiring any special, close attention.

Culturology - humanities studying culture as a system, i.e. generally. It originated at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and was widely recognized in Europe and around the world. Cultural studies began to develop in our country in the early 90s.

In general, culturology has not yet reached a completely mature level and is in its infancy.

Culture of Mesopotamia

The culture of Mesopotamia arose around the same time as that of Egypt. It developed in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and existed from 4 thousand BC. e. until the middle of the 6th century BC. e. Unlike the Egyptian culture of Mesopotamia was not homogeneous, it was formed in the process of multiple interpenetration of several ethnic groups and peoples, and therefore was multilayer . The main inhabitants of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Chaldeans in the south; Assyrians, Hurrians and Arameans in the north. The cultures of Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria reached the greatest development and significance.

The origin of the Sumerian ethnos is still a mystery. It is only known that in 4 thousand. BC. the southern part of Mesopotamia is inhabited by the Sumerians and lay the foundations for the entire subsequent civilization of this region. Like the Egyptian, this civilization was river. By the beginning of 3 thousand BC. in the south of Mesopotamia, several city-states appear, the main of which are Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Larsa and others. They alternately play a leading role in the unification of the country.

The history of Sumer knew several ups and downs. The 24th - 23rd centuries BC deserve special mention, when the rise Semitic city of Akkad north of Sumer. Under King Sargon the Ancient, Akkad managed to subjugate all of Sumer to his power. The Akkadian language replaces the Sumerian, and becomes the main language throughout Mesopotamia. Semitic art also has a great influence on the entire region. In general, the significance of the Akkadian period in the history of Sumer turned out to be so significant that some authors call the entire culture given period Sumero-Akkadian.

Culture of the Sumerian-Akkadian state

The basis of the Sumerian economy was agriculture with a developed irrigation system. Hence it is clear why one of the main monuments of Sumerian culture was the "Land Owner's Almanac", containing instructions on farming - how to maintain soil fertility and avoid clogging it. Cattle breeding was also important. Sumerian metallurgy reached a high level. Already at the beginning of 3 thousand. BC. the Sumerians began to manufacture bronze tools, and at the end of 2000. BC. entered the Iron Age.

From the middle of 3 thousand. BC. potter's wheel is used in the manufacture of dishes. Other crafts are successfully developing - weaving, stone-cutting, blacksmithing. Extensive trade and exchange take place both between the Sumerian cities and with other countries - Egypt, Iran, India, the states of Asia Minor.

The importance of Sumerian writing should be emphasized. The cuneiform script invented by the Sumerians turned out to be the most successful and effective. Improved in 2 thousand. BC. Phoenicians, it formed the basis of almost all modern alphabets.

The system of religious and mythological ideas and cults of Sumer partly echoes the Egyptian one. In particular, it also contains the myth of a dying and resurrecting God, which is the God Dumuzi. As in Egypt, the ruler of the city-state was declared a descendant of God and was perceived as an earthly God. At the same time, there were noticeable differences between the Sumerian and Egyptian systems. So among the Sumerians, the funeral cult, belief in the afterlife did not acquire great importance. Equally, the priests among the Sumerians did not become a special layer that played a huge role in public life. In general, the Sumerian system religious beliefs seems less complicated.

As a rule, each city-state had its patron God. However, there were gods who were revered throughout Mesopotamia. Behind them stood those forces of nature, the importance of which for agriculture was especially great - sky, earth and water. These were the sky god An, the earth god Enlil and the water god Enki. Some stars were associated with individual stars or constellations. It is noteworthy that in the Sumerian writing, the pictogram of a star meant the concept of "God". Of great importance in the Sumerian religion was the Mother Goddess, the patroness of agriculture, fertility and childbearing. There were several such goddesses, one of which was the goddess Inanna, the patroness of the city of Uruk. Some Sumerian myths - about the creation of the world, about the global flood - had a strong influence on the mythology of other peoples, including Christian ones.

In the artistic culture of Sumer, architecture was the leading art. Unlike the Egyptians, the Sumerians did not know stone construction, and all structures were made of raw brick. Due to the swampy terrain, buildings were erected on artificial platforms - embankments. From the middle of 3 thousand. BC. The Sumerians were the first to widely use arches and vaults in construction.

The first monuments of architecture were two temples, White and Red, discovered in Uruk and dedicated to the main deities of the city - the god Anu and the goddess Inanna. Both temples are rectangular in plan, with ledges and niches, decorated with relief images in the "Egyptian style". Another significant monument is the small temple of the fertility goddess Ninhursag at Ur. It was built using the same architectural forms, but decorated not only with relief but also with round sculpture. In the niches of the walls there were copper figurines of copper gobies, and on the friezes there were high reliefs of lying gobies. At the entrance to the temple - two statues of lions made of wood. All this made the temple festive and elegant.

In Sumer, a peculiar type of religious building developed - a ziggurat, which was a stepped, rectangular tower. On the upper platform of the ziggurat there was usually a small temple - "the dwelling of God." Sumerian literature reached a high level. In addition to the aforementioned "agricultural almanac", the most significant literary monument was the Epic of Gilgamesh. This epic poem tells about a man who saw everything, experienced everything, and knew everything, and who was close to unraveling the mystery of immortality.

By the end of 3000 BC. Sumer gradually falls into decay, and, in the end, Babylonia conquers it.

The ancient Egyptian civilization developed in contact with the ancient states of Mesopotamia (Mesopotamia), which existed from the 4th millennium BC. until the middle of the VI century. BC, that is, approximately simultaneously with Ancient Egypt. However, if the ancient Egyptian civilization can be regarded as homogeneous and stable, then the history of Mesopotamia is a series of successively changing civilizations, that is, it was multilayered. The neighbors of Ancient Egypt were the states of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Elam, Urartu, Hatti, Babylon and New Babylon, etc. The main inhabitants of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Arameans and other peoples. greatest flourishing and influence reached the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations.

There are reasons to consider all civilizations of Mesopotamia as single complex because they have a lot in common. The cradle of civilization was a long and narrow strip of land along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. At the turn of IV-III millennium BC. city-states appeared on this territory, the predecessors of the Greek city-states, but which had a different political structure and economic structure). Almost all of them were closely connected with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the civilization of this region was no less ancient than the Egyptian. The states that existed in the region were typically oriental despotisms.

In the states of the Two Rivers there were many cities, wide enough internal and transit trade was developed . The latter was not characteristic of Ancient Egypt. The development of trade in Mesopotamia was caused by a number of circumstances. Although the lands of this region were distinguished by fertility, it was difficult to maintain it in the conditions of unfavorable river floods. Therefore, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia sought to develop trade and develop new lands. In addition, repeated destruction of cities as a result of wars and severe floods led to the fact that irrigation canals were not regularly cleared of sand, the soil was not washed with water and lost fertility. To overcome these difficulties, the inhabitants of the region found a way out in the development of trade and the development of new lands.

The history and culture of Mesopotamia was more dynamic than in Egypt. The states of the region throughout their history have established trade relations with their nearest and distant neighbors, bringing ivory and colored stones from India, gold jewelry and cereal products from Egypt, antimony, tin and copper from the cities of Asia Minor and the Caucasus mountains.

The ancient eastern civilizations of Mesopotamia remind of their former existence in two ways - visual , in the form of various tangible cultural monuments, and written . Visual and written images allow us to develop hypotheses, hypothetical judgments about the culture of the people, the state, the level of economic, political, social, cultural development of civilization with a greater degree of reliability.

If a ancient Egyptian civilization preserved visual and written images , then civilizations of Mesopotamia , especially Sumero-Babylonian, mostly written . Quantitatively, the written monuments of the culture of the region surpass the material monuments. If in ancient Egypt stone was mainly used in construction, then in Mesopotamia - raw brick. If the waters of the Nile flowed relatively calmly, especially in the lower reaches, and during floods they carried fertile silt, then the Tigris and Euphrates were capricious, carried a lot of sand and clay, and their floods were destructive for buildings made of raw brick. Apparently, the floods were so strong and destructive that it was in Mesopotamia that the myth of the Flood was born, which killed all sinful people and eventually passed into the Old Testament of the Bible.

Sumero-Babylonian culture can be called written. Clay, with appropriate processing, turned out to be a material that became not the only, but reliable storage ancient word. At the disposal of specialist scientists were hundreds of thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that could be read. A significant part of the archives of cuneiform tablets that have come down to our time consists of economic, administrative and legal documents that make it possible to judge the history of society - its social structure, economic condition, and level of culture.

At the end of the IV millennium BC. tribes of unknown ethnic origin came to the Euphrates valley - the Sumerians, or Sumerians. They mastered the swampy but very fertile alluvial valley of the Euphrates, and then the more capricious Tigris: they drained the swamps, coped with the irregular, at times catastrophic floods of the Euphrates by creating an artificial irrigation system. The Sumerians formed the first city-states in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian period of history covers about one and a half thousand years, ended at the end of the 3rd - beginning of the 2nd millennium BC.

When the Sumerians came to Mesopotamia, they already knew how to make pottery and smelt copper from ore. But the most, perhaps, the main achievement of the people was the invention at the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. writing. Until now, Sumerian writing is considered the most ancient on Earth.

Obviously, the higher level of culture of the Sumerians allowed them to influence their neighbors - the Akkadian Semites. The southern part of Mesopotamia, inhabited by the Sumerians, was called the country Sumer , the northern part - the country Akkad , by the name of the people - Akkadians. The language of the country of Akkad was a branch of the ancient Semitic language of the Semitic branch of the Afroasian languages, which included the ancient Egyptian language. To the east of the country of Sumer, in the mountains near the Persian Gulf, there was a state Elam with the capital city of Susa (modern Iranian city of Shush). The ruins of city fortifications, palaces, tombs, reliefs, steles with inscriptions, etc. have been preserved. The northern part of Mesopotamia was called the country Ashur , or Assyria , whose capital from the middle of the II millennium BC. there was the city of Ashur (in Iraq ruins have been preserved from it), and then Nineveh. The Assyrians were the first in the region to learn how to ride a horse, they knew how to smelt iron from ore and make weapons from it. North of Assyria was a state Urartu with the capital Tushpa on the shores of Lake Van (now the city of Van in Turkey), from which the citadel and steles with inscriptions have been preserved.

kingdoms that arose in Mesopotamia sometimes existed for several tens of centuries, but died mainly "from bureaucratic decay "So, in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC, the Akkadians established themselves in the south of Mesopotamia. In the 22nd century BC, the Akkadian ruler Sargon the Ancient, or the Great, unites Mesopotamia into a single state. In the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, the main role in Mesopotamia begins to be played by the Babylonians - a people who spoke Akkadian and was formed as a result of the merger of the Sumerians and Akkadians. By that time, the Sumerian language was already a dead language and played approximately the same role in Babylonian culture as Latin in medieval Europe.

Around 1750 BC The king of Babylon, Hammurabi, united all Mesopotamia. Under him was created code of laws (known in history as laws King Hammurabi) in which an attempt was made legally streamline the settlement system , enter guarantee of legal protection of property of the population , establish the principle of equal liability . True, sometimes barbarism emanates from this principle. So, a builder was punished with death if the house he built collapsed, and its owner died; the doctor who failed to carry out the operation had to cut off his hand.

The laws turned out to be acceptable to most peoples of the multi-tribal empire of Hammurabi. They contained articles devoted to the legal regulation of property and settlement documents. So, cases were not accepted for trial if the contract was concluded without witnesses, or if the plaintiff and the defendant did not draw up the contract. The judge was punished if he made a decision that contradicted the obligations under the document with the seal. The code of laws established wages according to various types works and services. For non-fulfillment of debt obligations and loans, losses incurred should be compensated, etc.

After 1600 BC The Babylonian kingdom collapsed and was owned by the Hittites, Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans (Arameans), Persians, Macedonians, and in the period of modern chronology - Parthians, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks.

At the end of the IX-VII centuries. BC. the most powerful state of Western Asia was Assyria, which subjugated the entire Mesopotamia and extended its influence to Asia Minor, the Mediterranean, and even at one time to Egypt. Under the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, a library was assembled (30 thousand cuneiform tablets) - a large collection of cuneiform texts. The library contained texts in Akkadian and Aramaic (the official languages ​​of Assyria), texts and dictionaries in Sumerian, Egyptian, Phoenician and other languages, as well as texts from Elam. Assembly of Ashurbanipal in 612 BC suffered greatly during the Assyrian war with the Babylonians and Medes. The remains of the library were found in the middle of the 19th century. in the former capital of Assyria - Nineveh (now the northern regions of Iraq).

The last pages of the history of Mesopotamia were connected with Babylon. At the end of the 7th century BC. The Babylonians, together with their Mede neighbors, defeated Assyria. Having existed for about a hundred years, the Neo-Babylonian kingdom in 538 BC. fell under the blows of the Persian troops.

Thus, over the centuries, empires arose and perished on the territory of Mesopotamia, but only, perhaps, cuneiform remained unchanged - the dominant writing system of the region, which acted as a kind of unifying factor. Around 3000 BC the Sumerians began to convey the names of individual specific objects with images and general concepts. The number of characters was about a thousand. Signs were milestones for memory, fixing the most important moments of the transmitted thought, but not coherent speech. They gradually associated with certain words. This already allowed them to be used to denote sound combinations. So, the sign "legs" could convey not only the meaning of the verbs "walk", "stand", "bring", etc., but also the syllabic meaning. Verbal-syllabic writing developed by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. into a single system.

The Akkadians, and then the Babylonians and Assyrians adapted cuneiform for their Semitic language (mid-2nd millennium BC), reducing the number of common signs to 350 and creating new syllabic meanings that corresponded to the Akkadian phonetic system. However, Sumerian ideograms and spellings of individual words and expressions also continued to be used in the Akkadian system. The Akkadian system of cuneiform writing went beyond Mesopotamia and was used by other languages ​​- Elem, Urartian, etc.

A huge number of cuneiform monuments and texts have survived (in the form of prisms, cylinders, stone slabs, tablets): business and economic documents, historical inscriptions, dictionaries, scientific works, religious and magical texts. Their deciphering began at the beginning of the 19th century. Through the efforts of English, Irish, German and French scientists, Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, as well as Hittite and Urartian cuneiform belonging to the Akkadian system, were deciphered.

In the most general terms, the literary monuments of Mesopotamia can be represented as follows:

* beginning of III millennium BC - the first texts in the Sumerian language: lists of gods, records of hymns, proverbs, sayings, some myths;

* Late III - early II millennium BC - the bulk of currently known literary monuments: hymns, myths, prayers, epics, ritual songs, school and didactic texts, funerary elegies, catalogs-lists of works (the titles of 87 monuments, i.e. more than a third, are known to us); the first literary texts in Akkadian; the Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh; the legend of the flood; translations from Sumerian;

* End of II millennium BC - creation of a general literary religious canon; the bulk of the monuments known to us in the Akkadian language (poem about the creation of the world, hymns and prayers, spells, didactic literature);

* middle of the 1st millennium BC - Assyrian libraries (library of Ashurbanipal); the main version of the Epic of Gilgamesh; royal inscriptions, prayers and other works.

Until now, experts in Sumerology and Assyrology have been publishing new texts and interpreting them. Thus, Sumerologists, for example, continue to face the task of understanding written monuments. Apparently, for the time being, Sumero-Babylonian and Assyrian literature can be regarded as something intermediate between authorial literature (although mostly unnamed) and folklore, on the one hand, and between literature and written monuments, on the other.

The civilizations of Mesopotamia had their own pantheons of gods. Information about them can be obtained both from written sources (myths, hymns, prayers, etc.), starting from the 3rd millennium BC, and on the basis of fine art materials that date back to the 6th millennium BC .

It can be assumed that by the time the first Sumerian city-states were formed, ideas about an anthropomorphic deity had formed. The patron deities of the community were, first of all, the personification of the creative and productive forces of nature, with which the ideas about the power of the leader of the tribe-community were combined, which he apparently combined with the functions of a priest. From the first written sources (late IV - early II millennium BC), the names (or symbols) of the goddess are known Inanna (the deity of the city of Uruk, the goddess of fertility, love and strife, the central female image, which passed into the Akkadian pantheon), gods Enlil (common Sumerian god, patron of the city of Nippur, son of the sky god Ana ), Enki (the patron of the city of Eredu[g], the lord of underground fresh waters, the world ocean, the deity of wisdom), Nanna (moon god revered in the city of Ur) and dh. oldest list gods, compiled around the 26th century. BC, identifies six supreme gods of the early Sumerian pantheon: An, Enlil, Inanna, Enki, Nanna and the sun god Utu.

One of the most typical gods of the Mesopotamian civilizations is the image mother goddesses (in iconography, images of a woman with a child in her arms are sometimes associated with her), which was revered under various names. Another not less common image - fertility gods . In the myths about them, there is a close connection with the cult. The cyclicity is clearly traced, which manifests itself in the ritual "life-death-life", associated with earthly life and the underworld, that is, life-death-resurrection.

As a border underworld there was an underground river through which the carrier ferries. Those who enter the underworld pass through the seven gates of the underworld, where they are met by the gatekeeper Neti . The conditions of stay in the underworld are differentiated: a tolerable life is awarded to the souls, according to which the funeral rite was performed and sacrifices were made, those who fell in battle and those with many children. not buried souls of the dead return to earth and bring misfortune to the living.

One of the central places in the mythology of Mesopotamia was occupied by the problem of the appearance of man. Several myths have come down about the creation of people, according to which the gods sculpted people from clay so that they would cultivate the land, herd cattle, collect fruits, etc., in order to feed the gods. When a person was made, the gods determined his fate and arranged a feast. The drunken gods began to sculpt people again, but they turned out to be inferior people (not able to give birth to women, creatures deprived of sex).

Pantheon of Akkadian-Babylonian gods largely coincides with the Sumerian. Religious ideas about the role of the gods also coincide. The role of the goddess Inanna among the Akkadians, the goddess performs Ishtar , god Enlil - God Bel , god Utu - God Shamash etc. As Babylon rises, the main god of this city begins to play an increasingly important role. Marduk , although his name is Sumerian in origin.

Akkado-Babylonian ideas about the creation of the world and the human race are associated with legends about human disasters, death of people, and even about the destruction of the universe. The cause of all adversity is the wrath of the gods, their desire to reduce the number of the ever-growing and annoying human race with its noise. Often, disasters are perceived not as a legitimate retribution for committed sins, but as an evil whim of a deity. So, the god Enlil, outraged by the fussiness and noisiness of people, decides to destroy them, sending plague, pestilence, drought, famine, salting the soil. But with the help of the god Enki, people cope with these disasters and each time they multiply again. Finally, Enlil sends a flood on people, and humanity perishes. Only Atrahasis is saved, who, on the advice of Enki, builds a large ship, loads his family, artisans, grain, all property, as well as animals "who eat grass" into it.

The mythological idea of ​​the world and man testifies to the deep internal unity of the culture and religion of the states of Mesopotamia, their impact on the formation of the worldview of subsequent generations in other civilizations. The Flood, Noah's Ark, other biblical stories testify to the historical relationship between the formation and development of world cultures. In the mythological plots of Mesopotamia, a significant place is given to cult of water . This is a flood, and a river in the underworld, and a number of gods associated with water (Inanna, Enki), which, apparently, was determined by the role and attitude towards it, as one of the fundamental foundations of the universe. Water, as in life, acted both as a source of good will, giving a harvest, and as an evil element, bringing destruction and death.

Another such cult was cult of the sky and heavenly bodies , the most important part of the cosmos, which are stretched over everything on earth. In Sumerian-Akkadian mythology, the "father of the gods" An is the god of the sky and his creator, Utu is the sun god, Shamash is the god of the sun, Inanna was revered as the goddess of the planet Venus. Astral, solar and other myths testified to the interest of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia in outer space and their desire to know it. In the constant movement of heavenly bodies along a constantly set path, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia saw the manifestation of divine will. But they wanted to know this will, and hence the attention to the stars, planets, the sun. Interest in them led to the development of astronomy and mathematics. The Babylonian "stargazers" calculated the period of revolution of the Sun, the Moon, compiled a solar calendar and a map of the starry sky, drew attention to the pattern solar eclipses. In the astral myths of Mesopotamia, a natural picture of the movement of heavenly bodies was reflected, which was described by means of mythological animal symbols.

In astral myths, stars and constellations were often represented as animals. AT Ancient Babylonia, for example, 12 signs of the zodiac stood out, and each god had its own heavenly body. Earthly geography corresponded to heavenly geography. The ancient inhabitants believed that countries, rivers, cities, temples exist in the sky in the form of stars, and earthly objects are reflections of heavenly ones. So, it was believed that the plan of the city of Nineveh was first drawn in the heavens and existed since ancient times. In one constellation is the celestial Tigris, in the other - the celestial Euphrates, the city of Nippur corresponds to the constellation Cancer. Other cities also have their own specific constellations. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to identify them with the modern names of the stellar world of the Universe.

The scientific knowledge and research of "scientists" and "astrologers", in the role of which the priesthood acted mainly, were associated with magic and divination. Therefore, it was not by chance that astrology and the compilation of horoscopes related to it were born in Mesopotamia. The inhabitants were sure that there is a certain pattern and connection between the location of the heavenly bodies and historical events, the fate of people and peoples. It seemed to them that observation of the sky, stars and planets is the way to determine the fate of man. The practice of calculating fate, as well as "good" and "bad" days, gradually developed.

In Ancient Mesopotamia, the priests did not have the influence that the priesthood had in Ancient Egypt. Nonetheless residents believed in the subordination of man to higher powers , in the predestination of fate and obeyed the will of kings and priests. That's why, on the one hand, the population of Eastern despotisms is characterized by humility and faith in fate, on the other hand, faith in the ability to fight against the often hostile environment . As you can see, faith in witchcraft and mysticism, the mystery of the world around them and the fear of it, they combined with sobriety of thought, the desire for accurate calculation and pragmatism. From here originate the origins of arithmetic and geometry, the creation of formulas for measuring land, the ability to square a power and extract a square root, the development of urban planning and architecture, the construction of palace and temple complexes.

Back in ancient Babylon the first schools and the teaching profession arose . who was engaged not only in teaching, but was also a scribe at the same time. In Sumer, Babylon, and later in Assyria, scribes left behind a large number of tablets (in the museums of the world there are about 500 thousand, but many of them have not yet been read). They taught children to write on clay tablets, to count, to calculate land areas, the volume of earthworks, to observe the movement of planets and stars. The teacher not only taught the subject, but was also considered a “wise”, “knowledgeable” person, and above all in divine matters, since mathematics and astronomy were understood as divine principles.

There is a lot of evidence from archaeologists dealing with ancient cities about the level of urban development. It is known that the ancient cities of Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish and others were located in the southern part of Mesopotamia. BC, - indicates a high level of civilization. At that time, the city was an irregular oval surrounded by a mud wall. During the excavations, the remains of a cult ziggurat tower built of mud brick and lined with burnt bricks were found. In 16 tombs (presumably royal) of the XXV century. BC. Numerous examples of jewelry art and artistic crafts (made of gold, silver, lapis lazuli and other materials) have been found. The state fell about 2000 BC, and the city of Ur fell into decay towards the end of the 4th century. BC.

In the cities of southern Mesopotamia, from the end of the 4th - the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. developed a certain type of building temples, sanctuaries, palaces with reliefs, as well as fortifications . In the III millennium BC. formed new type temple - ziggurat , a cult tiered tower made of raw brick with 3-7 tiers in the form of a truncated pyramid or parallelepiped, with a courtyard and a statue of a deity in the inner sanctuary. The tiers were connected by stairs and gentle ramps.

Each tier (step) was dedicated to one of the gods and his planet, was apparently landscaped and had a certain color. The multi-stage temples ended with observatory pavilions, from where the priests conducted astronomical observations. A seven-tiered ziggurat could have the following dedications and colors: for example, the 1st tier was dedicated to the Sun and was painted gold; 2nd tier - to the Moon - in silver; 3rd tier - Saturn - in black; 4th tier to Jupiter - in dark red; 5th tier - to Mars - in bright red, like the color of blood shed in battles; 6th tier - Venus - in yellow, because it is closest to the Sun; the seventh - Mercury - in blue. The seventh temple was dedicated to the god Ea (Enki). Unlike the pyramids, ziggurats were not posthumous or mortuary monuments.

The largest ziggurat was, apparently, the Tower of Babel, which is sometimes compared in size with the pyramid of Cheops. According to one version, the tower had a height and base of 90 m, landscaped terraces. The Tower of Babel is associated with legends that are reflected in the Old Testament of the Bible. The first book of Moses "Genesis" (chapter 11) tells about the construction of a tower city "as high as the heavens", for which the Lord confused the language of those who built the tower and "scattered them ... from there over all the earth."

The temples of Mesopotamia were not only cult, but also scientific, commercial institutions, centers of writing. Scribes were taught in schools called tablet houses, which existed at temples. They trained specialists who knew writing, counting, singing and musical art. In addition, they had to know rituals, law and accounting. Accounting workers could come from poor families and even slaves. After completing their studies at schools, graduates became ministers in churches, private households, and even at the royal court. Caste isolation did not exist, so much depended on the personal abilities of the graduate.

Few material architectural monuments of the civilizations of Mesopotamia have survived to our time. Therefore, each of them is of great importance for understanding the states of Mesopotamia civilizations. It was possible to draw up plans for the development of some cities. Some of the monuments have been reconstructed and are now kept as exhibits in museums around the world. Restored, for example, the plans of the city of Babylon VII-VI centuries. BC. and its architectural ensemble, created under King Nebuchadnezzar.

In the VII-VI centuries. BC. Babylon was an elongated rectangle with an area of ​​about 10 square meters. km, divided by the Euphrates into two parts. The city was surrounded by outer and inner walls with crenellated towers and passage gates named after the gods. The main gate bore the name of the goddess Ishtar and was lined with glazed brick with reliefs of bulls and dragons. In a reconstructed form, this gate is stored in the State Museum of Berlin. Among the main monuments of the city are the temples of the main god Marduk, the mother goddess Ninmah, the seven-tiered ziggurat of the god Enki - Etemenanki, destroyed by the troops of Alexander the Great, the palace-fortress, etc.

art civilizations of Mesopotamia quite diverse - reliefs, stele sculptures, figurines, works of glitics, etc. Together with large-scale architectural structures, even in a ruined form, they make a strong impression.

Centralization of the economy, characteristic of oriental despotisms, brought to life the control system conducted by special officials. Submission of reports from the managers of works and farms, followed by a huge apparatus of accounting workers, controllers, inspectors, was mandatory. The well-established mechanism of accounting and control failed only during the weakening of the role of the state.

However the eastern despotisms of Mesopotamia, corroded by corruption, power struggles, and wars, eventually declined . All that remained of them was an immortal culture, which was assimilated, passing from one people to another. Its elements even reached the Russian-Orthodox, much later civilization. There are many words and names in the Russian language that came from the Sumerian-Akkadian languages, which are sometimes perceived as primordially Russian.

Religious system of ancient Mesopotamia

For many centuries, in the culture of Mesopotamia, there was a process of eliminating some deities and cults and exalting others, processing and merging mythological stories, changes in the nature and appearance of those gods who were to rise and become universal (as a rule, they were credited with the deeds and merits of those that remained in the shadows or died in the memory of generations). The result of this process was the formation of the religious system in its form, as it has come down to our days according to the surviving texts and archaeological excavations.

The religious system bore a noticeable imprint of the socio-political structure that really existed in this region. In Mesopotamia, with its many successive state formations (Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia), there was no strong stable state power. Therefore, although at times certain successful rulers (Sargon of Akkad, Hammurabi) achieved considerable power and recognized power, there were, as a rule, no centralized despotism in this region. Apparently, this also affected the status of the Mesopotamian rulers fixed by the religious system. Usually they did not call themselves (and others did not call them) the sons of the gods, and their sacralization was practically limited to granting them the prerogatives of the high priest or recognizing their right to direct contact with God (an obelisk with the image of the sun god Shamash, handing Hammurabi a scroll with laws that entered history as the laws of Hammurabi).

This relatively low degree of centralization of political power and, accordingly, the deification of the ruler contributed to the fact that in Mesopotamia quite easily, without fierce rivalry (which took place in Egypt), many gods got along with each other with temples dedicated to them and priests serving them. Mythology has preserved information about the Sumerian pantheon, which already existed at the early stages of civilization and statehood in Mesopotamia. The main ones were the sky god An and the earth goddess Ki, who gave birth to the powerful air god Enlil, the water god Ea (Enki), often depicted as a fish-man and who created the first people. All these and many other gods and goddesses entered into complex relationships with each other, the interpretation of which changed over time and depending on the change of dynasties and ethnic groups (the Semitic Akkadian tribes, mixed with the ancient Sumerians, brought with them new gods, new mythological plots).

Most of the Sumerian-Akkadian-Babylonian gods had an anthropomorphic appearance, and only a few, like Ea or Nergal, bore zoomorphic features, a kind of recollection of totemic ideas of the distant past. The sacred animals of the Mesopotamians included the bull and the snake: in myths, the gods were often called "powerful bulls", and the snake was revered as the personification of the feminine.

It already follows from the ancient Sumerian myths that Enlil was considered the first among the gods. However, his power in the pantheon was far from absolute: seven pairs of great gods, his relatives, at times challenged his power and even removed him from office, overthrowing him into the underworld for wrongdoings. The underworld is the realm of the dead, where the cruel and vengeful goddess Ereshkigal ruled omnipotently, who could only be pacified by the god of war, Nergal, who became her husband. Enlil and other gods and goddesses were immortal, so they, even if they fell into the underworld, returned from there after a series of adventures. But people, unlike them, are mortal, so their destiny after death is an eternal stay in the gloomy realm of the dead. The border of this kingdom was considered a river, through which the souls of the buried were transported to the kingdom of the dead by a special carrier (the souls of the unburied remained on earth and could cause a lot of trouble to people).

Life and death, the kingdom of heaven and earth and the underworld of the dead - these two principles were clearly opposed in the religious system of Mesopotamia. And not only opposed. The real existence of farmers with their cult of fertility and the regular change of seasons, awakening and dying nature could not but lead to the idea of ​​a close and interdependent relationship between life and death, dying and resurrection. Let people be mortal and never return from the underworld. But nature is immortal! Every year she gives birth to a new life, as if resurrecting her after a dead winter hibernation. It was this regularity of nature that the immortal gods had to reflect. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the central places in Mesopotamian mythology was occupied by the story of the death and resurrection of Dumuzi (Tammuz).

The goddess of love and fertility in Mesopotamia was the beautiful Inanna (Ishtar), the patron goddess of the city of Uruk, where a temple was built in her honor (something like a temple of love) with priestesses and temple servants who gave their caresses to anyone (temple prostitution). Like them, the loving goddess bestowed her caresses on many - both gods and people, but the story of her love for Dumuzi was most famous. This story has developed. In the beginning (the Sumerian version of the myth), Inanna, having married the shepherd Dumuzi, sacrificed him to the goddess Ereshkigal as a payment for her liberation from the underworld. Later (Babylonian version) things began to look different. Dumuzi, who turned out to be not only the husband, but also the brother of Ishtar, died on a hunt. The goddess went to the underworld for him. The evil Ereshkigal left Ishtar with her. As a result, life on earth ceased: animals and people ceased to reproduce. The alarmed gods demanded from Ereshkigal the return of Ishtar, who came to earth with a vessel of living water, which allowed her to resurrect the dead Dumuzi.

The story speaks for itself: Dumuzi, personifying the fertility of nature, dies and is resurrected with the help of the goddess of fertility, who conquers death. The symbolism is quite obvious, although it did not appear immediately, but only as a result of the gradual transformation of the original mythological plot.

The mythology of Mesopotamia is rich and very diverse. It also contains cosmogonic plots, stories about the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, including people molded from clay, and legends about the exploits of great heroes, primarily Gilgamesh, and, finally, the story of the great flood. The famous legend of the great flood, which subsequently spread so widely among different peoples, entered the Bible and was accepted by Christian teaching, is not an idle invention. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who especially singled out among other gods the god of the south wind, which drove the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates against the current and threatened catastrophic floods, could not perceive such floods (especially the most destructive of them) as a great flood. The fact that such a catastrophic flood was indeed a real fact is confirmed by the excavations of the English archaeologist L. Woolley in Ur (in the 20-30s), during which a multi-meter layer of silt was discovered that separated the most ancient cultural layers of the settlement from more later. It is interesting that the Sumerian story about the flood preserved in fragments in some details (the message of the gods to the virtuous king about the intention to arrange a flood and save him) resembles biblical legend about Noah.

The religious system of Mesopotamia, changed and improved by the efforts of different peoples over many centuries, in the II millennium BC. e. was already well developed. Of the great many small local deities, often duplicating the functions of each other (note that in addition to Ishtar there were two more goddesses of fertility), several main, universally known and most revered ones stood out. A certain hierarchy of them also developed: Marduk, the patron god of the city of Babylon, moved to the place of the supreme god, whose influential priests put him at the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon. With the rise of Marduk, the sacralization of the ruler was also associated, whose status acquired more and more holiness over time. In the II millennium BC. e. The mythological interpretation of the deeds, merits and spheres of influence of all forces was also somewhat revised. underworld all the gods, heroes and spirits, including the rulers of the underworld and numerous demons of evil, illness and misfortune, in the fight against which the Mesopotamian priests developed a whole system of spells and amulets. In particular, each person turned out to be the owner of his own divine patron-patron, sometimes several, which contributed to the formation of personal ties "man-deity". A complex cosmological system was developed from several heavens, covering the earth as a hemisphere, floating in the world's oceans. Heaven was the residence of the highest gods, and the sun god Shamash daily made his way from the eastern mountain towards the western mountain, and at night he retired to the “inside of heaven”.

At the service of the gods, magic and mantles, which had achieved considerable success, were put. Finally, through the efforts of the priests, much was done in the field of astronomy and the calendar, mathematics and writing. At the same time, it should be noted that, although all this pre-scientific knowledge had a completely independent cultural value, their connection with religion (moreover, the connection is not only genetic, but also functional) is undeniable. And not so much because priests stood at their source, but because all this knowledge was connected with religious ideas and even mediated by them.

In fairness, it should be noted that by no means all aspects of life, not the entire system of ideas and institutions of the ancient Mesopotamia were determined by religious ideas. For example, the texts of the laws of Hammurabi convince us that the rules of law were practically free from them. This very significant point indicates that the religious system of Mesopotamia, in the image and likeness of which later similar systems of other Middle Eastern states were formed, was not total, i.e., did not monopolize the entire sphere of spiritual life. It left room for views, actions and practices not directly related to religion, and it was this practice that could influence the nature of the religious ideas of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Semitic tribes of Syria and Phoenicia to the Cretan-Mycenaean predecessors of the ancient Greeks. It is possible that she played a certain role in the emergence of freethinking in antiquity. This is worth paying attention to because the second version of the most ancient religious system of the world, the ancient Egyptian, almost simultaneously with the Mesopotamian, led in this sense to other results.