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Period: 10,000 BCE to 6400 BCE
Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period
This period features settlement of life in semi or permanent villages, performing complex rituals, but vessels are inconvenient for storage and cooking practices. No evidence for domesticated animals and plants exist for this period. People at this time lived by hunting and gathering resources in the wild, but movement towards controlling resources, such as sowing wild seeds. This more sedentary lifestyle led to increasingly complex social interactions, including rituals. -
9500 BCE
M'lefaat, Iraq
This site was situated near a stream giving growth to small shrubs. A small, permanent settlement with semi-subterranean dwellings, it's positioned around a clay courtyard. Subsistence strategy is hunting and gathering wild barley, rye, bitter vetch, lentils, and goat-grass. Stone artifacts include small projectile points used to hunt gazelles. They also hunted hare, fox and birds, but also fished. Mortars, flat grindstones and wood tools suggest that wild cereals were ground. -
Period: 6400 BCE to 4000 BCE
Pottery Neolithic Period
There is a clear pattern of increased social complexity in the Pottery Neolithic period: communal storage of grain suggests organization of people beyond the level of household or family; construction of T-shaped and round granaries, and maintenance of stored grain is characteristic of coordinated and communal labor to build irrigation systems, to expand agricultural production to the level of producing surpluses for storage and walls. -
Period: 6300 BCE to 4500 BCE
Early Dynasties: Ubaid Period (Chalcolithic)
Most Ubaid archaeological sites are small villages, characterized by self-sufficient households: each produced or gathered food and materials necessary for daily life of its extended occupants. Some sites are a bit larger and may have been early towns. These towns contain elaborate architecture, including temple structures. Priests or priestesses held a role that occasionally require others to build temples or tend animals and fields for the temple. They stored excess for use during poor yields. -
Period: 6000 BCE to 5200 BCE
Hassunan farming culture
This culture is characterized by small farming villages of hundreds of people where subsistence was based on growing wheat, barley, peas and lentils. Domesticated animals are also important, as about 82% of the bones recovered from Hassunan sites are domesticated animals, including sheep, goat, pig and especially cattle. -
5500 BCE
Samarran Farming Culture
Tell es-Sawwan as a village represents early examples of expansion of farming through irrigation methods. Villagers used water from the Tigris River to irrigate their fields of domesticated barley and wheat. They also domesticated cattle, collected fresh mussels, and fished in Tigris River. The occupation of Tell es-Sawwan had small dwelling made of sun dried mud brick positioned around courtyard. Features include ovens and kilns to make pottery and granaries for cereal. -
Period: 4000 BCE to 3100 BCE
Early Dynasties: Uruk Period (Chalcolithic)
This period presented evidence for the first cities of southern Mesopotamia, characterized by furrowed field, high population concentration in cities, irrigation canal systems, innovations such as animal-drawn plows and the threshing sledge, construction of public buildings, highly directed and well-organized oversight of labor, accumulation of agricultural surplus at temples, tribute payments to temples, specialized labor, priest-king leaders, and earliest forms of writing. -
Period: 3500 BCE to 3200 BCE
World's First City: Uruk = Warka
This city was situated on a segment of the Euphrates River in Iraq, and formed when two smaller Ubaid settlements merged. At peak, it has a settlement so large with a population estimate of over 10,000. Uruk grew through a process of population concentration, or in the modern term "urbanization." Many small farming communities near Uruk were abandoned when populations concentrated in a growing city. This congregation maybe from warfare in the area, evidenced by fortifications around city center. -
Period: 2900 BCE to 2350 BCE
Early Dynastic Period
Early Dynastic city-states included Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Nippur, Eridu, Larsa. The city-states of south Mesopotamia are collectively called Sumerian civilization, but each was an independent entity. They all shared characteristics including: population concentration in cities with defense walls, powerful royal and religious elites, cuneiform writing, pantheon, temple ziggurat dedicated to a patron god or goddess, metallurgy, complex hierarchies with class differences between elites and commoners. -
2334 BCE
Dynastic Period: Akkadian Empire
To build the Akkadian Empire, Sargon I launched a series of military battles, invading parts of Iran, Syria as far west as Lebanon. During this period, religious traditions, social organization, economic and administrative units continued as they were during Early Dynasties. The difference is in political leadership: Sargon and his successors depicted propagandas of themselves as military heroes who rule by conquests rather than appointed by deities. This is a significant shift in authority. -
Period: 2150 BCE to 2025 BCE
Competing city-states and conquests
Akkadians fell in 2150 BC under Gutians, periods of unification: 3rd Dynasty of Ur in 2112 BC, Babylonian Kingdom 1792 BC, Assyrian Kingdom in the north 2025 BC. -
539 BCE
Fall to Persian Empire
Mesopotamia fell into the Achaemenid Empire upon conquests by Cyrus II the Great.
