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Culture of Ancient Mesopotamia. Culture of Mesopotamia (second name Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia) briefly Material culture of ancient Mesopotamia briefly

The first settlements on the territory of Mesopotamia existed in the Paleolithic era. In the Neolithic era, in the 7th-6th millennium BC, river valleys were settled first in the Northern, and then in the 5th millennium BC. and southern Mesopotamia. The ethnic composition of the population is unknown. At the beginning of the IV millennium BC. in the south, the Sumerians appear, who gradually occupied territories up to the point of closest convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates.

At the turn of IV-III millennium BC. the first city-states arise - Ur, Lagash, Uruk, Larsa, Nippur, etc. They fight among themselves for a predominant position in Sumer, but none of their rulers succeeded in uniting the country.

From the beginning of the III millennium BC. Semitic tribes lived in the north of Mesopotamia (their language is called Akkadian). During the III millennium BC. they gradually moved south and occupied all of Mesopotamia. Around 2334, the king of Akkad - the oldest Semitic city in Mesopotamia - became Sargon the Ancient (in Akkadian - Shurruken, which means "True King"). According to legend, he was not of noble origin, and he himself said about himself: “My mother was poor, I did not know my father ... My mother conceived me, gave birth secretly, put me in a reed basket and let me go down the river.” Under him and his successors, the power of Akkad extends over most of Mesopotamia. The Sumerians merged with the Semites, which had a great influence on the entire subsequent culture of this region. But the struggle for power between the various city-states continued.

At the end of the III millennium BC. the penetration of nomads began into the country - the West Semitic tribes (Amorites) and a number of other peoples. Amorites around the 19th century BC. created several of their states, the most famous of them - with its capital in Babylon, which played a major role in the history of Mesopotamia. The heyday of the Babylonian state (Old Babylon) is associated with the activities of King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC). In the XVI century. BC. Babylon was captured by the Hittites, then by the Kassites, whose power over the country lasted almost four centuries.

From the beginning of the III millennium BC. in the north of Mesopotamia there was the city of Ashur, after which the whole country began to be called Assyria. At the end of II - beginning of I millennium BC. Assyria is gradually becoming the largest and most powerful state in the Middle East.

Starting from the IX century. BC. the Chaldeans began to play an important role in the life of Babylonia. In the 7th century BC. there is a new rise of Babylon (New Babylon), which, together with its allies (in particular, the Medes), managed to defeat Assyria. The Medes captured most of the indigenous territory of Assyria and created their own state (Medes) there.

In 539 BC the Persians, who had previously defeated the Medes, captured Babylon, and it forever lost its independence.

The contribution of the Sumerians to the development of science and world culture

Many sources testify to the high astronomical and mathematical achievements of the Sumerians, their building art (it was the Sumerians who built the world's first step pyramid). They are the authors of the most ancient calendar, recipe guide, library catalogue. However, perhaps the most significant contribution of ancient Sumer to world culture is the "Tale of Gilgamesh" ("who saw everything") - the oldest epic poem on earth. The hero of the poem, half-man-half-god, struggling with numerous dangers and enemies, defeating them, learns the meaning of life and the joy of being, learns (for the first time in the world!) The bitterness of losing a friend and the inevitability of death. Written in cuneiform, which was the common writing system for the multilingual peoples of Mesopotamia, the poem of Gilgamesh is a great cultural monument of ancient Babylon. The Babylonian (more precisely - the ancient Babylonian) kingdom united the north and south - the regions of Sumer and Akkad, becoming the heir to the culture of the ancient Sumerians. The city of Babylon reached its pinnacle when King Hammurabi (r. 1792-1750 BC) made it the capital of his kingdom. Hammurabi became famous as the author of the world's first code of laws (from where, for example, the expression "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" has come down to us). The history of the cultures of Mesopotamia provides an example of the opposite type of cultural process, namely: intensive mutual influence, cultural inheritance, borrowings and continuity.

The Babylonians introduced a positional number system, an accurate time measurement system into world culture, they were the first to divide an hour into 60 minutes and a minute into 60 seconds, learned to measure the area of geometric shapes, distinguish stars from planets and devoted every day of the seven-day week invented by them to a separate deity ( traces of this tradition are preserved in the names of the days of the week in the Romance languages). The Babylonians also left to their descendants astrology, the science of the alleged connection of human destinies with the arrangement of heavenly bodies. All this is far from a complete enumeration of the heritage of Babylonian culture.

Sumero-Akkadian culture

In general, the early culture of Mesopotamia is designated as Sumero-Akkadian. The double name is due to the fact that the Sumerians and the inhabitants of the Akkadian kingdom spoke different languages and had different scripts. Cultural communication between different tribes was actively promoted by the invention of writing by the Sumerians, first pictography (which was based on picture writing), and then cuneiform writing. Recordings were made on clay tiles or tablets with sharp sticks and burned on fire. The very first Sumerian cuneiform tablets date back to the middle of the 4th millennium BC. These are the oldest written records. Subsequently, the principle of pictorial writing began to be replaced by the principle of conveying the sound side of the word. Hundreds of characters for syllables appeared, and several alphabetic characters for vowels. Writing was a great achievement of the Sumero-Akkadian culture. It was borrowed and developed by the Babylonians and spread widely throughout Asia Minor: cuneiform was used in Syria, ancient Persia and other states. In the middle of 2 thousand BC. Cuneiform became the international writing system: even the Egyptian pharaohs knew and used it. In the middle of 1 thousand BC. cuneiform becomes alphabetic. The Sumerians created the first poem in human history - "The Golden Age"; wrote the first elegies, compiled the world's first library catalog. The Sumerians are the authors of the oldest medical books - collections of recipes. They developed and recorded the farmer's calendar, left the first information about protective plantings. Early Sumerian deities 4-3 thousand BC acted as givers of life's blessings and abundance - for this they were revered by mere mortals, they built temples for them and made sacrifices. The most powerful of all the gods were An - the god of heaven and the father of other gods, Enlil - the god of wind, air and all space from earth to sky (he invented the hoe and gave it to mankind) and Enki - the god of the ocean and fresh underground waters. Other important deities were the god of the Moon - Nanna, the god of the Sun - Utu, the goddess of fertility - Inanna and others. The deities, which previously personified only cosmic and natural forces, began to be perceived primarily as great "heavenly chiefs" and only then - as the natural element and "giver of blessings." In the second half of the 4th millennium BC. e. in the fertile plains of the Southern Mesopotamia, the first city-states arose, which by the 3rd millennium BC. e. filled the entire valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. The main cities were Ur, Uruk Akkad, etc. The youngest of these cities was Babylon. The first monuments of monumental architecture grew up in them, the types of art associated with it flourished - sculpture, relief, mosaic, various kinds of decorative crafts. In the country of turbulent rivers and swampy plains, it was necessary to raise the temple to a high bulk platform-foot. Therefore, an important part of the architectural ensemble became long, sometimes laid around the hill, stairs and ramps along which the inhabitants of the city climbed to the sanctuary. The slow ascent made it possible to see the temple from different points. The surviving ruins show that these were austere and majestic buildings. Rectangular in plan, devoid of windows, with walls dissected by narrow vertical niches or powerful semi-columns, simple in their cubic volumes, the structures clearly loomed on the top of the bulk mountain.

In the 3rd millennium BC. e. in the Sumerian centers of Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Adaba, Umma, Eredu, Eshnun and Kish, more diverse types of architecture arose. A significant place in the ensemble of each city was occupied by palaces and temples, in the decorative design of which a great variety was manifested. Due to the humid climate, wall paintings were poorly preserved, so mosaics and inlays made of semi-precious stones, mother-of-pearl and shells began to play a special role in decorating walls, columns, statues. The decoration of columns with sheet copper, the inclusion of relief compositions, also came into use. The color of the walls was also of no small importance. All these details enlivened the strict and simple forms of the temples, giving them great spectacle. Over the course of many centuries, various types and forms of sculpture gradually developed. Sculpture in the form of statues and reliefs has been an integral part of temples since ancient times. Stone vessels and musical instruments were decorated with sculptural forms. The first monumental portrait statues of the all-powerful rulers of the states of Mesopotamia were made in metal and stone, and their deeds and victories were depicted in the reliefs of steles.

The sculptural images of Mesopotamia acquired a special inner strength in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC, when, as a result of a struggle for power between city-states, Akkad won. New trends, images and themes appeared in the literature and art of Akkad. The most important monument of Sumerian literature was the cycle of legends about Gilgamesh, the legendary king of the city of Uruk, who ruled in the 18th century. BC. In these tales, the hero Gilgamesh is presented as the son of a mere mortal and the goddess Ninsun, his wanderings around the world in search of the secret of immortality are described in detail. The legends about Gilgamesh and the legends about the global flood had a very strong influence on world literature and culture and on the culture of neighboring peoples who adopted and adapted the legends to their national life.

Culture of the Old Babylonian Kingdom

The successor of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization was Babylonia, its center was the city of Babylon (Gate of God), whose kings in 2 thousand BC. were able to unite under their rule all the regions of Sumer and Akkad. An important innovation in the religious life of Mesopotamia 2 thousand BC. there was a gradual promotion among all the Sumerian-Babylonian gods of the city god of Babylon - Marduk. He was universally regarded as the king of the gods. According to the teachings of the Babylonian priests, it was the gods who determined the fate of people and only the priests could know this will - they alone knew how to summon and conjure spirits, talk with the gods, and determine the future by the movement of heavenly bodies. The cult of heavenly bodies becomes extremely important in Babylonia. Attention to the stars and planets contributed to the rapid development of astronomy and mathematics. A sexagesimal system was created, which exists to this day in terms of time. Babylonian astronomers calculated the laws of circulation of the Sun, Moon, and the frequency of eclipses. The religious beliefs of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia were reflected in their monumental art. The classical form of the temples of Babylonia was a high stepped tower - a ziggurat, surrounded by protruding terraces and giving the impression of several towers, which decreased in volume ledge by ledge. There could be from four to seven such ledges-terraces. The ziggurats were painted, the terraces planted. The most famous ziggurat in history is the temple of the god Marduk in Babylon - the famous Tower of Babel, the construction of which is mentioned in the Bible. The landscaped terraces of the Tower of Babel are known as the seventh wonder of the world - the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Not many architectural monuments of Babylonian art have come down to us, which is explained by the lack of durable building material, but the style of buildings - a rectangular shape, and massive walls, and architectural elements used - domes, arches, vaulted ceilings - were those architectural forms that became the basis of building art Ancient Rome, and then Medieval Europe. For Babylonian fine art, the image of animals was typical - most often a lion or a bull.

The influence of Babylonian culture on Assyrian

The culture, religion and art of Babylonia were borrowed and developed by the Assyrians, who subjugated the Babylonian kingdom in the 8th century. BC. In the ruins of a palace in Nineveh, a library was found that contained tens of thousands of cuneiform texts. This library contained all the most important works of Babylonian, as well as ancient Sumerian literature. The collector of this library, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, went down in history as an educated and well-read person. However, these features were not inherent in all the rulers of Assyria. A more common and constant feature of the rulers was the desire for power, domination over neighboring peoples. Assyrian art is filled with the pathos of strength, it glorified the power and victory of the conquerors. The image of grandiose and arrogant bulls with arrogant human faces and sparkling eyes is characteristic. A feature of Assyrian art is the depiction of royal cruelty: scenes of impalement, tearing out the captives' tongues, and ripping off the skins of the guilty. These were facts of Assyrian everyday life and these scenes are conveyed without a sense of pity and compassion. The cruelty of the mores of society was associated with its low religiosity. Assyria was dominated not by religious buildings, but by palaces and secular buildings, as well as in reliefs and murals - secular subjects. Superbly executed images of animals, mainly a lion, a camel, a horse, were characteristic. In the art of Assyria in the 1st millennium BC. e. hard canon appears. This canon is not religious, just as all official Assyrian art was not religious, and this is the fundamental difference between Assyrian monuments and monuments of the previous time. It is not anthropometric, like the ancient canon, which proceeded from the human body as a unit of measurement. Rather, it can be called an idealistic-ideological canon, because it proceeded from the idea of an ideal ruler, embodied in the image of a powerful man. Attempts to create an ideal image of a mighty ruler had already been encountered before, in Akkadian art and in the period of the III dynasty of Ur, but they were not embodied as consistently and completely and were not so divorced from religion as in Assyria. Assyrian art was purely court art, and when the Assyrian power perished, it disappeared. It was the canon that was the organizing principle, thanks to which Assyrian art reached such an unprecedented perfection. The image of the king becomes in him a model and a role model, he is created by all possible means: purely pictorial - the image of a physically perfect, powerful man in an emphatically magnificent decoration - hence the monumental static nature of the figures and attention to the fine details of the decoration; pictorial-narrative - when both in art and in literature, themes praising the military power of the country and its creator, "the ruler of all countries" stand out; descriptive - in the form of annals of the Assyrian kings, glorifying their exploits. Some descriptions in the Assyrian annals give the impression of signatures under the images, moreover, the texts of royal inscriptions with stories about royal military exploits are placed directly on the reliefs, crossing the image of the ruler, which, with a standardized image devoid of any individuality, was very significant and was an additional ornament-like decoration of the plane. relief. The formation of the canon and the development of firm rules in the depiction of the royal person, as well as the ideological tendentiousness of all court art, contributed to the preservation of high artistic standards in the craft reproduction of samples and did not constrain the creative possibilities of master artists when it was not about the royal person. This can be seen in the freedom with which Assyrian artists experimented with composition and animal depictions.

Art of Iran 6th-4th centuries BC. even more secular and courtly than the art of his predecessors. It is more peaceful: it does not have the cruelty that was characteristic of the art of the Assyrians, but at the same time, the continuity of cultures is preserved. The most important element of fine art is the image of animals - primarily winged bulls, lions and vultures. In the 4th c. BC. Iran was conquered by Alexander the Great and included in the sphere of influence of the Hellenistic culture.

Religion and Mythology of Ancient Mesopotamia

A characteristic feature of the religion of ancient Mesopotamia is polytheism (polytheism) and anthropomorphism (human likeness) of the gods. For Sumer, the cult of local gods, and above all the patron god of the city, is typical. So, in Nippur they worshiped Enlil (Ellil) - the god of air, who would later receive the status of the supreme god in the Sumerian pantheon; in Eredu - Enki (god of underground fresh waters and god of wisdom); in Lars - Utu (to the god of the Sun); in Uruk, An and Inanna (the goddess of love and war) were revered, etc. Ereshkigal was considered the goddess of the underworld, which was underground, and her husband was the god of war, Nergal. Humans were created by the gods to serve them. After the death of a person, his soul forever ended up in the afterlife, where a very “gloomy” life awaited it: bread from sewage, salt water, etc. A tolerable existence was awarded only to those for whom the priests on earth performed special rites, the only exception was made for warriors and mothers of many children.

A deity, as a rule, was considered present in its image if it possessed certain specific features and attributes, and it was worshiped in the way it was established and consecrated by the tradition of this temple. If the image was taken out of the sanctuary, the god was removed with it, thus expressing his anger against the city or country. The gods were dressed in magnificent clothes of a special style, complemented by tiaras and breast decorations (pectorals). Clothes were changed during special ceremonies in accordance with the requirement of the ritual.

We know from Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources that images of the gods were sculpted and refurbished in special temple workshops; after that, they were subjected to a complex and completely secret ritual of consecration, which was supposed to turn lifeless matter into a vessel of the divine presence. During the night ceremonies, they were endowed with "life", their eyes and mouths "opened" so that the idols could see, hear and eat; then a ritual of “washing the mouth” was performed over them, giving them, as it was believed, a special holiness. Similar customs were adopted in Egypt, where the idols of deities were traditionally endowed with the necessary qualities with the help of magical acts and formulas. Nevertheless, the very process of making idols by hand, apparently in all religions, where such images had a cult or sacred function, was felt as a kind of awkwardness, as indicated by the often encountered legends and religious tales that emphasize the miraculous origin of the most famous images of the gods.

The gods at the temple of Uruk, for example, were served food twice a day. The first and main meal was in the morning, when the temple was opened, the second - in the evening, obviously, at a time immediately before the closing of the doors of the sanctuary... Each meal consisted of two dishes, called "main" and "second". The dishes differed among themselves, apparently, rather in quantity than in composition of products. The ceremonial, the nature and number of dishes included in the divine meal are approaching human standards, generally characteristic of the Mesopotamian gods.

Writing and books

Mesopotamian writing in its most ancient, pictographic form appears at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. Apparently, it developed on the basis of the system of "recording chips", which it displaced and replaced. In the VI-IV millennium BC. Inhabitants of Middle Eastern settlements from Western Syria to Central Iran used three-dimensional symbols - small clay balls, cones, etc. - to account for various products and goods. In the IV millennium BC. sets of such tokens, which registered some acts of transfer of certain products, began to be enclosed in clay shells the size of a fist. On the outer wall of the “envelope”, all the chips enclosed inside were sometimes imprinted in order to be able to conduct accurate calculations without relying on memory and without breaking the sealed shells. The need for the chips themselves, thus, disappeared - it was enough to print alone. Later, the prints were replaced by badges scratched with a wand - drawings. Such a theory of the origin of ancient Mesopotamian writing explains the choice of clay as a writing material and the specific, cushion- or lenticular form of the earliest tablets.

It is believed that in early pictographic writing there were over one and a half thousand signs-drawings. Each sign meant a word or several words. The improvement of the ancient Mesopotamian writing system went along the line of unification of icons, reduction of their number (a little more than 300 remained in the Neo-Babylonian period), schematization and simplification of the outline, as a result of which cuneiform (consisting of combinations of wedge-shaped impressions left by the end of a trihedral wand) signs appeared, in which it is almost impossible to recognize the original sign-drawing. At the same time, the phonetization of the letter took place, i.e. icons began to be used not only in their original, verbal meaning, but also in isolation from it, as purely syllabic ones. This made it possible to transmit exact grammatical forms, write out proper names, etc.; cuneiform became a genuine writing, fixed by living speech.

The scope of cuneiform writing is expanding: in addition to business accounting documents and bills of sale, lengthy building or mortgage inscriptions, cult texts, collections of proverbs, numerous "school" or "scientific" texts appear - lists of signs, lists of names of mountains, countries, minerals, plants, fish, professions and positions and, finally, the first bilingual dictionaries.

Sumerian cuneiform is becoming widespread: having adapted it to the needs of their languages, from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. used by the Akkadians, the Semitic-speaking inhabitants of Central and Northern Mesopotamia, and the Eblaites in Western Syria. At the beginning of the II millennium BC. Cuneiform is borrowed by the Hittites, and around 1500. BC. the inhabitants of Ugarit, on its basis, create their own simplified syllabic cuneiform, which may have influenced the formation of the Phoenician script. The Greek and, accordingly, later alphabets originate from the latter.

At schools-academies (eddubba) libraries were created in many branches of knowledge, there were also private collections of "clay books". Large temples and palaces of rulers also often had large libraries in addition to economic and administrative archives. The most famous of them is the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, discovered in 1853 during excavations on a hill near the village of Kuyundzhik on the left bank of the Tigris. Ashurbanipal's collection was not only the largest for its time; this is perhaps the world's first real, systematically selected library. The tsar personally supervised its acquisition; on his orders, scribes throughout the country made copies of ancient or rare tablets kept in temple or private collections, or delivered the originals to Nineveh.

Lengthy texts made up entire "series", sometimes including up to 150 tablets. On each such "serial" plate was its serial number; the initial words of the first tablet served as the title. On the shelves "books" were placed on certain branches of knowledge. Here were collected texts of "historical" content ("annals", "chronicles", etc.), judicial records, hymns, prayers, incantations and spells, epic poems, "scientific" texts (collections of signs and predictions, medical and astrological texts, recipes , Sumero-Akkadian dictionaries, etc.), hundreds of books in which all the knowledge, the entire experience of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization was “deposited”. Much of what we know about the culture of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians has come from studying these 25,000 tablets and fragments recovered from the ruins of the palace library that perished in the destruction of Nineveh. The school was called in Mesopotamia "eddubba", which meant "the house of the tablets", the directors were called the "father of the tablet house", and the teachers were called "elder brothers"; there were guards in schools who were called "wielding a whip", which illustrates some of the features of the teaching method. Students mastered writing by copying, first, individual characters, and then entire texts. The training took place from early morning until late at night and lasted for many years. It was difficult to study, but the profession of a scribe was profitable and honorable.

Sumero-Akkadian culture.

Cultural communication between different tribes was actively promoted by the invention of writing by the Sumerians, first pictography (which was based on picture writing), and then cuneiform writing. Recordings were made on clay tiles or tablets with sharp sticks and burned on fire. The very first Sumerian cuneiform tablets date back to the middle of the 4th millennium BC. These are the oldest written records. Subsequently, the principle of pictorial writing began to be replaced by the principle of conveying the sound side of the word. Hundreds of characters for syllables appeared, and several alphabetic characters for vowels.

Writing was a great achievement of the Sumero-Akkadian culture. It was borrowed and developed by the Babylonians and spread widely throughout Asia Minor: cuneiform was used in Syria, ancient Persia and other states. In the middle of 2 thousand BC. Cuneiform became the international writing system: even the Egyptian pharaohs knew and used it. In the middle of 1 thousand BC. cuneiform becomes alphabetic.

The Sumerians created the first poem in human history - "The Golden Age"; wrote the first elegies, compiled the world's first library catalog. The Sumerians are the authors of the oldest medical books - collections of recipes. They developed and recorded the farmer's calendar, left the first information about protective plantings.

Early Sumerian deities 4-3 thousand BC acted as givers of life's blessings and abundance - for this they were revered by mere mortals, they built temples for them and made sacrifices. The most powerful of all the gods were An - the god of heaven and the father of other gods, Enlil - the god of wind, air and all space from earth to sky (he invented the hoe and gave it to mankind) and Enki - the god of the ocean and fresh underground waters. Other important deities were the god of the Moon - Nanna, the god of the Sun - Utu, the goddess of fertility - Inanna and others. The deities, which previously personified only cosmic and natural forces, began to be perceived primarily as great "heavenly chiefs" and only then - as the natural element and "giver of blessings."

In the second half of the 4th millennium BC. e. in the fertile plains of the Southern Mesopotamia, the first city-states arose, which by the 3rd millennium BC. e. filled the entire valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. The main cities were Ur, Uruk Akkad, etc. The youngest of these cities was Babylon. The first monuments of monumental architecture grew up in them, the types of art associated with it flourished - sculpture, relief, mosaic, various kinds of decorative crafts.

Over the course of many centuries, various types and forms of sculpture gradually developed. Sculpture in the form of statues and reliefs has been an integral part of temples since ancient times. Stone vessels and musical instruments were decorated with sculptural forms. The first monumental portrait statues of the all-powerful rulers of the states of Mesopotamia were made in metal and stone, and their deeds and victories were depicted in the reliefs of steles.

The most important monument of Sumerian literature was the cycle of legends about Gilgamesh, the legendary king of the city of Uruk, who ruled in the 18th century. BC. In these tales, the hero Gilgamesh is presented as the son of a mere mortal and the goddess Ninsun, his wanderings around the world in search of the secret of immortality are described in detail. The legends about Gilgamesh and the legends about the global flood had a very strong influence on world literature and culture and on the culture of neighboring peoples who adopted and adapted the legends to their national life.

Culture of the Old Babylonian Kingdom.

An important innovation in the religious life of Mesopotamia 2 thousand BC. there was a gradual promotion among all the Sumerian-Babylonian gods of the city god of Babylon - Marduk. He was universally regarded as the king of the gods.

According to the teachings of the Babylonian priests, it was the gods who determined the fate of people and only the priests could know this will - they alone knew how to summon and conjure spirits, talk with the gods, and determine the future by the movement of heavenly bodies. The cult of heavenly bodies becomes extremely important in Babylonia.

Attention to the stars and planets contributed to the rapid development of astronomy and mathematics. A sixty-point system was created, which exists to this day in terms of time. Babylonian astronomers calculated the laws of circulation of the Sun, Moon, and the frequency of eclipses.

The religious beliefs of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia were reflected in their monumental art. The classical form of the temples of Babylonia was a high stepped tower - a ziggurat, surrounded by protruding terraces and giving the impression of several towers, which decreased in volume ledge by ledge. There could be from four to seven such ledges-terraces. The ziggurats were painted, the terraces planted. The most famous ziggurat in history is the temple of the god Marduk in Babylon - the famous Tower of Babel, the construction of which is mentioned in the Bible. The landscaped terraces of the Tower of Babel are known as the seventh wonder of the world - the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

For Babylonian fine art, the image of animals was typical - most often a lion or a bull.

Assyrian culture.

Mesopotamia is one of the most important centers of world civilization and ancient urban culture. The pioneers in the creation of this culture were the Sumerians, whose achievements were assimilated and further developed by the Babylonians and Assyrians. The origins of Mesopotamian culture date back to the 4th millennium BC. when cities began to emerge. Throughout the long period of its existence (until the 1st century AD), it was characterized by internal unity, continuity of traditions, and the inseparable connection of its organic components. The initial stages of Mesopotamian culture were marked by the invention of a kind of writing, which later turned into cuneiform. It was cuneiform that was the core of the Mesopotamian civilization, uniting all its aspects and allowing to preserve traditions. When the cuneiform was completely forgotten, the Mesopotamian culture perished along with it. However, its most important values were adopted by the Persians, Arameans, Greeks and other peoples, and as a result of a complex and not yet fully elucidated chain of transmission, they entered the treasury of modern world culture.

Writing.

One of the most amazing achievements of Mesopotamian culture was the invention at the turn of the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. e. letters, with the help of which it became possible at first to record numerous facts of everyday life, and pretty soon also to convey thoughts and perpetuate the achievements of culture. It is possible that the priority in creating the letter belonged to an unknown people who lived in the Southern Mesopotamia even before the arrival of the Sumerians. However, in any case, it was the Sumerians who put writing at the service of civilization.

At first, Sumerian writing was pictographic, that is, individual objects were depicted in the form of drawings. The oldest texts inscribed in such a script date back to about 3200 BC. e. However, only the simplest facts of economic life could be marked with pictography, approximately as follows: 100 vertical lines and a picture of a fish placed next to it meant that the warehouse had the specified amount of fish. A bull and a lion, depicted next to each other, could convey information that the lion ate the bull. However, such a letter could not fix their own names or convey abstract concepts (for example, thunder, flood) or human emotions (joy, grief, etc.). Therefore, strictly speaking, pictography was not yet a real letter, since it did not convey coherent speech, but only recorded fragmentary information or helped to remember this information.

Gradually, in the process of a long and extremely complex development, pictography turned into a verbal-syllabic script. One of the ways in which pictography moved into writing was due to the association of drawings with words. For example, the drawing of a sheep among the Sumerians evoked associations with the word udu, which denoted this animal. Therefore, over time, the drawing of a sheep acquired the meaning of an ideogram, which was read as udu. At the same time, the syllabic meaning udu also acquired the same sign (for example, when it was necessary to write the compound word udutila - “living sheep”). Somewhat later, when the Babylonians and Assyrians adopted the Sumerian script, the udu sign, retaining its former meanings of an ideogram (or logogram, i.e., the verbal meaning of “sheep”) and a syllabogram (syllabic spelling of the udu sign), acquired another logographic meaning, namely im-meru (Akkadian word for sheep). In this way, polyphony (polysemy) began to arise, and the same sign, depending on the context, was read in completely different ways. Or another example: a sign or a drawing for a foot began to be read not only as a “foot”, but also as “stand”, “walk” and “run”, i.e. the same sign acquired four completely different meanings, each of which had to be selected depending on the context.

Simultaneously with the advent of polyphony, writing began to lose its pictorial character. Instead of a drawing to designate this or that object, they began to depict some of its characteristic detail (for example, instead of a bird, its wing), and then only schematically. Since they wrote with a reed stick on soft clay, it was inconvenient to draw on it. In addition, when writing from left to right, the drawings had to be rotated 90 degrees, as a result of which they lost all resemblance to the objects depicted and gradually took on the form of horizontal, vertical and angular wedges. So, as a result of centuries of development, pictorial writing turned into cuneiform. However, neither the Sumerians nor other peoples who borrowed their writing developed it into an alphabet, that is, a sound writing, where each sign conveys only one consonant or vowel sound. The Sumerian script contains logograms (or ideograms) that are read as whole words, signs for vowels, as well as consonants together with vowels (but not just consonants separately). To make it easier for the reader to navigate when reading complex texts, often reminiscent of puzzles, scribes used special determinatives to denote wooden tools or objects, the names of professions, numerous plants, etc. Such determinatives were placed before the corresponding words, and the reader could immediately see that, for example, after the sign lu, which was a determiner for denoting a profession, one should expect words like “blacksmith”, “shipman”, etc. Such determinants were absolutely necessary, since in Sumerian writing the same sign had many completely different readings and meanings . For example, the tin sign, among others, had the meanings of "life" and "builder" (in oral speech, these words differed in tone). If the sign ting was preceded by a determinative to designate a profession, it was read "builder", and without a determinative - "life". In total, in the Sumerian cuneiform, developed further by the Akkadians, there were more than 600 characters, consisting of wedges in various combinations. Since almost every sign had many meanings, cuneiform in all its subtleties was accessible to a rather limited circle of scribes.

In the XXIV century. BC e. the first lengthy texts known to us written in the Sumerian language appear.

The Akkadian language is attested in southern Mesopotamia from the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. e, when the speakers of this language borrowed cuneiform from the Sumerians and began to use it widely in their daily lives. From the same time, intensive processes of interpenetration of the Sumerian and Akkadian languages began, as a result of which they learned many words from each other. But the predominant source of such borrowings was the Sumerian language. Akkadian, in particular, borrowed words from it to refer to such concepts as a plow, a table, barley, a plowman, many terms to refer to various craft professions, a cult and officials of the state apparatus. In the same early period, the Sumerians borrowed from the Akkadian language the word for the onion plant, the terms of sale and the concept of a slave. In the last quarter of the III millennium BC. e. the oldest bilingual (Sumero-Akkadian) dictionaries were compiled.

At the end of the XXV century. BC e. Sumerian cuneiform began to be used in Ebla, the oldest state in Syria, where a library and archive were found, consisting of many thousands of tablets,

Among them, a huge number of texts in the Sumerian language have been preserved, as well as Sumerian-Eblaite dictionaries, sometimes presented in dozens of copies.

Sumerian writing was borrowed by many other peoples (Elamites, Hurrians, Hittites, and later Urartians), who adapted it to their languages, and gradually by the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. the whole of Asia Minor began to use the Sumero-Akkadian script. Simultaneously with the spread of cuneiform, Akkadian became the international language of communication, diplomacy, science, and commerce. So, for example, in the Amarna period (XIV century BC), the Egyptian court used the Babylonian dialect of the Akkadian language to communicate with its Syrian vassals and other states. Among the Amarna texts in Egypt, even Babylonian mythological works with notes by Egyptian scribes have been found.

Natural conditions were of particular importance for the Mesopotamian civilization. Unlike other centers of ancient culture, Mesopotamia had no stone, let alone papyrus, on which to write. But there was plenty of clay, which gave unlimited possibilities for writing, without requiring, in essence, any costs. At the same time, clay was a durable material. Clay tablets were not destroyed by fire, but, on the contrary, they acquired even greater strength. Therefore, the main material for writing in Mesopotamia was clay. Tablets were made from fine grades of clay, purifying it in water from straw and other impurities, including mineral salts. Salts were also removed by firing. However, since there was no forest in Mesopotamia, only the most important texts were burned (royal inscriptions, copies of works intended for storage in libraries). The vast majority of the tablets were simply dried in the sun. Usually the tablets were made in the size of 7-9 cm in length. The most important royal (and sometimes temple) inscriptions were also written on stone and metal plates.

In the first millennium BC. e. Babylonians and Assyrians also began to use leather and imported papyrus for writing. At the same time, in Mesopotamia, they began to use long narrow wooden boards covered with a thin layer of wax, on which cuneiform signs were applied.

Starting from the 8th century BC e. Aramaic became the language of international diplomacy and trade throughout the Middle East. Aramaic scribes, who wrote on leather and papyrus, gradually took the lead in the Mesopotamian office. The schools of cuneiform scribes were now doomed.

Libraries.

One of the greatest achievements of Babylonian and Assyrian culture was the creation of libraries. In Ur, Nippur and other cities, starting from the II millennium BC. BC, for many centuries scribes collected literary and scientific texts, and thus there were extensive private libraries.

Among all the libraries in the Ancient East, the most famous was the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (669-c. 635 BC), carefully and with great skill collected in his palace in Nineveh. For her, throughout Mesopotamia, scribes made copies of books from official and private collections, or collected the books themselves.

The library of Ashurbanipal kept royal annals, chronicles of the most important historical events, collections of laws, literary works and scientific texts. In total, more than 30,000 tablets and fragments have been preserved, which reflect the achievements of the Mesopotamian civilization. At the same time, Ashurbanipal's library was the first systematically selected library in the world, where clay books were placed in a certain order. Many books were presented in several copies, so that two or more readers could use the necessary texts at the same time. Large texts, continuing on many tablets of the same size, occupied a significant place in the library. Some of these texts included up to forty, and sometimes even more than a hundred tablets. The compilation of such series was dictated by the need to collect in one place all available information on a particular issue. Each plate had a "page" number so that it could be returned to its place after use. The title of the series was the opening words of its first tablet. Literary texts were accompanied by colophons, which correspond to the title pages of modern books. The search for the desired work was facilitated by labels tied with twine to the tablets and indicating the content, the name of the series and the number of tablets in each series. These labels were sort of catalogues.

Archives.

Ancient Mesopotamia was a land of archives. The earliest archives date back to the first quarter of the 3rd millennium BC. e. During this period, the premises in which the archives were stored, in most cases, did not differ from ordinary rooms. Later, the tablets began to be stored in boxes and baskets covered with bitumen to protect them from moisture. Labels were attached to the baskets indicating the contents of the documents and the period to which they belong. In the archives of the temple administration in the city of Ur in the 19th century. BC. the tablets were placed on wooden shelves in a special room. In the royal palace of Mari, archaeologists have found a colossal archive dating back to the 18th century. BC e. In Uruk, about 3,500 documents of economic reporting of the 8th-6th centuries were found in two rooms. BC e. During excavations in Khor-sabad, on the territory of Ancient Assyria, archaeologists saw a room, in the walls of which there were three rows of niches from 25 to 30 cm high and wide and from 40 to 50 cm deep, separated by partitions. A number of tablet fragments were found in these niches. Obviously, archival documents were once stored in this room.

The first archives of private individuals known to us date back to the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. e. They were stored in jugs, boxes and reed baskets. From the 1st millennium BC e. a large number of private archives have been preserved. Among them, a special place is occupied by the archive of the Egibi business house, which functioned in Babylon from the end of the 8th to the beginning of the 5th century. BC e. This archive contains more than 3,000 promissory notes, contracts for the lease of land and houses, for the giving of slaves for training in various crafts, etc. In the city of Nippur, an archive of another business house was found, namely Murash, which was of great importance in the economic life of South Babylonia in the 5th century BC e. This archive contains over 700 tablets, most of which are perfectly preserved.

Thousands of letters of the most diverse nature have also been preserved in state, temple and private archives. They are written on oblong small clay tablets in small, compact letters. Some of them are burnt, and most of them are dried in the sun. They were sent to the addressee in clay envelopes sealed with seals, which ensured the secrecy of the correspondence and preserved the text from damage. The name of the addressee was also written on the envelope.

The central figure of the Mesopotamian civilization was the scribe, who was the main creator of the richest cuneiform literature. Rulers, temples and individuals depended on the services of scribes. Some of the scribes held very important posts and had the opportunity to influence the kings, took part in important diplomatic negotiations. But most of the scribes who were in the service of the king or at the temples performed bureaucratic functions in managing the economy and collecting taxes.

Schools.

Most of the scribes were educated at school, although scribe knowledge was often passed on in the family, from father to son. The Sumerian school, like the later Babylonian school, mainly trained scribes for state and temple administration. The school became a center of education and culture. The curriculum was so secular that religious education was not part of the curriculum at all. The main subject of study was the Sumerian language and literature. Pupils of the senior classes, depending on the narrower specialization assumed in the future, received grammatical, mathematical and astronomical knowledge. Those who were going to devote their lives to science studied law, astronomy, medicine and mathematics for a long time.

A number of Sumerian works tell about school life. Some of them are moralizing in nature, while others are full of irony and sarcasm towards teachers. So, for example, in the work “About the useless son”, the scribe admonishes his lazy son not to wander around the streets, to take an example from worthy students and diligently study. As told in another Sumerian work, at the request of his son, who was a poor student and therefore often subjected to flogging at school, the father invited the teacher to visit to appease him. The guest was seated on an honorary chair, fed a good dinner and presented with a valuable gift, after which he began to praise the boy as a capable and diligent student. Another Sumerian text survives in which a student accuses his teacher of not teaching him anything, even though he attended school from childhood to adulthood. To these reproaches, the teacher replies: “You are already close to old age. Your time has passed like that of a withered grain... But if you study all the time, day and night, you will be obedient and not arrogant, if you obey your teachers and comrades, then you can still become a scribe.”

Literature.

A significant number of poems, lyric works, myths, hymns, legends, epic tales and collections of proverbs have survived that once made up the rich Sumerian literature. A special genre was made up of works about the death of Sumerian cities due to raids by neighboring tribes. The “Lament for the death of the inhabitants of Ur>% (at the end of the 21st century BC) was very popular, which describes terrible details about the suffering of women, the elderly and children who suffered from hunger, burned in houses on fire and drowned in the river .

The most famous monument of Sumerian literature is the cycle of epic tales about the legendary hero Gilgamesh. In its most complete form, this cycle was preserved in a later Akkadian revision found in the library of Ashurbanap-la. This is the greatest literary work of ancient Mesopotamia. According to legend, Gilgamesh was the son of a mortal man and the goddess Ninsun and ruled in Uruk. But the surviving tradition suggests that Gilgamesh was a historical figure. For example, in the Sumerian king lists, he is mentioned as one of the kings of the First Dynasty of the city of Uruk.

At the end of the II millennium BC. e. in Babylonia, a philosophical work appeared in the Akkadian language called "May I glorify the lord of wisdom." It tells about the miserable and cruel fate of an innocent sufferer. Although he lived righteously and observed all divine ordinances and human laws, endless misfortunes, suffering and persecution did not cease to haunt him. This work asks why Marduk, the supreme god of the Babylonians, allows the best people to suffer endlessly without any fault on their part? The following answer is given to this question: the will of the gods is incomprehensible and therefore people must unquestioningly obey them. Later, this plot was further developed in the biblical book of Job, a blameless, just and God-fearing husband, who nevertheless was overtaken by endless blows of fate.

In terms of its content, the poem “Babylonian Theodicy” (literally “God’s justification”), which arose in the first half of the 11th century, adjoins the work about the innocent sufferer. BC e. Unlike most ancient Eastern literary works, which are anonymous, we know the author of this poem. He was a certain Esagil-kini-ubbib, who served as a priest-caster at the royal court. It expresses in vivid form the religious and philosophical ideas that agitated the Babylonians. "Theodicy" is built in the form of a dialogue between an innocent sufferer and his friend. Throughout the work, the sufferer denounces unrighteousness and evil, sets out his claims to the gods and laments the injustice of social order. The friend seeks to refute these arguments. The author of the work does not express his attitude to the essence of the dispute and does not impose his opinion on the reader or listener.

X century BC e. dates back to an interesting work called "Slave, obey me", permeated with a pessimistic attitude to life and its vicissitudes. It contains a dialogue between a master and his slave. Bored with idleness, the master enumerates a variety of desires that he would like to fulfill. The slave first supports the intentions of the owner and expresses his arguments in favor of their implementation. Then, when the master refuses to implement them, the slave each time argues that all human actions are useless and meaningless. So, if the master enters the service of the ruler, he can send him on a dangerous campaign; if he goes on a journey, he may die on the way; it would be possible to start a family, but this should not be done either, because in this case the children will ruin the father; if you engage in usury, you can lose your property and deserve the black ingratitude of debtors; it is also senseless to make sacrifices to the gods, for the latter are capricious and greedy, and in return for offerings they leave people without any attention. The slave inspires the master that one should not do good to people, because after death the villains, and the righteous, and the noble, and the slaves are equal and no one will distinguish them from each other by their skulls. At the end of the work, the slave convinces his life-weary master that the only good is death. Then the master expresses his desire to kill his slave. But he is saved by what indicates the inevitability of the imminent death of the master himself. Assyrian annals written in rhythmic language and containing vivid images, including descriptions of the nature of foreign countries through which the Assyrian warriors passed, are of great artistic value. But the most famous Assyrian work was the story of the wise scribe and adviser to the Assyrian kings Ahikar. A cuneiform text has survived that names Ahiqar as the learned adviser of Esarhaddon (681 - 669 BC). Thus, the hero of the story was a historical person. As can be seen from the work itself and the aforementioned cuneiform text, he came from the Aramaic environment, in which, apparently, the story itself arose. Its text was translated into Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Slavic and other languages in ancient times and in the Middle Ages. In its most complete form, the story has been preserved in the Syriac language. The plot line of the story is as follows: Ahikar did not have his own children, so he adopted his sister's son Nadan and, having taught him the honorary profession of a scribe, arranged for court service. But the nephew turned out to be an ungrateful person - he slandered his adoptive father before the king. As a result of this, Ahikar is subjected to endless misadventures, but at the end of the sun, justice has triumphed, and Nadan dies, having suffered the punishment he deserved: God.

Religion.

In the ideological life of ancient Mesopotamia, the dominant role belonged to. Even at the turn of the IV-III millennium BC. e. in Sumer a thoroughly developed theological system arose, which was later largely borrowed and developed further by the Babylonians. Each Sumerian city revered its patron god. In addition, there were gods who were revered throughout Sumer, although each of them had their own special places of worship, usually where their cult arose. These are Zyli the god of the sky Anu, the god of the earth Enlil the Akkadians also called him White) and the god -od Enki, or Ea. The deities personified the elemental forces of nature and were often identified with cosmic bodies. Each deity was assigned specific functions. Enlil, whose center was the sacred city of Nippur, was the god of fate, the creator of cities, and the inventor of the hoe and plow. The god of the sun Utu (in Akkadian mythology he bears the name Shamash), the god of the moon Nannar (in Akkadian Sin), who was considered the son of Enlil, the fire of love and fertility Inanna (in the Vazilonian and Assyrian pantheon - Lshtar) and the god of eternity wildlife Du-muzi (Babylonian Tammuz), personifying the dying and resurrecting vegetation. The god of war, disease and death Nergal was identified with the planet Mars, the Babylonian god Marduk - with the planet Jupiter, Nabu (the son of Marduk), who was considered the god of wisdom, writing and counting - with the planet Mercury. The supreme god of Assyria was the tribal god Ashur.

In the beginning, Marduk was one of the most insignificant gods. But his role began to fall along with the political rise of Zavilon, whose patron he was considered. According to the Babylonian myth of the creation of the world, initially there was only chaos, personified in the form of a monster named Tiamtu. The latter gave birth to the gods, who, however, behaved very noisily and began to constantly disturb their mother. Therefore, Tiamtu decided to destroy all the gods. But the fearless Marduk decided to single combat with the monster, having secured the consent of the other gods that in the event of his victory they would obey him. Marduk succeeded in overpowering Tiamtu and killing her. From her body, he created the sky with stars, the earth, plants, animals and fish. After that, Marduk also created a man, mixing clay with the blood of one god, who was executed for going over to the side of Tiamtu. The Babylonians borrowed this myth from the Sumerians with only minor deviations. Naturally, in the corresponding Sumerian myth, Marduk, the god of Babylon, was not mentioned at all, and Enlil was the hero-winner of the monster.

In addition to deities, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia also revered numerous demons of goodness and sought to propitiate the demons of evil, who were considered the cause of various diseases and death. They also tried to save themselves against evil spirits with the help of spells and special amulets. All these demons were depicted as half-humans, half-animals. Especially popular were the so-called lamassu, which people imagined as winged bulls with human heads. Giant-sized lamassu guarded the entrance to the palaces of the Assyrian kings.

The Sumerians and Akkadians believed in an afterlife. According to their ideas, it was a realm of shadows, where the dead suffered from hunger and thirst forever and were forced to eat clay and dust. Therefore, the children of the dead were obliged to make sacrifices to them.

Scientific knowledge.

The peoples of Mesopotamia achieved certain successes in the scientific knowledge of the world. Particularly great were the achievements of Babylonian mathematics, which originally arose from the practical needs of measuring fields, constructing canals and various buildings. Since ancient times, the Babylonians erected multi-story (usually seven-story) ziggurats. From the upper floors of the ziggurats, scientists from year to year conducted observations of the movements of celestial bodies. In this way the Babylonians collected and recorded empirical observations of the Sun, the Moon, and the positions of the various planets and constellations. In particular, astronomers noted the position of the Moon in relation to the planets and gradually established the periodicity of the movement of celestial bodies visible to the naked eye. In the process of such centuries-old observations, Babylonian mathematical astronomy arose. Her most creative period falls on the 5th century. BC e., when its level in many respects was not inferior to the level of European astronomy in the early Renaissance. Numerous tables with astronomical calculations of the distances between stars have survived to our time. One such work contains information about the principal fixed stars and constellations, their solar risings and setting, and their comparative positions.

In the 5th century BC e. there were large astronomical schools in Babylon, Borsippa, Sippar and Uruk. At the same time, the activity of the great astronomers Naburian and Kiden falls. The first of them developed a system for determining the lunar phases, the second established the duration of the solar year, which, according to his calculations, was 365 days 5 hours 4] minutes and 4.16 seconds. Thus, Ki-den was wrong in determining the length of the solar year by only 7 minutes and 17 seconds. Starting from the second quarter of the 3rd c. BC e. Babylonian astronomical writings began to be translated into ancient Greek. This enabled the Greek astronomers to share in a short time the millennial achievements of Babylonian science and soon after that to achieve brilliant success.

However, with all the achievements, Babylonian astronomy was inextricably linked with astrology, a pseudoscience that tried to predict the future from the stars. In addition, many astronomical texts contain indications of causal relationships that allegedly existed between the stars and certain diseases.

A large number of Babylonian medical texts have survived. It can be seen from them that the doctors of Ancient Mesopotamia were able to treat dislocations and fractures of the limbs well. However, the Babylonians had very weak ideas about the structure of the human body and they failed to achieve noticeable success in the treatment of internal diseases.

Even in the III millennium BC. e. the inhabitants of Mesopotamia knew the way to India, and in the 1st millennium BC. e. also in Ethiopia and Spain. The maps that have survived to this day reflect the attempts of the Babylonians to systematize and generalize their rather extensive geographical knowledge. In the middle of the II millennium BC. e. guides were compiled for Mesopotamia and adjacent countries, intended for merchants engaged in domestic and international trade. Maps covering the territory from Urartu to Egypt were found in the Ashurbanap-la library. Some maps show Babylonia and neighboring countries. These cards also contain text with the necessary comments. On one such map, Mesopotamia and the surrounding areas are represented as a circular plain, washed by the Persian Gulf, and Babylon is located in the very center of this plain.

In Mesopotamia, they took a keen interest in their distant past. For example, during the reign of Nabonidus in the VI century. BC e. during excavations in the foundations of collapsed temple buildings, inscriptions of the 3rd millennium BC were discovered and read. e., and the names of the kings found in these texts are correctly placed in chronological order. In one of the temples of the buildings of the city of Ur, archaeologists found a museum room in which objects of various eras of historical interest were collected. A similar museum was located in the summer royal palace of Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon.

However, at the end of the 1st millennium BC. e. the ossified forms of ancient traditions, the centuries-old dominance of religious ideas, the absence of new methods of understanding nature began to hinder the development of Babylonian science. In addition, it began to lose its vitality, as the scientific language remained Akkadian (and to a large extent Sumerian, which was already dead a millennium and a half earlier), while the population everywhere in Mesopotamia switched to Aramaic as a spoken language. .

Art. In the formation and subsequent development of the art of ancient Mesopotamia, the artistic traditions of the Sumerians played a decisive role. In the IV millennium BC. e., i.e., even before the emergence of the first state formations, the leading place in Sumerian art was occupied by painted ceramics with their characteristic geometric ornament. From the beginning of the III millennium BC. e. stone carving played an important role, which soon led to the rapid development of glyptics, which continued until the disappearance of cuneiform culture at the turn of the 1st century BC. n. e. Cylindrical seals depicted mythological, religious, domestic and hunting scenes.

In the XXIV-XXII centuries. BC When Mesopotamia became a single power, sculptors began to create idealized portraits of Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian dynasty. On the stele of the king of the same dynasty, Naram-Suen, which commemorates the victory over the Lullube tribes, he is depicted in a warlike pose at the moment of defeating the enemy with a spear. Twelve more captives are also presented there. One of them is lying on his knees at the feet of the king, the other raises his hands up, making a pleading gesture with them, and the third flies into the abyss; the rest of the captives are terrified. Above the figure of the victorious king, two multi-pointed stars are carved, symbolizing the benevolence of the gods towards the winner.

During the III dynasty of Ur in the XXII-XXI centuries. BC h., when a single widely ramified network of bureaucratic apparatus was created throughout Mesopotamia, art monuments also acquire uniformity and stereotype. These are mainly sculptural portraits of rulers in a stately calm pose.

In the palace of the kings of Mari, built at the beginning of the II millennium BC. e., archaeologists have found numerous frescoes depicting sacrifices and scenes of palace life. The artists first applied the contours to the plaster base and then applied the paints.

The art of Mesopotamia reached a special flowering during the existence of the Assyrian state in the 8th-7th centuries. BC e. This heyday was reflected primarily in the Assyrian reliefs that lined the palace chambers. The reliefs depict military campaigns on enemy territory, the capture of cities and fortresses in the neighboring countries of Assyria. The characteristic anthropological and ethnographic features of prisoners of war and tributaries representing various peoples and tribes are especially subtly conveyed. Some of the reliefs also contain hunting scenes of the Assyrian kings. The reliefs from the palace of Ashurbana-pala in Nineveh are characterized by great subtlety and decoration of details when depicting the suffering of wounded lions. The artists who created the Assyrian palace art completely departed from the ancient traditions of the static depiction of people and objects, at the same time giving perfection to genre scenes and enriching them with landscape paintings.

The population of ancient Mesopotamia achieved impressive success in the construction of palace and temple buildings. They, like the houses of private individuals, were built of mud brick, but unlike the latter, they were erected on high platforms. A characteristic building of this kind was the famous palace of the kings of Mari, built at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. e.

The development of technology, crafts and commodity-money relations led in the 1st millennium BC. e. to the emergence of large cities in Mesopotamia, which were the administrative, craft and cultural centers of the country, and to the improvement of living conditions. The largest city in Mesopotamia by area was Nineveh, built on the banks of the Tigris mainly under Sennacherib (705-681 BC) as the capital of Assyria. It occupied 728.7 hectares of land and was located in the shape of an elongated triangle. The city was surrounded by a wall that had fifteen gates. In the urban area, in addition to palaces and private houses, there was a huge royal park with all kinds of exotic trees and plants, including cotton and rice, the seeds of which were brought from India. Nineveh was supplied with water using a special aqueduct, which originated 16 km from the city. The Assyrian capital was probably home to over 170,000 people. There were even more people in Babylon (probably about 200,000), which was largely rebuilt under Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century BC. BC e. and occupied an area of 404.8 hectares. In Babylon there were streets with a length of five or more kilometers. The walls of houses were often up to two meters thick. Many houses had two floors and were equipped with all necessary amenities, including bathrooms. As a rule, the rooms were located around the central courtyard. The floors were covered with baked bricks carefully poured with natural asphalt, and the interior walls were whitewashed with lime mortar. Near the houses of the rich up to 1600 square meters. m, which had several yards and more than twenty rooms, were the houses of the poor, the area of \u200b\u200bwhich did not exceed 30 square meters. m.

Glass production began early in Mesopotamia: the first recipes for its manufacture date back to the 18th century. BC e.

However, the Iron Age in this country came relatively late - in the 11th century. BC e., the widespread use of iron for the production of tools and weapons began only a few centuries later.

Concluding the characterization of the culture of Ancient Mesopotamia, it should be noted that the achievements of the inhabitants of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in architecture, art, writing and literature, in the field of scientific knowledge, in many respects played the role of a standard for the entire Near East in antiquity.

The name "interfluve" refers to the confluence of two rivers in the Middle East - the Tigris and the Euphrates. Consider how people lived on this earth thousands of years ago.

Ancient Mesopotamia

Historians divide this region into Upper and Lower Mesopotamia. The upper one is the northern part of the region, where the state of Assyria was relatively recently formed. In the Lower (southern) Mesopotamia, people lived long before the appearance of people to the north. It is here that the first cities of mankind arise - Sumer and Akkad.

On the territory of this region, about 7 thousand years ago, the first states were formed - the names of the first two cities. Later, other city-states arise - Ur, Uruk, Eshnuna, Sippar and others.

Rice. 1. Map of Mesopotamia.

Hundreds of years later, the cities of the Lower Mesopotamia will be united under the rule of the intensified Babylon, which will become the capital of Babylonia. To the north of it, Assyria arises.

The ancient civilization of Mesopotamia was formed in parallel with the Egyptian, but it has certain differences. Mesopotamia is a unique center for the emergence of agriculture, because it was not only located along the rivers, but also protected from the north by a chain of mountains, which ensured a mild climate.

Culture of ancient Mesopotamia

A prominent representative of the cultural heritage of Mesopotamia is the people of the Sumerians. No one knows how they appeared in this region, and most importantly, that they have nothing to do with the Semitic peoples who inhabited it. Their language was not similar to any of the neighboring dialects and was similar to Indo-European speech. Their appearance also differed from the Semitic - the Sumerians had oval faces and large eyes.

Babylonia and Assyria

The Babylonian kingdom arose at the beginning of the second millennium BC, and the city itself arose on the site of the earlier Sumerian city of Kadingir. They were a Semitic people, the Amorites, who adopted the early culture of the Sumerians but retained their language.

An iconic figure in the history of Babylon is King Hammurabi. He was not only able to subdue many neighboring cities, but is also famous for his great work - the set of "Laws of Hammurabi". These were the first laws, carved on a clay tablet, regulating relationships in society. According to historians, the concept of "presumption of innocence" was also introduced by this king.

The first mention of Assyria dates back to the 24th century BC. and lasted 2,000 years. The Assyrians were quite a warlike people. They subjugated the kingdom of Israel and Cyprus. Their attempt to subjugate the Egyptians was not successful, because 15 years after the conquest, Egypt nevertheless gained independence.

The culture of Assyria, like the Babylonian, had a Sumerian in its foundation.

What have we learned?

Mesopotamia is the oldest region of human settlement. We know what peoples lived in this territory several thousand years ago, but we still do not know where they came from. These mysteries have yet to be answered.

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Ancient Civilizations Bongard-Levin Grigory Maksimovich

CULTURE OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

The Persian conquest and the loss of Babylonian independence did not yet mean the end of Mesopotamian civilization. For the Babylonians themselves, the arrival of the Persians may have seemed at first just another change in the ruling dynasty. The former greatness and glory of Babylon was enough for the locals in order not to experience feelings of inferiority and inferiority before the conquerors. The Persians, for their part, also treated the shrines and culture of the peoples of Mesopotamia with due respect.

Babylon retained its position as one of the greatest cities in the world. Alexander the Great, having defeated the Persians at Gaugamela, entered in October 331 BC. e. to Babylon, where he was "crowned", made sacrifices to Marduk and gave the order to restore the ancient temples. According to Alexander's plan, Babylon in Mesopotamia and Alexandria in Egypt were to become the capitals of his empire; in Babylon he died 13 June 323 BC e., returning from the eastern campaign. Badly damaged during the forty-year war of the Diadochi, Babylonia remained with Seleucus, whose successors owned it until 126 BC. when the country was taken over by the Parthians. From the defeat inflicted by the Parthians on Babylon for the Hellenistic sympathies of its inhabitants, the city never recovered.

Thus, the ancient Mesopotamian culture existed for another half a millennium after the collapse of the Mesopotamian statehood proper. The arrival of the Hellenes in Mesopotamia was a turning point in the history of Mesopotamian civilization. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who survived more than one defeat and assimilated more than one wave of newcomers, this time faced a culture that was clearly superior to their own. If the Babylonians could feel on an equal footing with the Persians, then they were inferior to the Hellenes in almost everything that they themselves were aware of and that fatally affected the fate of Babylonian culture. The decline and final death of the Mesopotamian civilization should be explained not so much by economic and environmental reasons (salinization of soils, changes in riverbeds, etc.), which, obviously, fully affected only in the Sasanian era (227-636 AD) how much socio-political: the absence of a “national” central government interested in maintaining old traditions, influence and rivalry from the new cities founded by Alexander the Great and his heirs, and most importantly, deep and irreversible changes in the ethno-linguistic and general cultural situation. By the time the Hellenes arrived, Arameans, Persians, and Arabs made up a large percentage of the population of Mesopotamia; in live communication, the Aramaic language began to displace the Babylonian and Assyrian dialects of Akkadian as early as the first half of the 1st millennium BC. e. Under the Seleucids, the old Mesopotamian culture was preserved in ancient communities that united around the largest and most revered temples (in Babylon, Uruk and other ancient cities). Its true bearers were learned scribes and priests. It was they who for three centuries preserved the ancient heritage in a new in spirit, much more rapidly changing and “open” world. However, all the efforts of Babylonian scientists to save the past were in vain: the Mesopotamian culture had outlived its usefulness and was doomed.

In fact, what could Babylonian "scholarship" mean to people already familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle? Traditional Mesopotamian ideas and values turned out to be outdated and could not satisfy the demands of the critical and dynamic consciousness of the Hellenes and the Hellenized inhabitants of the Mesopotamian cities. The complex cuneiform could not compete with either Aramaic or Greek writing; Greek and Aramaic served as a means of "interethnic" communication, as elsewhere in the Middle East. Even the apologists of ancient traditions among the Hellenized Babylonians were compelled to write in Greek if they wished to be heard, as did the Babylonian scholar Berossus, who dedicated his "Babiloniaca" to Antiochus I. The Greeks showed a striking indifference to the cultural heritage of the conquered country. Mesopotamian literature, accessible only to connoisseurs of cuneiform writing, went unnoticed; art, following the patterns of a thousand years ago, did not impress the Greek taste; local cults and religious ideas were alien to the Hellenes. Even the past of Mesopotamia, apparently, did not arouse particular interest among the Greeks. No case is known of any Greek philosopher or historian studying cuneiform. Perhaps only Babylonian mathematics, astrology and astronomy attracted the attention of the Hellenes and became widespread.

At the same time, Greek culture could not help but appeal to many of the non-conservative Babylonians. Among other things, participation in the culture of the conquerors opened the way to social success. As in other countries of the Hellenistic East, in Mesopotamia Hellenization took place (was carried out and accepted) consciously and affected primarily the tops of the local society, and then spread to the lower classes. For Babylonian culture, this obviously meant the loss of a considerable number of active and capable people who "passed over to Hellenism."

However, the impulse given by the Greeks weakened over time and as it spread, while the reverse process of barbarization of the newcomer Hellenes was on the rise. It began with the social ranks of the settlers, was spontaneous and at first, probably not very noticeable, but in the end the Greeks disappeared into the mass of the local population. Overcame the East, though the East is no longer Babylonian, but Aramaic-Iranian. Actually, the ancient Mesopotamian cultural heritage was perceived by subsequent generations in the East and West only to a limited extent, often in a distorted form, which is inevitable with any transmission through second and third hands. This, however, does not in the least diminish our interest in it, nor the importance of studying ancient Mesopotamian culture for a better understanding of the general history of culture.

The Mesopotamian civilization is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, in the world. It was in Sumer at the end of the 4th millennium BC. e. human society, almost for the first time, left the stage of primitiveness and entered the era of antiquity, from here begins the true history of mankind. The transition from primitive to antiquity, "from barbarism to civilization" means the formation of a fundamentally new type of culture and the birth of a new type of consciousness. Both the first and the second are closely connected with urbanization, complex social differentiation, the formation of statehood and "civil society", with the emergence of new activities, especially in the field of management and education, with a new nature of relations between people in society. The existence of some kind of boundary separating the primitive culture from the ancient one has been felt by researchers for a long time, but attempts to determine the inner essence of the difference between these cultures of different stages began to be made only recently. The pre-urban non-literate culture is characterized by the sympracticality of information processes that take place in society; in other words, the main activities did not require any independent communication channels; training in economic, trade and handicraft skills, ritual, etc. was based on the direct connection of trainees to practice.

The thinking of a person of primitive culture can be defined as "complex", with the predominance of objective logic; the individual is completely immersed in activity, is bound by the psychological fields of situational reality, and is not capable of categorical thinking. The level of development of the primitive personality can be called pre-reflexive. With the birth of civilization, the noted sim-practicality is overcome and “theoretical” textual activity arises, associated with new types of social practice (management, accounting, planning, etc.). These new types of activity and the formation of "civil" relations in society create the conditions for the emergence of categorical thinking and conceptual logic.

Essentially, in their fundamentals, the culture of antiquity and the type of consciousness and thinking accompanying it do not fundamentally differ from modern culture and consciousness. Only a part of the ancient society was involved in this new culture, probably a very small one at first; in Mesopotamia, a new type of people - the bearers of such a culture, apparently, was best represented by the figures of the Sumerian official-bureaucrat and the learned scribe. People who managed a complex temple or royal economy, planned major construction work or military campaigns, people engaged in predicting the future, accumulating useful information, improving the writing system and training shifts - future administrators and "scientists", were the first to break out of the eternal circle of unreflexive, almost automatic reproduction of a relatively limited set of traditional patterns and patterns of behavior. By the very nature of their occupation, they were placed in different conditions, they often found themselves in situations that were previously impossible, and new forms and methods of thinking were required to solve the tasks facing them.

Throughout the entire period of antiquity, primitive culture was preserved and coexisted side by side with the ancient one. The impact of the new urban culture on different segments of the population of Mesopotamia was not the same; primitive culture was constantly "ionized", subjected to the transforming influence of the culture of ancient cities, but nevertheless it was safely preserved until the end of the period of antiquity and even survived it. Residents of remote and remote villages, many tribes and social groups were not affected by it.

An important role in the formation and consolidation of the new culture of the ancient society was played by writing, with the advent of which new forms of storage and transmission of information and “theoretical”, i.e. purely intellectual, activities became possible. In the culture of ancient Mesopotamia, writing has a special place: the cuneiform invented by the Sumerians is the most characteristic and important (at least for us) of what was created by the ancient Mesopotamian civilization. At the word "Egypt" we immediately imagine pyramids, sphinxes, the ruins of majestic temples. Nothing of the kind has been preserved in Mesopotamia - grandiose structures and even entire cities have blurred into shapeless telly hills, traces of ancient canals are barely distinguishable. Only written monuments speak of the past, countless wedge-shaped inscriptions on clay tablets, stone tiles, steles and bas-reliefs. About one and a half million cuneiform texts are now stored in museums around the world, and every year archaeologists find hundreds and thousands of new documents. A clay tablet covered with cuneiform signs could serve as a symbol of the ancient Mesopotamia, as the pyramids are for Egypt.

Mesopotamian writing in its most ancient, pictographic form appears at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. Apparently, it developed on the basis of the system of "recording chips", which it displaced and replaced. In the IX-IV millennium BC. e. the inhabitants of the Middle Eastern settlements from Western Syria to Central Iran used three-dimensional symbols to account for various products and goods - small clay balls, cones, etc. In the 4th millennium BC. e. sets of such tokens, which registered some acts of transfer of certain products, began to be enclosed in clay shells the size of a fist. On the outer wall of the “envelope”, all the chips enclosed inside were sometimes imprinted in order to be able to conduct accurate calculations without relying on memory and without breaking the sealed shells. The need for the chips themselves, thus, disappeared - it was enough to print alone. Later, the prints were replaced with drawing badges scratched with a wand. Such a theory of the origin of ancient Mesopotamian writing explains the choice of clay as a writing material and the specific, cushion- or lenticular shape of the earliest tablets.

It is believed that in early pictographic writing there were over one and a half thousand signs-drawings. Each sign meant a word or several words. The improvement of the ancient Mesopotamian writing system went along the line of unification of icons, reduction of their number (a little more than 300 remained in the Neo-Babylonian period), schematization and simplification of the outline, as a result of which cuneiform (consisting of combinations of wedge-shaped impressions left by the end of a trihedral wand) signs appeared, in which it is almost impossible to recognize the original sign-drawing. At the same time, the phonetization of writing took place, i.e., signs began to be used not only in their original, verbal meaning, but also in isolation from it, as purely syllabic ones. This made it possible to transmit exact grammatical forms, write out proper names, etc.; cuneiform became a genuine writing, fixed by living speech.

The most ancient written messages were a kind of puzzles, unambiguously understandable only to the compilers and those who were present at the time of recording. They served as "reminders" and material confirmation of the terms of transactions, which could be presented in the event of any disputes and disagreements. As far as one can judge, the oldest texts are inventories of received or issued products and property, or documents registering the exchange of material values. The first votive inscriptions also essentially record the transfer of property, its dedication to the gods. Educational texts are also among the oldest - lists of signs, words, etc.

A developed cuneiform system capable of conveying all the semantic shades of speech developed by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. e. The scope of cuneiform writing is expanding: in addition to business accounting documents and bills of sale, lengthy building or mortgage inscriptions, cult texts, collections of proverbs, numerous "school" or "scientific" texts appear - lists of signs, lists of names of mountains, countries, minerals, plants, fish, professions and positions and, finally, the first bilingual dictionaries.

Sumerian cuneiform is becoming widespread: having adapted it to the needs of their languages, it has been used since the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. e. used by the Akkadians, the Semitic-speaking inhabitants of Central and Northern Mesopotamia, and the Eblaites in Western Syria. At the beginning of the II millennium BC. e. Cuneiform is borrowed by the Hittites, and around 1500 BC. e. the inhabitants of Ugarit, on its basis, create their own simplified syllabic cuneiform, which may have influenced the formation of the Phoenician script. The Greek and, accordingly, later alphabets originate from the latter. The Pylos tablets in archaic Greece are also probably derived from the Mesopotamian pattern. In I millennium BC. e. cuneiform is borrowed by the Urartians; the Persians also create their ceremonial cuneiform writing, although in this era the more convenient Aramaic and Greek are already known. Cuneiform writing thus largely determined the cultural image of the Near East region in antiquity.

The prestige of Mesopotamian culture and writing was so great that in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. e., despite the decline of the political power of Babylon and Assyria, the Akkadian language and cuneiform become a means of international communication throughout the Middle East. The text of the treaty between Pharaoh Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III was written in Akkadian. Even to their vassals in Palestine, the pharaohs write not in Egyptian, but in Akkadian. Scribes at the courts of the rulers of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt diligently studied the Akkadian language, cuneiform, and literature. Someone else's complex letter delivered a lot of torment to these scribes: traces of paint are visible on some tablets from Tell Amarna (ancient Akhetaton). It was the Egyptian scribes who, when reading, tried to divide into words (sometimes incorrectly) continuous lines of cuneiform texts. 1400-600 BC e. - the time of the greatest influence of the Mesopotamian civilization on the world around us. Sumerian and Akkadian ritual, "scientific" and literary texts are being copied and translated into other languages throughout the area of cuneiform writing.

Ancient Mesopotamian Sumerian and Akkadian literature is relatively well known - about a quarter of what constituted the "main stream of tradition", that is, was studied and copied in ancient schools-academies, has been preserved. Clay tablets, even unfired, are perfectly preserved in the ground, and there is reason to hope that in time the entire corpus of literary and "scientific" texts will be restored. Education in the Mesopotamia has long been based on copying texts of the most diverse content - from samples of business documents to "works of art", and a number of Sumerian and Akkadian works have been restored from numerous student copies.

At schools-academies (edubba) libraries were created in many branches of knowledge, there were also private collections of "clay books". Large temples and palaces of rulers also often had large libraries in addition to economic and administrative archives. The most famous of them is the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, discovered in 1853 during excavations on a hill near the village of Kuyundzhik on the left bank of the Tigris. Ashurbanipal's collection was not only the largest for its time; this is perhaps the first real, systematically selected and arranged library in the world. The king personally oversaw its acquisition: on his orders, scribes throughout the country made copies of ancient or rare tablets kept in temple and private collections, or delivered the originals to Nineveh.

Some works are presented in this library in five or six copies. Lengthy texts made up entire "series", sometimes including up to 150 tablets. On each such "serial" plate was its serial number; the initial words of the first tablet served as the title. On the shelves "books" were placed on certain branches of knowledge. Here were collected texts of "historical" content ("annals", "chronicles", etc.), judicial records, hymns, prayers, incantations and spells, epic poems, "scientific" texts (collections of signs and predictions, medical and astrological texts, recipes , Sumero-Akkadian dictionaries, etc.), hundreds of books in which all the knowledge, the entire experience of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization was “deposited”. Much of what we know about the culture of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians has come from studying these 25,000 tablets and fragments recovered from the ruins of the palace library that perished in the destruction of Nineveh.

Ancient Mesopotamian literature includes both monuments of folklore origin - "literary" adaptations of epic poems, fairy tales, collections of proverbs, and author's works representing the written tradition. The most outstanding monument of Sumero-Babylonian literature, according to modern researchers, is the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, which tells about the search for immortality and raises the question of the meaning of human existence. A whole cycle of Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh and several later Akkadian versions of the epic have been found. This monument, obviously, enjoyed well-deserved fame in antiquity; his translations into the Hurrian and Hittite languages are known, and Elian also mentions Gilgamesh.

Of great interest are the Old Babylonian “Poem of Atrahasis”, which tells about the creation of man and the global flood, and the cult cosmogonic epic “Enuma Elish” (“When above ...”). A fairy tale poem about the tricks of a cunning man who took revenge on his offender three times came from Mesopotamia. This fairy-tale story is well represented in world folklore (type 1538 according to Aarn Thompson's system). The motif of the flight of a man on an eagle is also widespread in world folklore, first encountered in the Akkadian “Poem about Etana”. The Sumerian Teachings of Shuruppak (mid-3rd millennium BC) include a number of proverbs and maxims that are repeated later in many Middle Eastern literatures and among ancient philosophers.

Of the works of non-folklore, originally written, authorial origin, several poems about an innocent sufferer, the so-called "Babylonian Theodicy" and "The Conversation of the Master with the Slave", anticipating the themes of the biblical books of Job and Ecclesiastes, should be pointed out. Some penitential psalms and the lamentations of the Babylonians also find parallels in the biblical psalms. In general, it can be argued that ancient Mesopotamian literature, its themes, poetics, the very vision of the world and man had a significant impact on the literature of neighboring peoples, on the Bible, and through it on the literature of Europe.

Apparently, the Aramaic "Tale of Ahikar" (the oldest record dates back to the 5th century BC), translated into Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian and Slavic languages ("The Tale of Akira the Wise" in the Middle Ages) also had Mesopotamian origins. ).

Sumerian-Babylonian mathematics and astronomy left a deep mark on modern culture. To this day, we use the positional system of numbers and the Sumerian sexagesimal counting, dividing the circle into 360 °, the hour into 60 minutes, and each of them into 60 seconds. The achievements of Babylonian mathematical astronomy were especially significant.

The most creative period of Babylonian mathematical astronomy falls on the 5th century BC. BC e. At this time there were famous astronomical schools in Uruk, Sippar, Babylon and Borsippa. Two great astronomers came out of these schools: Naburian, who developed a system for determining the lunar phases, and Kiden, who established the duration of the solar year and, even before Hipparchus, discovered solar precessions. An important role in the transfer of Babylonian astronomical knowledge to the Greeks was played by the school founded by the Babylonian scientist Beross on the island of Kos around 270 BC. e. The Greeks thus had direct access to Babylonian mathematics, which in many respects rivaled that of early Renaissance Europe.

The legacy of the Mesopotamian civilization in the field of political theory and practice, military affairs, law and historiosophy is curious. The administrative system that had developed in Assyria was borrowed by the Persians (division of the country into satrapies, division of civil and military power in the provinces). The Achaemenids, and after them the Hellenistic rulers and later the Roman Caesars, adopted much of the court habits adopted by the Mesopotamian kings.

Born, apparently, at the turn of III-II millennium BC. e. the idea of a single true "royalty", passing over time from one city-state to another, survived the millennia. Having entered the Bible (the Book of Daniel) as the idea of a change of "kingdoms", it became the property of early Christian historiosophy and served as one of the sources that arose in Rus' at the beginning of the 16th century. theory of "Moscow - the third Rome". It is characteristic that the insignia of the Byzantine emperors and Russian tsars, according to Byzantine and Russian authors, come from Babylon. “When Prince Vladimer of Kiev heard that Tsar Vasily (Emperor of Byzantium 976-1025 - I.K.) received (from Babylon. - I.K.) such great royal things, and sent his ambassador to him, so that donated. Tsar Vasily, for the sake of his honor, sent an ambassador to Prince Vladimir in Kyiv as a gift, a carnelian crab and a Monomakhov's cap. And since that time, Grand Duke Vladimer of Kiev, Monomakh, heard. And now that hat in the Moscow state in the cathedral church. And how is the appointment of power, then for the sake of rank they put it on the head, ”we read in The Tale of Babylon City (according to the list of the 17th century).

Despite the fact that in the Old Testament and Christian traditions there was a clearly hostile attitude towards Babylon and Assyria, Babylon remained in the memory of many generations as the first "world kingdom", the successor of which was the subsequent great empires.

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