The development of successful agriculture, which relied on the region’s fertile soils and an irrigation system that took advantage of its consistent water supply, led to the development of the world’s first cities. The earliest known civilization developed along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now the country of Iraq. You may wish to use this lesson independently as an introduction to Mesopotamian civilization, or as an entry point into the study of Sumerian and Babylonian history and culture. This lesson plan, intended for use in the teaching of world history in the middle grades, is designed to help students appreciate the parallel development and increasing complexity of writing and civilization in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in ancient Mesopotamia. Cuneiform came to function both phonetically (representing a sound) and semantically (representing a meaning such as an object or concept) rather than only representing objects directly as a picture. An increasingly complex civilization encouraged the development of an increasingly sophisticated form of writing. Though writing began as pictures, this system was inconvenient for conveying anything other than simple nouns, and it became increasingly abstract as it evolved to encompass more abstract concepts, eventually taking form in the world’s earliest writing: cuneiform.

At first, this writing was representational: a bull might be represented by a picture of a bull, and a pictograph of barley signified the word barley. That writing system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship suggests that Mesopotamia’s writing appeared first.

Mesopotamia scribe on social ladder