“Within the three millennia in which ancient Mesopotamia flourished, innumerable individual kingdoms came and went, and a few empires rose and fell for various reasons,” says Podany, author of the forthcoming book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East.
“Within the three millennia in which ancient Mesopotamia flourished, innumerable individual kingdoms came and went, and a few empires rose and fell for various reasons,” says Podany, author of the forthcoming book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. “But at its core, the civilization was recognizably the same from around 3500 BCE to as late as 323 BCE—and, many would argue, beyond that. The region was rarely unified, but the civilization was very stable.”