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By: Allison W.

& Andrew T.

Mesopotamia’s name shows where it is located. The word 'Mesopotamia' comes from Greek words that mean “between the rivers”. The picture below is a map of Mesopotamia. It lies between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Mesopotamia is part of a larger area that is called the Fertile Crescent. One location in ancient Mesopotamia was the land of Akkad which was located in the area around modern Baghdad, where the Euphrates and Tigris are close to each other.

Mesopotamia’s soil was the best place to grow crops for farming. There was a great amount of food available to sell, so trade grew quickly. Cities grew up along the two rivers. There was a lot of land between the cities so each had their own special gods or goddess, religious beliefs, government, and Kings. These independent areas were called city-states for this reason.

One of the Sumerian city states was known as Akkad. The Akkadians were people who lived on the Arabic peninsula during the great period of the Sumerian city-states. Early Akkadian history and culture shows that the Akkadians migrated north and came in touch with other Sumerian city-states. In 2340 BC, the great Akkadian King, and military leader, Sargon, defeated Sumer and built an Akkadian empire that stretched over most of the Sumerian city-states. Sargon’s empire was mainly in the city of Akkad, which his people based their name on. This great capital empire later became the city of Babylon, which was the commercial and cultural center of the Middle East for almost two thousand years.

Sargon appointed his family members too many of the important jobs. His daughter Enheduanna became priestess in the city, Ur. He also created a standing army which was the first professional army. Trading was centralized in Akkad and coastal ships from the Persian Gulf stopped at ports of Akkad. Sargon was succeeded by his two sons and later his grandson, but his empire lasted for only a short time. In 2125, the Sumerian city of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia rose up in fight, and the Akkadian empire was conquered.

The Akkadian Language:

The Akkadians were Semites, which means they spoke a language taken from a family of languages called Semitic languages (the word "Semite" is a modern word taken from the Hebrew Scriptures; Shem was a son of Noah and the nations descended from Shem are the Semites). These languages include Hebrew, Arabic, Assyrian, and Babylonian.

Akkadian is one of the great cultural languages of world history. Akkadian (or Babylonian-Assyrian) is the collective name for the spoken languages of the culture in the three millennia in Mesopotamia. The name Akkadian --so called in ancient time-- is derived from the city-state of Akkad.

Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform texts, an introduction collected by John Heise.

En hedu’anna is the first female name recorded in technical history. She was the daughter of Sargon (of Akkad).He made her the chief priestess of the moon goddess of the city. This was a position of great power. There are no technical writings from her. There are forty-eight of her poems. A few of those are:

The En-hedu-Ana - the first known author of the world

This language used a writing system called cuneiform. Wedge shaped symbols were written on clay tablets with a reed stylus. This writing system was invented by the Sumerians around the end of the fourth millennium BCE. Many neighboring countries later used this writing method to record their own language.

Akkadian has been around for centuries. Below is a picture of a clay writing tablet using the cuneiform language.