THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION

The  beginning of the world is not the result of “chaos” said Pope Francis at a recent forum with the Pontifical Academy of Scientists, but comes directly from a supreme principle that  creates out of love. Hold on to this theme of creation—the beginning of the world as we know it, is not the result of “chaos” but comes directly from “a supreme principle” that creates out of love.  

“The Big Bang Theory and Evolution do not eliminate the existence of God who remains the one Who set all creation into motion.”

“Life in its deepest essence remains something that escapes us.  I can know perfectly what a cell is, ” said chemistry and physics  scientist Vicuna, and how it works deep down, what really is the dynamism that makes it move –that is life – the laws of chemistry and physics do not suffice to grasp the whole of life – that life is more than molecules.”  

Life is more than atoms and molecules, but what is that supreme principle, that Essence in life that creates out of love?  As we dive through the deepest tunnel of History of how human civilization developed through the prehistoric millennia, from BCE or BC of unrecorded time to the modern present, AD, we come into a great sense of astonishment that the world as we know it did not come out of “chaos’’  When we read  the account of creation in Genesis, we risk thinking  that God  was a magician, complete with a magic wand, able to do everything for us , but it is not like that, Pope Francis said,  God created us into living beings so we can develop according to the internal laws that give each one of us the power to develop to our full potential. The following account on the beginnings of our civilization can attest to that long journey, precarious in character similar to a.razor’s edge interjected with magical power to rise in greatness in the arts and culture through grace  by alternating periods of "dark age," and ''golden age" in the process of human evolution.  See that massive presence of an Assyrian king majestic in sculpted robes as a winged bull !! (above)

 At the British museum when you go there to visit the ancient artifacts of civilization as we live it, you will encounter the ancient Assyrians warriors and kings in bas relief and you would be tempted to want to touch them or even hug them if the security would allow for they are so real, '"so much in this world but not of this world" and they are valued as the masterpieces of the British museum
As Spirit the one that creates is not governed by limitations such as Space,Time, the Sumerians disappeared when their purpose was done, following the Law of Quantum Physics, nothing is solid, everything is Energy, and appearance that takes form in a formless but spiraling universe connotes Purpose, movement denotes it. What's your purpose for coming into this incarnation, that's your search for meaning for existing, for knowing the laws of your being...deep inside, your heart knows, it's soul, spirit, 
essence....deathless 
     
  

When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D. , they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Ashurian-Christian civilization with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture. And  advanced learning and institutions.  It is this civilization which became the foundation of the Arab civilization.  But this great Assyrian Christian civilization would come to an end in 1300 AD.  The tax which the Arabs levied on Christians simply for just being Christians made the Assyrians to convert to Islam to avoid the tax. This inexorably drained the community as by that time Tumerlane the Mongol delivered the final blow in 1300 AD,  violently destroying the Assyrian community which  had dwindled to its core in Assyria (modern day Iraq), and henceforth the Assyrian Church of the East would not regain its former glory.

The Beginnings of ASSYRIAN CIVILIZATION, EMPIRE
  

In 1932, Sir Mallowan the eminent British archeologist, dug a deep sounding which reached virgin soil ninety feet below the top of the mount of Nineveh in Iraq this gave a pottery sequence back to prehistoric times.  And showed that the site was already inhabited by 5000 BCE (Before Common Era). Very soon after that, the two other great Assyrian cities were settled, Ashur and Arbel,  although the exact date have yet to be determined. Arbel is the oldest extant city, and remains largely unexcavated, its archeological treasure waiting to be discovered.  Arbil is presumably present- day Erbil, capital of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, which according to legend has never been conquered by invading armies, foremost of them, is that of the conqueror Alexander the Great. From time to time I’ll insert a comment:  there is something about this city of Arbel now Erbil in northern Iraq that is a deep mystery to historians.  If it has not been conquered in an invasion through the ups and downs of warring, stormy Assyrian millennia, why? 

What is this mysterious hidden power behind ancient Arbel? I would presume to attribute it to Spirit guarding it against all threats and overwhelming odds in its ageless past?  It is now modern day Erbil, capital of Kurdistan Iraq with fortification walls reminiscent of its warlike ageless past...If you like to open my page in FB you will see photos of modern-day Erbil inter-laced with promenades of sparkling water fountains. It is clear that by 2500 BC these two cities Arbel and Ashur, were established and were thriving metropolis. I see here the Timelessness of Spirit cloaking this fragile emerging material world dated BCE   
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 This period of history saw the development of the fundamentals of our civilization such as domestication, agriculture, pottery, controllable fire, smelting, to name a few.

Between 4000 and 2400 BC complete societies appear in the form of cities with craft specializations and writing. These features were associated with the Sumerians, but they quickly spread to outer parts of Mesopotamia.in the Middle East.  
  

In Assyria, settlements had become large and guarded by fortification walls which implies risks of attack from outside, and have the need for defense and warfare.

GEOGRAPHY

Assyria is located in north Mesopotamia and spans four countries –Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran.  In Syria, it extends west to the Euphrates river, in Turkey, it extends north of Haram, Edesu, Diyarbakir and Lake Van.  In Iraq it extends east to Lake Urmi, and  extends to Kirkuk rich in fossil oil, guarded by the Iraqi Kurds as it is in their terrain. This is the Assyrian heartland, from which so much of the ancient Near East came to be controlled. 

Two giant rivers run through Assyria, the Tigris and the Euphrates and many lesser others. Strategically, surrounding the Tigris and two Zabs are the Assyrian cities of Nineveh, Ashur, Arbel, Nimrod, and Arrapkha. The Assyrian land is rich and fertile.  The Arbel plain and the Nineveh plain are areas of critical crop producers. This is from where Assyria derived her strength so it could feed a largepopulation of professionals and craftsmen which allowed it to expand and advance the arts and culture of civilization.  
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 ARTS ind CULTURE 

The Sumerians were the first people known to have devised a scheme of written representation as a means of communication.  Pictures on clay tablets the Sumerians gradually created cuneiform – a way of arranging impressions stamped on clay by the wedge-like section  chopped wedge to stand for phonetic, and possibly for  syllabic elements that provided more flexible communication than the pictogram. Through writing the Sumerians were able to pass on to generations  information and ideas. 
 

Another Sumerian legacy was the recording of literature –most famous Sumerian epic the one that has survived is the story of Gilgamesh who actually was a king of a city-state of  Uruk in approximately 2799 BC as a moving story of the ruler’s deep sorrow of the death of his friend and of the consequent search for immortality.  Other central themes of story are a devastating flood and the tenuous nature of man’s existence. Laden with all complex abstractions and emotional expression, the epic reflects the intellectual sophistication of the Sumerians, and it has served as the prototype for all Near Eastern inundation of flood stories . I wish to comment on Sumer: what is the mystery surrounding the Sumerians? Why were they so well developed at a very, very early time, in terms of the Arts like literature, the epic form? The Sumerians introduced writing, the beginning of communcative arts, languages, conceptual ideas, the whys of existence, philosophy, why so early? 

Who were the Sumerians ?  They must have descended from the higher realms of divine Light and Love to serve as our teachers, guides…. Remember the theme of creation we brought forth right at the opening of this historical and cultural account  --  the beginning of the world is not the result of “chaos” but comes  directly from the supreme principle that creates out of love.

    

RELIGION and POLITICS

The precariousness of existence led to a highly developed sense of religion.  Cult centers such as Eridu dating back to 5999 BC served as important centers of  pilgrimage  and devotion  even before the rise of Sumer.  Many of the most important Mesopotamian cities emerged in areas surrounding the pre-Sumerian relationship between religion and government

The Sumerians were pantheistic, their gods were personified local elements and natural forces. In exchange for sacrifice and adherence to a set of elaborate rituals  one is provided security and prosperity.  A powerful priesthood emerged to oversee ritual practices and to intervene  with the gods. Sumerian religious  beliefs also had important political aspects.   

Decisions relating to land, rentals, agricultural questions, trade, and.commercial relatons were determined by the priests that ruled from their  temples called  ziggurats which were essentially artificial mountains of sun-baked brick, built with outside staircases that tapered toward a shrive at the top.

Sumer also pioneered  in warfare technology by the  middle of 3^rd millennium BC.  They had developed the wheeled chariot.  Approximately in the middle of 3^rd millennium they discovered that tin and copper when smelted together produced bronze – a new, more durable and much harder metal.  The wheeled chariot and bronze weapons became increasingly important as the Sumerians developed the institution of kingship and as individual city-states began to rise for supremacy. 

THE CODE OF HAMMURABI                                               -

Historians generally divide Sumerian-Assyrian history in three stages at roughly between 3360 BC up to 430 BC.  Sumer was conquered in approximately 2334 BC by Sargon I king of the Semitic city of Akkad.  Sargon I was the world’s first empire-builder, an Assyrian, sending his troops as far as Egypt and Ethiopia.  Sargon I attempted to establish a unified empire and to end hostilities among the city-states.  Sargon’s rule introduced a new level of political organization characterized by an even more clear-cut separation between religious authority and civil authority. 

 To ensure his supremacy, Sargon created the first conscripted army, a development  related to the need to mobilize large numbers of Akkadian strength. This was boosted by the invention of the composite box, a new weapon made of wood and iron.  The Akkadian hegemony lasted only 200 years, a new Sumer-Akkadian culturtal legacy was carried on by the Amorites which established cities on the Tigris and Eurphrates rivers and made Babylon a town in the north, their capital. 
  

During the time of its 6^th ruling king, Hammurabi devised an elaborate set of statutes with the essence of a law code designed “to cause justice to prevail in the country, to destroy the wicked and the evil, so that the strong may not oppress the weak.” The Code of Hammurabi is not the earliest to appear in Near East but certainly the most complete that dealt with land tenure, rent, the position of women, marriage, divorce, inheritance, contracts, control of public order, administration of justice, wages and labor conditions. 

In Hammurabi’s legal code, the civilizing trend of the world begun manifesting a highly advanced civilization in which social intervention extended far beyond the confines of kingship.  The Babylonians made more important contributions, notably in the science of astronomy.  And they increased the flexibility if the cuneiform by syllable rather than an individual word.  Beginning in approximately 600 BC., one of the cities that flourished in the Tigris Valley was that of Ashur, named  after the sun-god of the Assyrians.

The Assyrians were Semitic speakers who occupied Babylon for a brief period in the 13^th century BC. Invasions of iron-producing people into the Near East and into the Aegean (Greece) sea region in approximately 1200 BC disrupted the unspeakable cruelty of the Assyrians. The names of such Assyrian kings as Ashurnasipal (883-859 BC) , Tiglash Puleser III (745-681 BC) Ashurbumipal (669-526 BC) continue to evoke images of powerful, militarily brilliant, but brutally savage conquerors.  

In 612 BC, the revolts of subject people combined with the allied forces of two new kingdoms, the Medes and Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians) effectively fought to extinguish Assyrian power rule in Nineveh near Mosul (in Iraq), and Nineveh was razed.  The hatred that the Assyrians inspired, particularly for their policy of wholesome resettlements of subject peoples was sufficiently great to ensure that  few traces of Assyrian civilization remained two years later.

 The Assyrians have used visual arts to depict their many conquests, in Assyrian friezes, executed in minute detail continues to be the best artifacts of Assyrian civilization. 
 

Conscious of their ancient past, the Chaldeans sought to re-establish  Babylon as the most magnificent city in Near East (now known as Middle East) It was during the Chaldean period that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon famed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were created. Babylonian monarchy was however, severely weakened, and it was unable to withstand the rising power of Achamenid in Iran. In 539 BC Cyrus the Great released the Jews who had been held in captivity there.  Why does Iran feature at this point in Assyrian History? Let’s start again for the sake of taking up geographical data in relation to the expanding Cradle of Civilization. 

SOURCE:   Brief History of Assyria by Peter BerBcsog (revised Nov 1, 2013) Wikipedia