ABSTRACT
The name ‘Mesopotamia’, coined for a Roman province, is now used for the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and in many general books it features as the eastern horn of the ‘fertile crescent’. The Mesopotamian heartland was a strip of land wrested by human vigilance from adverse climatic conditions. Its geography is essential to the understanding of its history: it defines the lifestyle of the agricultural community, and thereby of the city. It preordains the location of settlements and of the routes between them. Extremes of temperature and abrupt changes in landscape divide the area into very distinct environments, which can be blocked out on a map much more clearly than in most temperate parts of the world. The different zones favour or impose different lifestyles, which have often coincided with ethnic and political divisions and so have a direct impact on history. Sometimes it is the physical conformation of the country that has an obvious effect on its human geography: mountain ranges act as barriers to communication, plains enable it and rivers channel it. Major political units grow up in areas of easy communication, whether in the South or North Mesopotamian plain – Sumer, Babylon, Assyria – or on the Iranian or Anatolian plateaux – Elam, the Hittite Empire, Urartu; the intervening mountain ridges and valleys of the Taurus and Zagros, like so many mountainous areas in the world, foster local independence and discourage the rise of larger groupings, political, ethnic and linguistic. Here there were never major centres of cultural diffusion, and it was on the plains of North and South Mesopotamia that social and political developments were forged.
