ABSTRACT
Mesopotamia is originally a Greek word meaning land between the rivers. It is indeed a region gifted with wide open alluvial plains of agricultural richness, a unique area where two major rivers run parallel for more than 700 km. But people first chose to settle in areas along the hilly flanks, as archaeologists call them, at the margins of the alluvial basin and lower slopes of the Taurus and Zagros mountains. In the 4th millennium B.C., first the Ubaids and then the Sumerians built systems of canals that ran across the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, bringing water to fields, even creating oases. With mild and sporadically rainy winters separated by long, hot and dry summers, Mesopotamia could never have supported cities without large-scale irrigation. But the two rivers, particularly the Euphrates, the greater source of water for irrigation, were not like the Nile. Their flooding could be sudden, intermittent and poorly timed with relation to agriculture.
