ABSTRACT
In 1872, George Smith, an earnest banknote-engraver-turned-clay-tablet-expert, was sorting through the dusty fragments of Assyrian king Assurbanipal's royal library in the British Museum. The Victorians thought of Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq, as the location of the biblical Garden of Eden. From north to south, Mesopotamia is approximately 965 kilometers long and 400 kilometers wide, extending from the uplands of Iran to the east to the Arabian and Syrian deserts in the west. As Mesopotamian society grew rapidly in complexity in the centuries that followed, so did the need for social, political, and religious institutions that would provide some form of centralized authority. With the emergence of the Sumerian civilization in about 3100 BC, a new era in human experience begins, one in which the economic, political, and social mechanisms created by humans begin to affect the lives of cities, towns, and villages located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles apart.
