Mesopotamia Quotes

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

A writing exercise from a school in ancient Mesopotamia discovered by modern archaeologists gives us a glimpse into the lives of these students, some 4,000 years ago: I went in and sat down, and my teacher read my tablet. He said, 'There's something missing!' And he caned me. One of the people in charge said, 'Why did you open your mouth without my permission?' And he caned me. The one in charge of rules said, 'Why did you get up without my permission?' And he caned me. The gatekeeper said, 'Why are you going out without my permission?' And he caned me. The keeper of the beer jug said, 'Why did you get some without my permission?' And he caned me. The Sumerian teacher said, 'Why did you speak Akkadian?'fn1 And he caned me. My teacher said, 'Your handwriting is no good!' And he caned me.4 ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: "No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English 'religion' or 'religious.' "6 The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.7 Nor does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.8 ~ Karen Armstrong

From May until October, the Ottoman Government pursued methodically a plan of extermination far more hellish than the worst possible massacre. Orders for deportation of the entire Armenian population to Mesopotamia were dispatched to every province of Asia Minor. These orders were explicit and detailed. No hamlet was too insignificant to be missed. The news was given by town criers that every Armenian was to be ready to leave at a certain hour for an unknown destination. ~ Herbert Adams Gibbons

in classical times as Babylonia, consists of the lower half of Mesopotamia, roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian ~ Samuel Noah Kramer

The daughter of Sin was determined to go
To the dark house, dwelling of Erkalla's god,
To the house which those who enter cannot leave,
On the road where travelling is one-way only,
To the house where those who enter are deprived of light,
Where dust is their food, clay their bread.
They see no light, they dwell in darkness,
They are clothed like birds, with feathers. ~ Stephanie Dalley

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben. Other ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Mosul, the native city of the historian Ibn al-Athir, was the capital of Jazira, or Mesopotamia, the fertile plain watered by the two great rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It was a political, cultural, and economic centre of prime importance. The Arabs boasted of its succulent fruit: its apples, pears, grapes, and pomegranates. The fine cloth it exported - called 'muslin', a word derived from the city's name - was known throughout the world. At the time of the arrival of the Franj, the people of the emir Karbuqa's realm were already exploiting another natural resource, which the traveller Ibn Jubayr was to describe with amazement a few dozen years later: deposits of naphtha. This precious dark liquid, which would one day make the fortune of this part of the world, already offered travellers an unforgettable spectacle. ~ Amin Maalouf

Assyria had no more prospect of halting the human flow than can the British government stop illegal entrants to the UK, although an effective natural moat surrounds the British Isles. There is little hope that the US Department of Homeland Security will have greater success with its border fence than did King Shulgi of Ur and his successors, whose 'wall to keep out the Amorites' failed to prevent the migrants' eventual takeover of all lower Mesopotamia and their founding of Old Babylon. ~ Paul Kriwaczek

Mesopotamia
will be one together as city-states we cannot create a full out war over nothing, this will be settled ~ Hammurabi

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass - a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence? ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Two great
contemporary scholars at the antipodes of the cultural spread of Hellenism,
Boethius in Rome (d. 525) and Sergius of Re¯ˇsayna in northern Mesopotamia ¯
(d. 536), conceived of the grand idea of translating all of Aristotle into Latin
and Syriac respectively.5 The conception is to their credit as individual thinkers
for their noble intentions; their failure indicates that the receiving cultures in
which they worked had not developed the need for this enterprise. Philosophy
in Latin was to develop, even if on some of the foundations laid by Boethius,
much later,6 while in Syriac it reached its highest point with BarHebraeus in the thirteenth century only after it had developed in Arabic and was translated
from it. ~ Dimitri Gutas

boon for me, and for Turkey and the Middle East as a whole. We have a rich and varied history, a history that is being forgotten in today's world, buried beneath senseless wars, terrorism and religious zealotry. My museum aims to bring that history once again into the mind of the world, to show East and West that we are not simple, violent brutes. Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization and I hope one day we can bring that to the world's notice once again. ~ Alex Zabala

In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god was aroused by the clamor. Enlil heard the clamor and he said to the gods in council, "The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel." So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind. ~ Anonymous

The French delegates now wore a cynical smile as they argued before the commissions; they had their assurance that their armies were going to hold the Rhineland and the Sarre, and that a series of buffer states were to be set up between Germany and Russia, all owing their existence to France, all financed with the savings of the French peasants, and munitioned by Zaharoff, alias Schneider-Creusot. France and Britain were going to divide Persia and Mesopotamia and Syria and make a deal for the oil and the laying of pipelines. Italy was to take the Adriatic, Japan was to take Shantung - all such matters were being settled among sensible men. Lanny ~ Upton Sinclair

It is childish to assume that science began in Greece; the Greek "miracle" was prepared by millenia of work in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in other regions. Greek science was less an invention than a revival. ~ George Sarton

Prehistory isn't like a 'veil' or a 'curtain' that 'lifts' to reveal the pre-set 'stage' of history. Rather, prehistory is an absence of something: an absence of writing. So a better image of the 'dawn of history' might be an AM radio in the pre-dawn hours: you recognize wisps of words or music across the dial, inter blending, and noise obscures even the few clear-channel stations. The first ones we find, when we switch on the radio of history about 3200B.C.E., come from Mesopotamia, and those from Egypt soon emerge. Eventually the neighbouring lands produce records, with the effect that the ancient Near East is probably the best documented civilization before the invention of printing." (Daniels and Bright, page 19) ~ Peter T. Daniels

Let's stand against the killing of innocent civilians. It is time to make the future better than today. Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities. ~ Widad Akreyi

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began. ~ Tom Standage

The kingdoms of Africa and Mesopotamia, machine gunning your body with depleted uranium, this is the age of microchips and titanium, the dark side of the moon, and contact with aliens. ~ Immortal Technique

Speaking of wine, beer never caught on with the ancient Greeks and Romans the way it did in Mesopotamia and Western Europe - at least among the privileged classes, who showed a strong preference for fermented grape juice.[11] Beer was seen as a drink of peasants and savages, earning the contempt of public intellectuals like Pliny the Elder, who, in reference to the people of Spain and Gaul (now France) fumed that, "The perverted ingenuity of man has given even to water the power of intoxicating where wine is not procurable. Western nations intoxicate themselves by means of moistened grain."[12] One wonders what Pliny would say today if you were to hand him a glass of the famous beer that now bears his name - Pliny the Elder IPA, brewed by California's Russian River Brewing Co. and renowned as one of the world's finest beers. ~ James Houston

My first-year mentor Leslie taught me that the hurrieder we go, the behinder we get. ~ Weam Namou