Mesopotamian Culture

In early mesopotamia, their culture had many characteristics that made the early societies really “work.” Their codes and rules were based off certain things that can tell you a lot about their culture and how they governed the place. Mesopotamia was the first place to house civilization in around 1800 BCE. There were two civilizations that had stayed in mesopotamia, the Akkadians from 1800 BCE, and the sumerians from around 2200 BCE. Both civilizations lived at different times but had very similar cultures. For example, family was very important to the early mesopotamians. In Hammurabi 's Code, (a set of rules made by the mesopotamians) one rule, (code 14) says “If anyone steal the minor son of another, he shall be put to death.” What

There was a lot of things that made the mesopotamians mesopotamians, and you could tell be reading their codes, but ownership really defined them. One code from the Code Of Ur Nammu simply states, “if a man commits a robbery, he shall be killed.” Often times, back then if you committed a crime, you would just pay a fine but in this case, the penalty is death. If death was the penalty for stealing, it must mean they respect others ownership of things and they strongly disapprove of taking things away from their rightful owner and just the fact that penalty is death,that says a lot. So in other words, you steal, you die, simply because it means something to mesopotamians. Another code from Ur Nammu was code #30. “If a man stealthily cultivates the field of another man and he raises a complaint, this is however to be rejected, and this man will lose his expenses.” If a man steals some of another man 's land and farms on that land, if he is caught, he will not get paid for that stolen property and he will lose his expenses. This punishment is clearly not death, but if you were to commit this crime, you would still lose money, which was still effective considering people were very poor.Stealing/lying was a very serious matter to the mesopotamians and often resulted in a death punishment. One code from Hammurabi 's Code that was used in one of my earlier examples could also be used to prove this point. Code 14

A while ago, we had found this thing called the Standard Of Ur. It was a thing the mesopotamians built based on their social class and war. There was two sides to this object, each side explaining something different. One side had three layers and each layer represented a different level of social class, the bottom layer being the lowest level, the top layer being the highest. The bottom layer is (from what we can decipher) slaves, the middle is free-men, the top layer is kings/rulers or the royal people. The other side of the object described war. The Standard of Ur proves that there was social class because they, the mesopotamians, had created the Standard Of Ur themselves. On the top layer of the social class side, it had great detail as the bottom layer had barely any. The detail level proves how much the royals were considered and valued whilst the slaves were greatly disregarded and un thought of. When the mesopotamians had made this, they had put great detail into all of it overall. They had gotten precious stones from far away to build this object to describe their social class and their war formation or a battle they had won. With how much detail and time that was put into this object, you can tell that they respected and cared about their social class and that they had clearly revolved around it. In code 202 of Hammurabi 's Code, it states “If anyone strike the body of a man higher in