Around 500 BCE, following the Achaemenid conquest of Mesopotamia under Darius I, Old Aramaic was adopted by the conquerors as the " vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast empire with its different peoples and languages.

The Akkadian Empire was an empire centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region in Mesopotamia.

The empire's breadbasket was the rain-fed agricultural system of northern Mesopotamia ( Assyria ) and a chain of fortresses was built to control the imperial wheat production.

This title was assumed by the king who seized control of Nippur, the intellectual and religious center of southern Mesopotamia.

In the provinces of the Empire, in Illyricum, in Mauritania, in Armenia, in Mesopotamia and in Germania, fresh mutinies perpetually broke out, as his officers were murdered and his authority was disregarded.

It was at Anah that the emperor Julian met the first opposition on his disastrous expedition against Persia ( 363 ), when he got possession of the place and transported the people ; and there that Ziyad and Shureih with the advanced guard of Ali's army were refused passage across the Euphrates ( 36 / 657 ) to join Ali in Mesopotamia ( Tabari i. 3261 ).

He entered the army at an early age, when Constantius II was emperor of the East, and was sent to serve under Ursicinus, governor of Nisibis in Mesopotamia, and magister militum.

Assyria or Athura ( Aramaic for Assyria ) was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the late 25th or early – 24th century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia ( present day northern Iraq ), that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history.

This was to lead to both the Assyrians from Mesopotamia and Arameans from the Levant being dubbed Syrians in Greco-Roman culture.

Romans and Parthians fought over Assyria and the rest of Mesopotamia until 226 AD, when it was taken over by the Sassanid ( Persian ) Empire.

It also remained the spoken tongue of the indigenous Assyrian / Babylonian citizens of all Mesopotamia under Persian, Greek and Roman rule, and indeed well into the Arab period it was still the language of the majority, particularly in the north of Mesopotamia, surviving to this day among the Assyrian Christians.

Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the nine great ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, China, Rome, India, the Celtic peoples, and Maya.

* The land between Egypt and Canaan of the first Exodus was a " great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland " ( Deut 8: 15 ), but in this new Exodus, the land between Babylon ( Mesopotamia ) and the Promised Land will be transformed into a paradise, where the mountains will be lowered and the valleys raised to create level road ( Isa 40: 4 ).

By the end of 1346, reports of plague had reached the seaports of Europe: " India was depopulated, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies ".

Originally money was a form of receipt, representing grain stored in temple granaries in Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia, then Ancient Egypt.

Chaldea or Chaldaea (), from Greek, Chaldaia ; Akkadian ; Hebrew כשדים, Kaśdim ; Aramaic: ܟܐܠܕܘ, Kaldo ) was a marshy land located in south eastern Mesopotamia which came to rule Babylon briefly.

Though the name came to be commonly used to refer to the whole of southern Mesopotamia, Chaldea proper was in fact the vast plain in the far south east formed by the deposits of the Euphrates and the Tigris, extending to about four hundred miles along the course of these rivers, and about a hundred miles in average width.

The homeland of the Semitic Chaldean people was in the far south east of Mesopotamia.

The Chaldean's homeland was in the relatively poor country in the far south of Mesopotamia, at the head of the Persian Gulf.

By 572 Nebuchadnezzar was in full control of Mesopotamia, Aramea ( Syria ), Phonecia, Israel, Judah, Philistinia, Samarra, Jordan, northern Arabia and parts of Asia Minor.

Before Constantius arrived, the Persian general Narses, who was possibly the king's brother, overran Mesopotamia and captured Amida.

First activities were linked to irrigation and flood control, as demonstrated by traces of dykes, dams, and canals dating back to at least 2000 BCE that were found in ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, as well as around the early settlements of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa in the Indus valley.

Heyerdahl built yet another reed boat, Tigris, which was intended to demonstrate that trade and migration could have linked Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley Civilization in what is now modern-day Pakistan.

A cylinder seal, known as the Temptation seal, from post-Akkadian periods in Mesopotamia ( c. 23-22 Century BCE ), has been linked to the Adam and Eve story.

The concept of four humors may have origins in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, though it was not systemized until ancient Greek thinkers around 400 BC who directly linked it with the popular theory of the four elements earth, fire, water and air ( Empedocles ).

The cylinder seal, known as the Temptation seal from post-Akkadian periods in Mesopotamia ( c. 23 – 22 Century BCE ), has been linked to the Adam and Eve story.

It was a trading city in the extensive trade network that linked Mesopotamia and northern Syria.

On the other hand, the Elamites linked the old civilizations of Mesopotamia and the new peoples of the plateau, and their version of Mesopotamian civilization was a formative influence on the first indisputably Persian empire of the Achaemenids.

The fortress guarded the Baghesh Pass, which linked the southern reaches of the Armenian Plateau to northern Mesopotamia.

He alienated the powerful priests of Marduk, the official god of Babylon, by taking up the worship of Sin, the god of Harran ( a city in northern Mesopotamia ), absenting himself for long periods from the city and neglecting crucial ceremonies.

Some say that the Greeks took the constellation of Centaurus, and also its name " piercing bull ", from Mesopotamia, where it symbolized the god Baal who represents rain and fertility, fighting with and piercing with his horns the demon Mot who represents the summer drought.

He was originally patron god of the city of Eridu, but later the influence of his cult spread throughout Mesopotamia and to the Canaanites, Hittites and Hurrians.

Babylonian tradition held the king as an agent of the Mesopotamian god Marduk, and the city of Babylon as a " holy city " where any legitimate ruler of southern Mesopotamia had to be crowned.

In Assyria, in the north of Mesopotamia, the supreme god was Ashur.

A number of written prayers have survived from ancient Mesopotamia, each of which typically exalt the god that they are describing above all others.

Another modern religion to have adopted elements from the beliefs of ancient Mesopotamia is Anuism, devoted to the god Anu, who supposedly revealed himself as being the Supreme Being to a man named V. E. M, who before then had known nothing of ancient Mesopotamia.

Marduk ( Sumerian spelling in Akkadian: AMAR. UTU " solar calf "; perhaps from MERI. DUG ; Biblical Hebrew Merodach ; Greek, Mardochaios ) was the Babylonian name of a late-generation god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon, who, when Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of Hammurabi ( 18th century BCE ), started to slowly rise to the position of the head of the Babylonian pantheon, a position he fully acquired by the second half of the second millennium BCE.

When Babylon became the capital of Mesopotamia, the patron deity of Babylon was elevated to the level of supreme god.

He was originally patron god of the city of Eridu, but later the influence of his cult spread throughout Mesopotamia and to the Canaanites, Hittites and Hurrians.

Theophoric names were also exceedingly common in the ancient Near East and Mesopotamia, where the personal name of an individual included the name of a god in whose care the individual is entrusted.

In southern Mesopotamia, Zababa was the tutelary god of the city of Kish, whose sanctuary was the E-meteursag.

Depicting an anthropomorphic god as a naturalistic human is an innovative artistic idea that may well have diffused from Egypt to Mesopotamia, just like a number of concepts of religious rites, architecture, the " banquet plaques " and other artistic innovations previously.