The Mesopotamian flood stories concern the epics of Ziusudra, Gilgamesh, and Atrahasis.

** Atrahasis ( Mesopotamian mythology )

The earliest written flood myth is found in the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis and Epic of Gilgamesh texts.

A few general histories can be attributed to the Mesopotamian Atrahasis by ancient sources ; these should generally be considered mythology but they do give an insight into the possible origins of the character.

Deucalion, with the aid of his father Prometheus, was saved from this deluge by building a chest ( literally “ chest ” like the Bible's “ ark ,” which means “ box ”) Like his Biblical equivalent Noah and Mesopotamian counterpart Utnapishtim, he uses his chest to survive the deluge with his wife, Pyrrha.

Biblical scholars believe that the flood story was written around 550 – 450 BC as a reworking of the ancient Mesopotamian myth of the flood-hero Utnapishtim.

To the southeast, it is bounded by the ranges that separate it from the Orontes valley in Greater Syria and the Mesopotamian plain.

The work is probably based on the older Mesopotamian genre of the " city lament ", of which the Lament for Ur is among the oldest and best-known.

It is not certain when they migrated at an unknown period into the country of the Mesopotamian sea-lands about the head of the Persian Gulf.

Of his cult at Eridu, which goes back to the oldest period of Mesopotamian history, nothing definite is known except that his temple was also associated with Ninhursag's temple which was called Esaggila, " the lofty head house " ( E, house, sag, head, ila, high ; or Akkadian goddess = Ila ), a name shared with Marduk's temple in Babylon, pointing to a staged tower or ziggurat ( as with the temple of Enlil at Nippur, which was known as E-kur ( kur, hill )), and that incantations, involving ceremonial rites in which water as a sacred element played a prominent part, formed a feature of his worship.

Its history is important to understanding the origin and development of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Israeli, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Christian and Islamic cultures.

In Mesopotamian religion there is a story of a man who, after traveling through the darkness of a tunnel in the mountain of " Mashu ", entered a subterranean garden.

Some, such as Joanne Pearson, believes that this is based on the Mesopotamian myth of Innana's descent into the underworld, though this has not been confirmed.

* 763 BC – Assyrians record a solar eclipse that is later used to fix the chronology of Mesopotamian history.

The geography of southern Mesopotamia is such that agriculture is possible only with irrigation and good drainage, a fact which has had a profound effect on the evolution of early Mesopotamian civilization.

The study of ancient Mesopotamian architecture is based on available archaeological evidence, pictorial representation of buildings, and texts on building practices.

Many scholars believe that Noah and the Biblical Flood story are derived from the Mesopotamian version, predominantly because Biblical mythology that is today found in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mandeanism shares overlapping consistency with far older written ancient Mesopotamian story of The Great Flood, and that the early Hebrews were known to have lived in Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamian Shamash plays an important role during the Bronze Age, and " my Sun " is eventually used as an address to royalty.

It is now understood that the South Mesopotamian plain was exposed to regular floods from the Euphrates and the Tigris, with heavy erosion from water and wind, which may have given rise to the Mesopotamian and derivative Biblical Great Flood myths.

The Tropical zodiac ( of Mesopotamian origin ) is divided by the intersections of the ecliptic and equator, which shifts in relation to the backdrop of fixed stars at a rate of 1 ° every 72 years, creating the phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes.

The earliest mentioning of Dilmun is Mesopotamian sources was in the Early Dynastic III Period, when Ur-Nanshe ( circa 2520 BC ) proclaimed that ;

The metric system is very similar to the units of measurement used in Mesopotamia about five millennia previously: for example, a metre is almost exactly 1 Mesopotamian step, a litre is almost exactly 1 Mesopotamian bowl, and a metric pound is almost exactly 1 Mesopotamian pound or 1 / 2 kilograms.

The above quotation is omitted, and it is left to the flood hero Utanapishtim ( the Mesopotamian precursor of Noah ) to discuss issues of life and death.

Angel-shaped beings appear in ancient Mesopotamian and Greek art and were probably the inspiration for the popular Christian image of angels, a popular subject for Byzantine and European paintings and sculpture.

Although mythical elements are not so prominent in Exodus as in Genesis, the echoes of ancient legends are crucial to understanding the book's origins and purpose: for example, the story of the infant Moses's salvation from the Nile has its basis in an earlier legend of king Sargon, while the story of the parting of the Red Sea trades on Mesopotamian creation mythology.

Babylon was one of the many ancient city-states that dotted the Mesopotamian plain and waged war on each other for control of fertile agricultural land.

As a result of the skill involved in farming in the Mesopotamian, farmers did not depend on slaves to complete farm work for them, but there were some exceptions.

From the many subsequent periods before the ascendency of the Neo-Assyrian Empire Mesopotamian art survives in a number of forms: cylinder seals, relatively small figures in the round, and reliefs of various sizes, including cheap plaques of moulded pottery for the home, some religious and some apparently not.

Archaeological surface surveys also allowed for the study of urban form in early Mesopotamian cities.

Probably the first Sultan to identify and attempt to tackle the Janissaries as a praetorian institution doing more harm than good to the modern empire, Osman II closed their coffee shops ( the gathering points for conspiracies against the throne ) and started planning to create a new, loyal and ethnic Turkic army consisting of Anatolian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian Turks and Turkmens.

The Mesopotamian ziggurats were not places for public worship or ceremonies.

In Mesopotamian mythology, Etana searches for a ' plant of birth ' to provide him with a son.

Shulgi was a well known historical figure for at least another two thousand years, while historical narratives of the Mesopotamian societies of Assyria and Babylonia kept names, events, and mythologies in remembrance.

The original Mesopotamian writing system ( believed to be the world's oldest ) was derived from this method of keeping accounts circa 3600 BC, and by the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay for recording numbers.

Also in that period, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers, and this script was adapted to another Mesopotamian language, the East Semitic Akkadian ( Assyrian and Babylonian ) in around 2600 BC, and from there to others such as Elamite, Hattian, Hurrian and Hittite.

The oldest such museum in evidence was Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, dating from c. 530 BC and devoted to Mesopotamian antiquities ; it apparently had sufficient traffic as to warrant labels for the ordered collection.

Afghanistan was the source of lapis for the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, as well as the later Greeks and Romans.

After the collapse of the Akkadian empire, the south Mesopotamian region was ruled by Gutians for a few decades before the rise of the Sumerian third dynasty of Ur which encompassed the whole of Mesopotamia, including Babylon.

Tablets found in the Mesopotamian city of Nuzi use the term Kinahnu (" Canaan ") as a synonym for red or purple dye, laboriously produced by the Kassite rulers of Babylon from murex shells as early as 1600 BC, and on the Mediterranean coast by the Phoenicians from a byproduct of glassmaking.

Mesopotamian religion refers to the religious beliefs and practices followed by the Sumerian and Akkadian ( Assyrian / Babylonian ) peoples living in Mesopotamia ( around the area of modern Iraq ) that dominated the region for a period of 4200 years from the fourth millennium BC to proximately the 3rd century AD.

In the fourth millennium BCE, when the first evidence for what is recognisably Mesopotamian religion can be seen with the invention in Mesopotamia of writing circa 3500 BCE, the Sumerians appeared, although it is not known if they migrated into the area in prehistoric times or whether they were some of the original inhabitants.

This and the fact that the Persians and Medes to the east were growing in power now that the might of Assyria that had held them in vassalage for centuries was gone, spelt the death knell for native Mesopotamian power.