私醫聯招 英文歷屆試題｜第 537 題

Meaning “land between the rivers,” Mesopotamia is widely considered to be the cradle of civilization. It was here, in 5000 B.C., that people settled into an agricultural lifestyle by the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Because there was little rain, the people depended on these rivers for their survival. In particular, the Mesopotamians created canal channels to distribute the flood waters that flowed for a short duration each year to water their crops; the efficiency of their irrigation systems allowed their society to flourish in spite of little rainfall. This enables them to create the world's first towns and cities. At the center of each town stood a temple complex with food stores, a treasury, and living spaces, all incorporated into the overall design. Over time, these towns evolved into city-states, eventually becoming an empire.

In the beginning, there arose a need to keep reliable records of daily commodities traded; and out of this need, cuneiform—a wedge-shaped writing system—was invented. Later, this special writing system proved to be very versatile and quickly spread to uses other than documenting daily business transactions; for instance, the Sumerian scribed to record daily major life events and to write the first major literary work known to Western civilization. Perhaps the best known of Mesopotamia's civilizations was Babylon. During the second millennia B.C., it rose from a regional capital to become the center of a kingdom that stretched across southern Iraq and beyond. Its king, Hammurabi, left his mark with a remarkable collection of laws. Hammurabi's code defined the constraints of private property, as well as legal decisions for crimes, and family disputes.

Although its architecture was eventually lost to the sands of time, Mesopotamia left a legacy of law, literature, and engineering, for modern civilizations to build on. In fact, much of what we know of that chapter in the region's history has come from excavations of ruined cities, supplemented by recent discovery and written translations of Mesopotamia clay tablet texts.