Mesopotamian Life

Essay: How did the physical environment affect the Mesopotamians?

Mesopotamia is one of the earliest human civilizations. This fertile and beautiful landscape is between Tigris and Euphrates River which flow through the now modern day Iraq. There were many reasons why Mesopotamia thrived to succeed as a civilization, but I will narrow it down to trade, food, and culture. How did this all get connected to the physical environment and how does the physical environment itself affect the Mesopotamians? You are just about to find out.

Trade was one of the many supporters to civilization. The whole process may have been difficult, but it made the Mesopotamian’s, and the trading neighbor’s lives better. Mesopotamia was low in natural sources, even though their physical environment was fertile. That led the Mesopotamians to trade with the Northern Provinces for they had more resources. One of the natural resources that were rich in Mesopotamia was grain, which was used to trade timber, wine, precious metals, and stones. Not only does the physical environment force the Mesopotamians to trade, it also affected the way they traded. Mesopotamia was surrounded by the rivers. That made the transportation easier, by using floating device like, rafts, coracles, river boats, and gulf boats, which disembarked at the neighborhood’s docks, made for them. The Mesopotamians could have transported their trade goods to almost everywhere, but another physical environment was a huge barrier for the Mesopotamians to break through. The physical environment was the mountains, with its topography high and wide that made the city invulnerable but forced the Mesopotamians to trade with the neighborhood country, since transporting on land was harder so it forced the option to decrease to the Romans, Assyrians, Greeks, Hittites, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Persians, Seleucidians, and few more. Now, as you can see, trade was hugely affected by the physical environment,