Although the civilizations of the Middle East have taken on various cultural shapes through history, certain aspects of behavior have characterized that process throughout. The following cultural elements have characterized Middle Eastern civilizations, but no one set is definitive for all of them, even less do these characteristics define other civilizations in the world.

• Religious and secular ideology. The building of a civilization requires a common religious and/or secular ideology as the core of the shared cultural values that organize people’s behavior.
• Professional art and architecture. Creativity is used to express the metaphysical and power relationships of civilization through art and architecture. Monumental permanent buildings are characteristic of civilizations, and the style and purpose of public buildings define the cultural goals of a society.
• Permanent institutions. Religious, political, military, and economic institutions satisfy the organizational needs of nation states. Power is institutionalized in written law and formal government structures. Religion is organized into formal religious institutions with temples and a full-time priesthood.
• Wealth generating economic system. A defining feature of civilization is that it increases the material well being of the people. The production of food and other goods used in daily life makes a secure and comfortable lifestyle possible.
• Literacy and Literature. Writing is used to record history and write down narrative traditions, laws, and religious literature.
• The formation of city-states and urban living. Urban populations require goods, services, and social control mechanisms that lead to the economic and political infrastructure of nation-states.
• Social will and continuity. The creation of a nation-state is a long-term proposition, and it depends on the will of the people to construct the cultural life, institutions, public works, and buildings that define civilization.

The world’s earliest civilizations (Iraq and Egypt) developed in the Middle East and subsequently influenced civilizations in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The various cultures that developed in the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile River valleys borrowed extensively from each other until they merged into a common Middle Eastern civilization under Muslim influence. The Middle East is the middle not only in the geographical connection of three different continents, but it was also the cultural middle and served as a conduit for cultural traditions between Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The Middle East is composed of a mosaic of world peoples and cultures, including the Arab population of the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranians or Persians who have historically been the primary contact with Asia, the Egyptians who have been the primary connection in African peoples, and the Turks who have been the contact with Europe. This is not a world that was held together by common ethnicity, language, or even religion in the beginning. They lived near each other, shared the land, and eventually came to share a common religion and the cultural values associated with it.
The Middle East should be distinguished from the Muslim world because some people in the Middle Eastern are not Muslims, notably the Jews, Christians, Mandeans, and Bahais, and most Muslims do not live only in the Middle East. Actually, most Muslims are Asian. The cultural traditions of the Middle East are rich and varied, reflecting the multiple influences of ethnicity, language, religion, and economics. The peoples of the Middle East include various language and culture groups, including the Indo-Europeans, Semitics, Turks, and the Egyptians. The history of the area shows how these various groups coalesced into the contemporary Muslim world of the Middle East.

Iraq was the seat of the earliest civilization, and it has one of the richest cultural heritages in the world. It is the site of the first city, the first king, the first literature, the first great architecture, the first science, and the first professional art. It dominated the Middle East for the first 2000 years and again during the Muslim Empire. Iraqis are justly proud of their rich cultural tradition. This is the land the Greeks referred to it as mesopotamia (the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers). The earliest Iraqi civilization was called Sumer, and Abraham came from the Sumerian city of Ur. He brought the culture and traditions of that civilization with him as he left the city and sought his place in the world. Christians, Jews, and Muslims trace their origins to him.

Iraq, the Western World’s Garden of Eden

Iraq is a small country, two-thirds the size of the state of Texas and with twenty-four million people, only slightly more than Texas. Concentrated in this country is one of the richest cultural legacies in the world. Traditionally it has been considered the site of the Garden of Eden, and the word Eden comes from an early Iraqi (Sumerian) word referring to the well-watered grass lands of the south. It is remembered today at Basra Al-Qurna by an old tree, supposedly Adam and Eve’s tree, marking the site of the Garden. Iraq is also the site of the world’s first city, Uruk, where writing, kingship, wheel-turned pottery, and other inventions were made. Iraq is also the location of Ur, the home city of Abraham, and other great early cities including Babylon, the home of Hammurabi and the legal codes and the place of exile of the early Jews. Nineveh, famous for its parks and zoos, is located here, as well as Nimrud the royal city of the Assyrians, including the palace and the tombs of the queens and princesses. Nippur was a famous religious center in the south of Iraq where much of the Jewish Talmud was compiled.

Erbil is a city in the northern Kurdish area of Iraq that has been continuously inhabited for 5,000 years, the oldest inhabited town in the world. Baghdad is the home of the National Museum of Iraq which houses the world’s largest collection of Mesopotamian artifacts, but the collection was decimated in the looting that followed the invasion and overthrow of the government by the United States led invasion in 2003. Samarra is a major Sunni religious center near Baghdad, and it has a striking ninth century mosque. Kerbala is an important Shi’a religious center with a mosque honoring Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and considered the true heir to the prophet by the Shi’ites. The Kerbala mosque preserves the same blue tiled facade ornamentation used in Iraqi places of worship since the temples in Uruk.
Iraq is mostly a flat desert land, but it has two of the world’s most important rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, and they provide arable land to support agriculture. It also has the second largest oil reserves in the world. The present day population of this culturally and geographically rich land is divided into three distinct areas: the Shi’ite south, the Sunni central zone around Baghdad, and the Kurdish north. The Sunnis controlled the country after its creation as a modern kingdom in 1932 until the invasion of 2003. The Sunnis are Arabs and identify with the mainstream of Islam. The Shi’ites in the south are the majority in Iraq, and they identify with the Iranians with whom they are linked religiously and culturally. They protest the dominance of mainstream Islam and practice a more conservative version of the religion. Looking at the long history of Iraq gives a sense of the cultural richness of this country, and where better to start than the story of King Gilgamish?
The Epic of Gilgamish. This Epic tells the Sumerian story of the Great Flood and the ark in which people and animals were saved. It tells the adventures of Gilgamish, the icon of urban, civilized life, and his loyal companion and alter ego, Enkidu, who represents the natural, uncivilized man. This prototype of a pair of mismatched hero adventurers has been repeated in world story telling down to the present, including popular culture versions such as Lone Ranger and Tonto. Although Gilgamish was successful in most of his adventures, he failed in the last and most important one, his search for everlasting life. His ultimate failure reflects an element of fatalism in Sumerian culture. The greatness of the city and of human achievements is always overshadowed by the mortal reality that we will die, and ultimately the city will be destroyed. In the Gilgamish account, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the finality of death is the ultimate measure of humans.
In the Epic of Gilgamish the city of Uruk represents civilization, and the King of Uruk, Gilgamish, was the image of civilized behavior. Enkidu, a man living out in the prairie grasslands, was the image of an uncivilized man with an animal nature. As the differences between these two figures are drawn, we can see the Sumerian/Babylonian definition of civilization. It included grooming, cuisine, city life and kingship, temples, gods and processions, and music and dancing. Over fifty centuries later, that definition is still holds.

This epic story is a secular one about a human hero in the beginning of time who was capable of superhuman feats. Gilgamish won battles, was successful in love, and is said to have built the mighty walls around the city of Uruk. After having accumulated such power and success in life he was distraught at his own mortality. He went for advice to an elderly man and woman, venerable for their longevity, who had survived the great flood by taking refuge in an ark. Although they told him that immortality was impossible, they did tell him where to find a plant that would make him young again. Through a heroic effort Gilgamish finds the plant on the seabed and brings it to the surface with him. As he fell asleep to rest, a snake came and ate the plant. With that Gilgamish lost his opportunity for achieving longevity to the serpent. That is the reason that snakes shed their old skins every year and become young again. This also parallels the Biblical account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden who also lost their opportunity for longevity to the serpent. So, even Gilgamish, the most extraordinary person to have lived (according to this epic) could not control the process of aging and death. He is told:

Life, which thou seekest, thou wilt never find,
For when the gods created man, they let death be his share...
Gilgamish, put on clean clothes, and wash thine head and bathe.
Gaze at the child that holdeth thine hand,
And let thy wife delight in thine embrace.
These things alone are men's concerns.

Sumerian people saw the creation of civilization as an epic change in human life which it truly was. The actual creation of cities, kingship, and the institutionalized religion that formed the first civilizations was a momentous achievement.
Sumer: The Emergence of Civilization and of Abraham. The first civilization, the Sumerian, was characterized by cities surrounded by walls and crowned by temples on pyramidal constructions called ziggurats. Kings and priests, both of whom derived their power from the gods, ruled these kingdoms, organizing workers, overseeing the building of public works, and directing economic and military power. The religious roots of both the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds are in that first civilization. Cities, state organization, writing, and a multi-tiered social and economic organization are defining features of civilization, and they appear within a relatively short time period in the Sumerian city of Uruk about 3500 B.C.E. The contrast between city and countryside is interpreted cross-culturally as the difference between civilization and non-civilization, and that was true in the early Mesopotamian understanding of civilization.

The early Mesopotamian cultures of Sumer and Akkadia were the "Mother Culture" stage of Middle Eastern civilization. The basic cultural structure of the civilization was established, and an identifiable cultural character has existed since then although it has experienced significant revisions and modifications over time (i.e. Greco-Roman and Islamic). After the fall of Ur at the end of the third millennium B.C.E., a power vacuum ensued, resulting in insecurity and de-urbanization. Ur continued to exist as a city but without its earlier power. The most famous citizen of Ur was a man that much of the Middle East refers to as the original ancestor, Abraham.

27)...Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begot Lot. 28) Haran died in the lifetime of his father Terah, in his native land, Ur of the Chaldees, during his father's lifetime...31) Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldees for the land of Canaan; but when they had come as far as Haran, they settled there.

After Abram left Ur he traveled extensively through Canaan and Egypt with his sheep, cattle, and tents. God promised that he would become the father of many people, and that they would inhabit Canaan. Abram made a covenant with God to worship no other gods, the covenant of monotheism. To celebrate the covenant his name was changed to Abraham. Today, Christians, Jews, and Muslims look to Abraham as their common religious ancestor, and Jews and Arabs look to him as their biological progenitor.
People in the Tigris-Euphrates plain had been living in agricultural villages for thousands of years before the emergence of cities. This area was called Edin (or grasslands of the South) in the local language. Sumerians believed that the town of Eridu marked the mound of creation, the place where the first earth rose above the waters in the beginning of time. A sand mound was built there, marking the site of creation. Later generations built layer upon layer of larger and more dramatic monuments until a full ziggurat was built by the kings of Ur shortly before Abraham’s time. Within the temple at Eridu was a walled garden with a sacred tree that was thought by some to be the prototype of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. Until recent centuries the Marsh Arabs, who live in this area today, still worshiped the waters and told myths drawn from the Sumerian period and continued to live in reed houses similar to those portrayed in Sumerian art from the third millennium B.C.E.

Uruk. Between 3000 and 2700 B.C.E. Uruk became the first true city in the world with a population numbering in the tens of thousands. It was characterized by densely packed residential areas with narrow winding streets that created shade from the sun but also permitted breezes to flow. There were also gardens or parks and areas for the temples. Some Iraqi towns, such as Irbil, have continued this style of urban organization until today. The plain brick walls of the houses rose above narrow streets, and each neighborhood had a shrine, a bath, a souk (market), and a scribe, similar to descriptions of the earliest cities in the Middle East. Houses were built around central courtyards that permitted breezes to circulate through the rooms, and they included underground rooms protected from the intense mid-day sun. Rapid population growth led to the emergence of Uruk, but later over irrigation and cultivation turned the area to a desert. Should that be a warning for us today in our period of rapid population growth?
Enormous temples were built in Uruk, as large as mosques and cathedrals today. The facades were covered with blue glazed tiles, similar to the decoration of present day mosques throughout the Middle East. Temples were located at the center of the city, frequently on top of a ziggurat. After Alexander the Great, Greco-Roman temples were built at the center of Middle Eastern cities, which in turn were replaced by Christian churches, which in turn were replaced by mosques. So, the temple has always been at the center of the Middle Eastern town or city, only the religion has changed. One family may have administered the temple over many generations, a practice that was documented as early as 2000 B.C.E. in Nippur and can still be observed today in the administration of mosques in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

Uruk, the first city, was also the mother of invention of many of the arts later associated with civilization. The wheel was invented here, making it easier to transport loads. The potter's wheel was first used there, and urbanity at that time included having fine wheel turned pottery decorated with colored geometric patterns. Astronomy, maps, and schools were inventions from Uruk. The number system was based on sixty, and today we still use their sixty based system to organize time and geometry.
Writing was first invented in Uruk. Written records in pictograms (logograms) was developed between 3500 and 3200 B.C.E. and later cuneiform between 3200 and 2900 B.C.E. Ninety-five percent of the early texts were about economic issues: records of buying and selling, accounts, inventories, and land ownership. Although the temple was at the physical center of the city, their writing was dedicated to business. This is in contrast to the early texts from India (religious texts), China (divination texts), or Mexico (dynastic records). This concept of the urban, civilized person as a primarily economic being was resurrected in the Italian Renaissance and continues to characterize European/American civilization today.
Each city-state dedicated itself to the worship of a primary deity whose ziggurat towered above the other buildings. Citizens of the city belonged to the temple and god or goddess to which it was dedicated. So, within an overall polytheism (many gods were recognized), the city gave primary loyalty to one god, or henotheism. The people believed that gods carried out activities that were parallel to human activities. They were married and had families, and they went hunting and fishing. Around Uruk the people believed that the gods controlled the weather, which was so important to their primary economic activity of farming. The king of each city ruled in the name of the predominant deity, and some even claimed origin from the gods.

Warfare and Decline. Warfare was a continual experience of Sumerians, and in fact standing armies and institutionalized warfare are characteristics of civilization. The forty city-states fought among themselves over boundary issues, trade, or the need for more agricultural land. They were also repeatedly invaded by the nomadic peoples living to the north and south of the Tigris-Euphrates valley who came to raid the accumulated wealth of food and luxuries in the cities. Kings enriched themselves through warfare. The Royal Standard of Ur from 2700 B.C.E. shows the war booty of donkeys, sheep, oxen, and sacks of goods being brought to the king. Following that, a feast scene celebrates the victory with the king surrounded by his followers.
 Toward the end of this period, warfare was frequent and prolonged as the available fertile land became scarce. The agriculture that supported the city-states of Sumer over the centuries was based on irrigation, and the soil was eventually salinized rendering it useless for agriculture. Slowly, the high wheat yields were lost, and people had to go further afield to find fertile land, leading to conflicts with other city-states. This led to internecine warfare which further exhausted the resources of the cities, and wars could drag on for generations. War imagery became common in the art. One example is the stele (carved stone monument) called the Vultures of Lagash (2400 B.C.E.) that shows infantry men lined up in a tight formation with helmets, spears, and shields while they trample on their victims. As happens in times of war, the long distance trade networks broke down. Since cities depend on trade to supply their needs, the collapse of trade led to their collapse. Increased militarism frequently precedes the fall of a civilization, and so it was in Sumer. Soon, a Semitic group, the Akkadians, took the lead in the area (2340-2159 B.C.E.), and they ruled for the next two centuries. Although Akkadian replaced Sumerian as the dominant language, much of the culture remained the same. The language of the Akkadians evolved in Aramaic and became the lingua franca for diplomacy and commerce in the Middle East for the next 2,000 years until it was replaced by Greek. Eventually Aramaic developed into Arabic, the dominant language of Islam. After the fall of the Sumerians and Akkadians, a succession of kingdoms ruled the rich lands of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, each contributing to the development of civilization in its own way. The history of ancient Iraq is the history of the roots of Muslim and Western Civilization, including monotheism, monarchy, written law, city-states, and much more.

During this period, the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.E.) codified a set of laws that is the earliest law code recorded. The "Code of Hammurabi" is a collection of 282 laws that is a synthesis of Sumerian and Semitic laws. This Code has a different understanding of justice from that which has evolved in recent centuries. It gave most rights to men, especially those of higher social standing, with men of lower social standing having few rights. People who were slaves were treated as property with no rights, and they could be severely mutilated for the slightest offenses.
The most famous legal principle of this Code was "an eye for an eye", and it was preserved in the Bible. It assumed that the exact retaliation for the offense was the best deterrent. There is no indication of extenuating circumstances, such as accidents. If one man caused another to lose an eye, even if it was an accident, then his eye would be destroyed also. If one man breaks another's bone, then the same bone of the first man will be broken. The other well-established principle of the Code referred to commercial transactions, and it is known today as buyer beware. It basically said that the consumer had no redress if he bought something that was defective or bad. The seller had no legal responsibility for what he sold once the deal was done, and the consumer had to be sure of the purchase before making it. This was a jurisprudence system that gave categorical solutions to conflicts with little attention to balancing issues of right and wrong. It was a patriarchal culture in which the authority of the father could not be questioned. One provision said that if a child hit his father his hand should be cut off. Of course, we do not have the information to know how the Code was applied in practice. Although judges may have had some leeway in determining when to apply the law, the Code itself was a blunt instrument designed for punishment.
Next to rule were the Assyrians (1300 to 612 B.C.E.), Neo-Babylonians (612 to 539 B.C.E.), and the Persians (550 to 330 B.C.E.), each following the basic pattern of Middle Eastern Civilization. Babylon was the largest city of its day, but more striking were its walls, which were built with blue glazed bricks highlighted by figures of lions, bulls, and dragons in yellow and white colors. If that were not enough, the famous hanging gardens of Babylon were terraces built up from the banks of the Euphrates with a lush array of trees and plants. Perhaps the later European tradition of botanical gardens harks back to those original gardens of Babylon. In the two hundred years between 700 and 500 B.C.E. the Assyrians and Chaldeans made significant strides forward in architecture and urban design, building two of the most important cities of the Middle East (Nineveh and Babylon). The Chaldeans also made significant discoveries in astronomy, differentiating planets from stars, and they laid the groundwork for the science of astronomy developed by the Greeks and the Romans. In 539 B.C.E. the Persians invaded the Chaldean kingdom in a lightening attack that allowed them to take Babylon without a fight, and it became the jewel of what was to be the world's first empire.
The period of empires was beginning which would slowly transform the ancient world into the Middle East that we know today. The Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian developments in civilization would be passed on to subsequent empires (Roman and Muslim) to become the primary force in shaping world civilization along with the Indian and Chinese civilizations. The culture and civilization of present day Middle East, Europe, and the Americas are heavily influenced by these early civilizations in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. Close to half of the people in the world today owe their concepts of the city, laws, government, literacy, architecture, religion, and more to the achievements of these early cultures from Iraq. Iraq was not alone in the ancient Middle East. Egypt was the other great power, but these two centers of civilization developed very different cultures.

Egypt: The Gift of the Nile

Egypt developed its civilization in the splendid isolation of its river valley, and rarely did foreign invaders interrupt its peace in contrast to the regular invasion and political turmoil that plagued the early Middle Eastern city states. In contrast to the sequence of empires and cultures that imposed themselves on ancient Iraq and Syria, Egypt had an incredible historical continuity. The cultural achievements of the Egyptians are dramatically seen in their architecture, public art, and funerary practices. Although Egypt did not give rise to any of the later civilizations in the Middle East, it has given a legacy of cultural practices that is important. Although the 365 day solar calendar was developed by all of the primary civilizations, it was the Egyptian version that was later adopted by the Romans and became the basis of the European calendar. The Egyptian concept of the afterlife and the Day of Judgment anticipated later Judeo-Christian-Muslim eschatology.
Egypt is defined by the Nile, which is divided into two major parts, the delta (Lower Egypt) and the valley (Upper Egypt). About one hundred miles before the Nile empties into the Mediterranean Sea it divides into two major branches which in turn sub-divide into smaller and smaller branches on the way to the Sea. This forms the delta which is the richest agricultural zone in Egypt. It is well watered and has fertile soil. Stretching to the south of the delta are five hundred miles of the Nile valley which has only a narrow strip of fertile land on each side, bound in by hills and cliffs. For most of the length of the valley, the fertile strip extends no more than a few hundred yards on each side of the river.
Religion and the State. Although there were no written laws, the pharaoh was not supposed to rule arbitrarily. There were principles, the primary one being Ma'at, or order and harmony, by which he was to rule. Egyptians believed that there was a natural order and harmony in the universe, and that the pharaoh was to use his power to maintain it. The pharaohs were also obligated to rule according to the same principle to sustain both the natural and social orders. Egyptian religious belief was based on the recurrent cycles and annual renewal that they observed around them. There was no separate word for religion in the Egyptian language because it was an integral part of the order in which they believed. The gods were associated with natural forces, especially the sun and the earth, reflecting the importance of both in their agricultural society. The local gods of the various regions of Egypt became the national gods, including Re the sun god of Heliopolis, Amon the air/sky god of Thebes, and Ptah the creator god of Memphis.
Re, the sun, was important because he showed the continuity of natural cycles rising every day to bring the sun for the crops. Egyptians believed that Re was on a voyage in a boat through the underworld every night in which he fought off the attacks of demonic serpents, only to be re-born every morning. Re was shown in different forms through Egyptian history, but one of the important ones was as a human with the head of a falcon. Later in Egyptian history, Re was fused with Amon, the god of the sky of Thebes, to become Amon-Re.
After Zoser, pharaohs called themselves the son of Re, and a cult to the pharaoh was fused to sun worship. The king became the representative on earth of Re, and the pyramid became a symbolic ladder to the sky, a world axis, where contact between heaven and earth could be made. After the king died, he took his place among the stars which were thought to be divine beings, his spirit ascending the pyramid to arrive there.
Osiris was the god of the river, and he represented the renewal of life similar to what the flooding of the Nile brought each year. Egyptians believed that in the beginning Osiris brought civilization to them, and that he represented the good or positive forces of life. He represented good, but his brother Seth represented the evil destructive forces in life. They struggled against each other, and at one point Seth killed Osiris, cut his body into fourteen parts, and threw them into the Nile. Osiris' wife, Isis, found the parts and with the assistance of other gods brought Osiris back to life. Their son Horus caught Seth and castrated him to revenge his father's death. Eventually, the Egyptians banned Seth from their pantheon altogether. Hierakonpolis, located near the village of Kom el-Ahmar today, was a ritual center as well as political center, and it was the location of the shrine of the local deity, Horus the Hawk, and the Greek name means "town of the hawk." Archaeologists discovered a shrine believed to represent the original mound of creation. It was on this mound that Horus, the symbol of life for Egyptians, was thought to have first landed bringing life to earth. For centuries Egyptian temples continued to have representations of the mound of creation and its reed fence carved on their walls as a cultural memory of the site of creation.
Osiris became the symbol of resurrection and took on a special role in the beliefs about the afterlife. After death, the person was embalmed, placed in the tomb, and re-named as Osiris, so that the person could be resurrected into the afterlife like Osiris. As, morality was increasingly emphasized in later Egyptian thought, people began to believe in the final judgment and Osiris as the judge of the dead. The dead person was expected to give an account of his or her deeds on earth to determine their condition in the afterlife. The Book of the Dead gives instructions for how to make the confession to earn good treatment. Although mummification and hope for the afterlife was primarily limited to the wealthy and powerful during the Old Kingdom, later it became available to a broader cross-section of society.
The State and Dynastic History. Egypt was characterized by a strong central government under the Pharaoh, which was made easier because of the unique geography of that land. Since the Nile was a narrow fertile zone surrounded by inhospitable desert, the population was limited to the Nile, which facilitated centralized control of the agriculture and the people. Manetho, an Egyptian priest and historian who worked in the third century B.C.E., wrote an early political history of the thirty-one Egyptian dynasties and his basic framework is still used. The generally accepted periods are:

Early Dynastic Period (Dynasties 1-2)                      3100-2700 B.C.E.
Old Kingdom (Dynasties 3-6)                                  2700-2200 B.C.E.
First Intermediate Period (Dynasties 7-10)                2200-2050 B.C.E.
Middle Kingdom (Dynasties 11-12)                         2040-1652 B.C.E.
Second Intermediate Period (Dynasties 13-17)          1652-1567 B.C.E.
New Kingdom (Dynasties 18-20)                             1567-1085 B.C.E.
Post Empire (Dynasties 21-31)                                 1085-30 B.C.E..

The grouping of certain dynasties into kingdoms (Old, Middle, and New) corresponds to periods of political power, wealth, and cultural achievement. The intermediate periods reflect political fragmentation and disorder which also meant cultural stagnation. The changes in dynasties frequently corresponded to new regions of the country emerging to power.
The Contrast between Iraq and Egypt. Although the two civilizations shared trade and ideas, each developed its own version of city life. The hieroglyphic writing system of the Egyptians is completely different from the cuneiform of the Sumerians. The Egyptians had a unified state organization, whereas the peoples of the Tigris-Euphrates plain lived with competing kingdoms and city-states. The Egyptians had a burial cult and fascination with the afterlife that the people in Iraq never had. The monumental architecture of the Egyptians (pyramids) glorified Pharaohs and their memory while the monumental architecture in Iraq (ziggurats) was dedicated to gods and goddesses like Ishtar.
The contrast between Egypt and the Mesopotamian city-states helps bring into focus the cultural differences between the two areas. For instance, authority in Sumer and Akkadia was decentralized in the powerful city-states, in contrast to the centralized state governed by the pharaoh in Egypt. Mesopotamia was more urban with forty cities in the Tigris-Euphrates River plain in contrast to the predominantly rural Egyptian society with only four or five significant cities. Mesopotamian cities were important commercial centers whereas cities in Egypt were primarily the centers of court life for the pharaohs and priests. Independent merchants were important in Mesopotamia, in contrast to the powerful control of the pharaohs over the economy as can be seen in the story of Joseph (Genesis 41:46 to 57) in which he was given extraordinary powers over the agricultural production of the country. The power of the pharaoh in Egypt is described in greater detail in Genesis 47:13 to 26. During seven years of famine the pharaoh under Joseph’s administration sold the accumulated food stocks to the Egyptians until all of their money was exhausted, then the pharaoh bartered food for their livestock. When the pharaoh owned all of the livestock, he bartered food for their lands. Finally, when the people had nothing left to barter with the pharaoh, he required them to mortgage their futures, paying to the pharaonic treasury twenty percent of all future production. In this way the pharaoh created a state owned monopoly of agriculture which was virtually the entire economy of the country.
The Egyptians had a long period of autonomous history in contrast to the Sumerians and Babylonians who repeatedly suffered invasion, shifting alliances of independent city-states, and foreign rule. The people of early Iraq lived in a difficult environment where the rivers flooded unpredictably, and they had to build complex irrigation systems to make the desert fertile. On the other hand, the Egyptian experience was very different because the flooding of the Nile was predictable every September, and the floods naturally fertilized the narrow strip of land along the banks of the river. Egyptian society was composed primarily of village-based farmers, and it lacked the independent merchants that characterized the early Iraqi cities. The few cities in Egypt were little more than extensions of the Pharaoh's palace, and they were primarily bureaucratic centers that controlled the state apparatus, religion, and commerce. Egyptian society was monolithic and centralized around the Pharaohs.
Although Egyptian culture under the Pharaohs was brilliant in architecture, art, and literature, it had little impact on subsequent civilizations. The continuing invasions and syntheses of cultures in early Iraq led to synergy and cultural complexity, but the homogeneity of Egyptian history meant little cultural renovation and a slow pace of new ideas coming into the society. Eventually, Egypt fell behind culturally and politically. This period of cultural recession and hesitation characterized Egypt throughout the Greek and Roman periods until Islam broke into the scene with its invasion of the country in 641 C.E., bringing a new religion, language, culture, rulers, and cultural energy.

Conclusions

The Middle East has had profound cultural influence on much of the contemporary world. Not only do the religious heirs of Abraham in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reflect the core civilization from Sumer and Akkad, but the cultural brilliance of ancient Iraq has been resurrected time and again throughout history from Babylon to the Muslim fluorescence. After an interlude of Greek and Roman dominance, the emergence of Islam launched the Middle East into the global limelight once again. The early civilizations produced a prolonged cultural golden age in the Middle East, and it was repeated in the cultural flowering that occurred with Islam. Many people in the Middle East today dream of the time when the Muslim world will return to its historic role of international power, wealth, and influence.

Boxed Insert One. Time Line Iraq.