Mesopotamia: History Timeline & Key Events

16 key events in the history of Mesopotamia, from 3200 BCE to 575 BCE, with places and context on an interactive map.

• 3200 BCE · Writing Emerges at Uruk

  Around 3200 BCE scribes at Uruk, then one of the largest cities in the world, begin drawing and impressing signs on clay tablets to keep the accounts of the temple households: rations, livestock, land and workers, along with lists of words used to train new scribes. This proto-cuneiform is one of the earliest known writing systems; Egyptian hieroglyphs appear at about the same time, and which came first is debated. Over the following centuries the pictographic signs became the wedge-shaped cuneiform script, used for some 3,000 years; at Susa the proto-Elamite script, probably inspired by it, appeared soon after. Dates for the earliest (Uruk IV) tablets are approximate; the tablet pictured is slightly later (Uruk III). (Uruk) View on map

• 2334 BCE · Sargon Founds the Akkadian Empire

  Sargon of Akkad, who by later tradition began as cupbearer to Ur-Zababa, king of Kish, defeats Lugalzagesi of Uruk and brings the city-states of Sumer and Akkad under one ruler; his reign is traditionally dated c. 2334–2279 BCE (Middle Chronology), though some scholars place it decades later. His inscriptions claim campaigns as far as Mari and Ebla in Syria and against Elam in south-western Iran, and his dynasty made Akkadian, a Semitic language, a language of government beside Sumerian. Historians often describe Akkad as one of the earliest empires; much of what is said about Sargon comes from later legends. The city of Akkad has never been located; the marker is placed at Kish, near where it is thought to have stood. The bronze head from Nineveh pictured here is often called Sargon's portrait, but it is attributed to either Sargon or his grandson Naram-Sin. (Akkad (site unknown; shown at Kish)) View on map

• 2112 BCE · Ur-Nammu Founds the Third Dynasty of Ur

  After a period of Gutian and city-state rule, Ur-Nammu of Ur (r. c. 2112–2095 BCE, Middle Chronology) reunites Sumer and Akkad and begins the great ziggurat of the moon god Nanna at Ur, finished under his son Shulgi. The Ur III state ran provinces through governors and a large bureaucracy whose tens of thousands of surviving tablets record taxes, labour and livestock. The law collection known as the Code of Ur-Nammu, attributed to him or to Shulgi, is the oldest law collection known to survive, more than three centuries before Hammurabi's. Sumerian literature flourished at the court, including royal hymns. (Ur) View on map

• 2004 BCE · Elamites Sack Ur and End the Ur III State

  Around 2004 BCE (Middle Chronology) an army from Elam and Shimashki in western Iran, led by Kindattu, captures Ur and carries its last king, Ibbi-Sin, off to Anshan. The Ur III state had already lost its provinces, including Isin, where Ishbi-Erra had made himself king; he later drove the Elamite garrison out of Ur. The fall was mourned in Sumerian city laments such as the Lament for Ur, copied by Old Babylonian scribes. Power in Mesopotamia passed to rival kingdoms such as Isin, Larsa and Assur, while Shimashki and Elam became a leading power on the Iranian plateau's western edge. (Ur) View on map

• 1800 BCE · The Epic of Gilgamesh Takes Shape

  By about 1800 BCE Old Babylonian scribes had composed, drawing on earlier Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, a legendary king of Uruk, a single Akkadian epic about friendship, the fear of death and the limits of human power. A later 'standard' version in eleven or twelve tablets, which tradition attributes to the scholar Sin-leqi-unninni (late 2nd millennium BCE), is best known from copies found at Nineveh, and its flood story, read by George Smith in 1872, has close parallels to the flood in Genesis. It is one of the earliest surviving works of literature. The marker is at Uruk, the epic's setting; the Old Babylonian tablets come from several sites in southern Iraq. (Uruk) View on map

• 1754 BCE · Hammurabi of Babylon and His Law Code

  Hammurabi (r. c. 1792–1750 BCE, Middle Chronology) turns Babylon from a minor kingdom into the centre of a state that, after he defeats Larsa, Eshnunna and Mari, unites southern Mesopotamia; Babylon remains its political and religious capital for over a millennium. Late in his reign, around 1754 BCE, he sets up stone stelae with about 280 laws on trade, property, family, wages and injuries, framed as proof that he ruled justly. It is the best-preserved and most influential of the Mesopotamian law collections, though not the first: the codes of Ur-Nammu and Lipit-Ishtar are older, and scholars debate how far judges actually applied it. The best-known stele was carried off to Susa by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the 12th century BCE and found there in 1901–02; it is now in the Louvre. (Babylon) View on map

• 1595 BCE · Hittite Raid Sacks Babylon

  In 1595 BCE (Middle Chronology; other chronologies place it decades earlier or later) the Hittite king Mursili I marches down the Euphrates from his capital Hattusa in Anatolia, sacks Babylon and ends the dynasty of Hammurabi under its last king, Samsu-ditana. The Hittites did not stay; later Babylonian texts say the statue of the god Marduk was carried off and had to be brought back. The raid left a vacuum that the Kassites, a people of uncertain origin, perhaps from the Zagros, filled, founding the longest-lasting dynasty in Babylonian history. (Babylon) View on map

• 1350 BCE · Kassite Babylon in the Amarna Letters

  Around 1350 BCE Kassite kings of Babylon, Kadashman-Enlil I and Burna-Buriash II, write to the pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten as 'brothers', bargaining over gold, gifts and royal marriages; their clay letters were found at Amarna in Egypt. The Kassites, who ruled Babylonia for over four centuries (c. 1595–1155 BCE), adopted Babylonian language, gods and kingship, and Akkadian in cuneiform was then the common language of diplomacy from Egypt to the Hittites and Mitanni. Kassite-era scholars copied and standardised many literary and scholarly texts. (Babylon) View on map

• 1114 BCE · Tiglath-pileser I Takes Assyria to the Mediterranean

  Tiglath-pileser I (r. c. 1114–1076 BCE) campaigns from Assur against the Mushki in Anatolia and, again and again, against Aramaean groups across the Euphrates, and reaches the Mediterranean coast near Arwad. His reign falls in the turmoil of the Late Bronze Age collapse; his annals, written on clay prisms, are among the first long Assyrian royal annals, and he collected texts at Assur. After his death Aramaean pressure shrank Assyria for over a century. (Assur) View on map

• 745 BCE · Tiglath-pileser III Rebuilds the Assyrian State

  Tiglath-pileser III (r. 745–727 BCE) splits large provinces into smaller ones under royal governors, builds a standing army beside the seasonal levies, and turns Assyria from a raiding power into a territorial empire. He conquered northern Syria and much of the Levant, campaigned into the Zagros and Media, and in 729 BCE took the throne of Babylon himself. Mass deportations moved whole communities across the empire, which helped Aramaic spread as an everyday language. Many historians see this provincial system as one model for later empires, including the Achaemenids, which also drew on Elamite and Babylonian practice. (Kalhu (Nimrud)) View on map

• 701 BCE · Sennacherib Besieges Lachish

  In 701 BCE Sennacherib of Assyria (r. 705–681 BCE) campaigns against Hezekiah of Judah and other rebels in the Levant, storming the fortified town of Lachish by way of a siege ramp. He shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem but did not take it; his annals record the heavy tribute Hezekiah paid, which the Bible also mentions, while the Hebrew Bible tells of the city's deliverance. Sennacherib had the siege carved on the walls of his new palace at Nineveh, which he rebuilt as capital with canals and an aqueduct at Jerwan; the Assyrian siege ramp excavated at Lachish matches the reliefs. (Lachish) View on map

• 668 BCE · Neo-Assyrian Empire at Its Peak

  When Ashurbanipal succeeds his father Esarhaddon in 668 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire is at its greatest extent, ruling Mesopotamia, the Levant, much of south-eastern Anatolia and the western Zagros, and Egypt, which Esarhaddon had invaded in 671 BCE. The peak was short: Egypt slipped away under Psamtik I by about 655 BCE, a civil war with Ashurbanipal's brother Shamash-shum-ukin, king of Babylon, lasted from 652 to 648 BCE, and campaigns against Elam ended in the sack of Susa around 646 BCE. Within two decades of his death the empire had fallen to the Babylonians and the Medes. (Nineveh) View on map

• 652 BCE · Babylon's Astronomical Diaries

  From at least 652 BCE to 61 BCE scholars at Babylon keep the Astronomical Diaries, nightly records of the moon and planets, eclipses, weather, river levels, market prices and notable events; although only a fraction of the tablets survives, it is the longest series of systematic observations known from the ancient world. The record-keeping went on under Achaemenid, Seleucid and Parthian rule, and in the Persian period Babylonian scholars developed the twelve-sign zodiac and began the mathematical methods for predicting the moon and planets. The compendium MUL.APIN (earliest known copy 686 BCE) shows the older star lore it built on. Greek astronomers such as Hipparchus and Ptolemy used Babylonian eclipse records and parameters. (Babylon) View on map

• 650 BCE · Ashurbanipal's Library at Nineveh

  Ashurbanipal (r. 668–c. 631 BCE), who boasted of his scribal learning, has tablets copied and collected at Nineveh from temples and scholars across Assyria and Babylonia: omen and ritual texts, medicine, word lists, letters and literature, including the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. More than 30,000 tablets and fragments were recovered from the palace ruins by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam between 1849 and 1854 and are now in the British Museum. The collection survived the destruction of Nineveh in 612 BCE buried in the ruins, and became a foundation for the modern study of Akkadian. (Nineveh) View on map

• 587 BCE · Babylon Destroys Jerusalem and Exiles Judah

  After Judah rebels again, Nebuchadnezzar II's army takes Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BCE (the year is debated), burns the First Temple, which the Bible credits to Solomon, and deports much of the kingdom's elite to Babylonia, following an earlier deportation in 597 BCE that the Babylonian Chronicle records. Ration tablets from Babylon list the exiled king Jehoiachin. Many scholars think that Judaean scribes and priests in exile gathered and shaped much of the Hebrew Bible. After Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BCE, exiles were allowed, according to the Book of Ezra, to return and rebuild the Temple, though many stayed in Babylonia. (Jerusalem) View on map

• 575 BCE · Nebuchadnezzar II Rebuilds Babylon and the Ishtar Gate

  With tribute from an empire stretching from the Gulf to the Levant, secured after he defeated Egypt at Carchemish as crown prince in 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BCE) rebuilds Babylon: double walls, palaces, the temple of Marduk, the ziggurat Etemenanki and, around 575 BCE, the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way faced with glazed bricks of lions, bulls and dragons. Babylon was then one of the largest cities in the world. Whether the Hanging Gardens described by later Greek writers existed at Babylon is still debated. Bricks of the gate excavated by Robert Koldewey were rebuilt in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. (Babylon) View on map