LOST CIVILISATIONS – WHERE DID THEY GO?
The birth of the West
Sumeria, Babylonia and Assyria It was therefore in Sumeria that an organised, stratified society emerged, as well as the first recorded cuneiform writing system. As a similar culture began to form along the floodplains of the Nile, more states arose along the flanks of the Tigris and Euphrates too. Before long, in the 24th century BC, Sargon the Akkadian conquered them all, expanding his realm all the way up Mesopotamia to become the first known emperor in history. By 1700 BC the Akkadian kingdom had evolved into Babylonia, whose capital of Babylon, near modern-day Baghdad, was said to be one of the marvels of the ancient world. Though not as well-known as Egypt’s civilisation, Babylonia under its legendary king Hammurabi was a glorious empire that extended from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean – complete with fascinating ziggurat structures whose ruins can still be found scattered across Iraq.
It is out of this world that our own Western one emerged, spreading westwards with the Greeks and the Phoenicians (ancestors of the modern-day Lebanese), who established trading colonies across the Mediterranean. Southern Italy and Sicily became major centres of Hellenic influence, with Neapolis (today’s Naples) literally meaning ‘new town’. Along the eastern Spanish shoreline, they met Phoenician traders from Carthage, later to become an empire in its own right. Cities such as Cartagena, Málaga, Cádiz and Lisbon trace their origins to these seafarers from what is now Tunisia; centuries later, Hannibal, perhaps the most famous Carthaginian of all time, would cross the Alps and invade the Roman state. Rather than be defeated and confined to the dusty archives of history, the plucky Romans took the fight to Carthage itself and in their ultimate victory laid the foundations for the famous Roman Empire. Another step in the creation of the Western world was made when a certain resident of Sumeria named Abraham followed the calling of his God to the land of Canaan. The resulting blooming of Hebrew culture and Jewish faith in the state of Israel was, eventually, to lead to the genesis of Christianity and Islam, religions that shake the world to its foundations even now.
Neighbouring Elam was to become the first Iranian civilisation, precursor of the later Medes and Persians, but it too fell under the sway of the all-conquering Hammurabi, whose code can be seen as an early foundation of the civilised legal system. Even as Babylon rose to prominence within the Fertile Crescent, its northerly neighbours in Assyria had begun to flex their muscles too. They were eventually to conquer all of Mesopotamia and rule much of what we now call the Middle East, stretching west to the Levantine thalassocracy of the Phoenicians and north to the lands of the Hittites. Throughout all of this, the first form of alphabetic writing emerged in the Sinai, and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh became the first major work of literature.
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