Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia, the 'land between the rivers' in modern Iraq and its neighbours, is where the world's earliest civilization developed. Its people invented cuneiform writing, built the first cities and ziggurats, produced the Code of Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and created empires whose influence reached Egypt, the Indus valley and the Mediterranean. This fact file follows the story from Ubaid villages and Sumerian city-states through Akkad, Ur III, Assyria and Babylon to the last cuneiform tablets of the first century CE — and to the excavations and museum galleries that recovered it. Evidence comes from the British Museum, the Louvre, the Penn Museum and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago, from UNESCO's World Heritage records for Babylon, Ashur and the Ahwar, from the Oxford ETCSL corpus of Sumerian literature, from Britannica, and from public-domain texts and peer-reviewed research.