this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Absolutely no idea if you know any of this or not but this is a rabbit hole I've been digging down lately:
Been reading a lot about Mesopotamia lately circa 2000bc specifically. It's funny because it highlights just how arbitrary some systems are and just how many things naturally arise out of specialized labor.
Like that Ea Nassir guy from the meme complaint? He wasn't just selling copper ore from a stand he was actually asking people for money, then traveling all the way down the Arabian coast to use that money to procure copper ore, then he'd come back and give his financers their cut of the haul. He was a broker. And the contracts he made to do this work were complicated and had multiple clauses and stipulations.
That was 3300 years ago and it's still how people do things even today. You can't like- fundamentally change the kind of things that would make that operation any better or worse. You need material? Sometimes you go to a guy who has a source and you sign some stuff and give them money to get it for you.
Also the Mesopotamians (and probably a lot of other people) viewed their gods as legal garuntiers. They'd cosign an oath to Marduk or whoever they considered to be relevant to the contract along with the government. Their whole outlook on the super natural was very mundane. "Yes, of course we cosigned the god of justice on our contract. That's his office. We keep our records in his temple too." (Temples apparently did a lot of services we'd have dedicated spaces for today. Some were like healing and childbirth and served the roles of medical facilities. Others, yeah, helped you do legal work or stored money etc. It's all very cosmopolitan).
So I'm looking through more translated tablets for stuff like that. Just seeing how humans have interacted with built systems of relations with each other etc. But, in a lot more ways than you'd think, if an ancient Akkadian person and a modern person had to switch places they'd find a lot of eerly similar things in their new day-to-day lives.
Do you know much about Mesopotamia's religious system? I remember hearing about Inana. Are there still a lot of their legal records left? Love hearing about this.
A little bit! Just the basics and I might have some of this wrong:
They're polytheistic in a very plural way from what I know? Dieties come and go and they tend to have a lot of locational ties. Like a lot. They emphasize a lot about observing the correct festivals and dates for their gods, they sort of treat a god's domain with a specific location or city and vaguely suggest that other countries and lands have their own. That's definitely more unique as far as religions I know about go. Dieties are tied to geography or their believers conquering things for them.
In the earlier periods, every city had a god, and when the cities fought it was seen as the gods fighting. Also it was considered taboo to break the bricks of a city's wall in a war or fued. That uhhhh they didn't hold onto that taboo for long I to the middle/later periods LMAO.
There's also the North/South Akkadian/Mesopatamium language divide with gods. So Inana is what she's called in the South in Sumarian but in the North she's Ishtar in Akkadian. The Sumarians and Akkadians also have some theological differences here and there and the chief diety of the region could change sometimes based on if a certain ruler was in charge and if they wanted to elevate a god they felt represented them, their city or their powerbase etc sort of as an extension of the city-god relationship in earlier eras. And that wasn't just narrative from a ruler either: if that ruler swore under a certain diety and conquered Mesopatamia in /that/ diety's name: that's the main diety now. His guy won Mesopatamia. (I'm simplifying a bit but that's basically what it boils down to).
Also they sort of swore under a personal diety. So you might feel particularly inclined to pray to specific one based on your vibes.
Theology and politics much like many societies were pretty indistinguishable. Almost mundane. Like the geographic ties, legal relationships and rituals also were a very direct sort of physical manifestation of their gods.
Afterlife is interesting too! You go to a better one based on your deeds in the underworld through a series of gates. The less cool dead people eat clay and dust. I've heard it explained from a YouTube lecture from a professor that they sort of saw human souls as needing to wait before going into a new body and they had to be locked in down there so ghosts wouldn't ruin the mortal world by being everywhere.
Ghosts were also accepted as just- real. Kind of treated as pests that should be waiting in the afterlife. If you had a ghost you had to go buy a curse to get rid of it and it was kind of a pain in the ass.
Theres one notable thing where I can think of where one king named Ibbi Sin tried to sort of de-pluralize spirituality in a letter he wrote about some subject worshiping "Spirits" and not properly observing the holidays if then chief god, Marduk, which was not characteristic if spirituality at the time. Didn't end up mattering though because proto-persian people called the Elemites came down from the hills and abducted his ass and kinda stacked the kingdom. As it goes.
Legal records: yeah as far as I can tell! It varries between different dynasties and eras but they were pretty thorough contract writers. Something important to know about their law system is that it's highly class-stratified (no big surprise). The literate gentry were mostly the ones bothering with contracts and punishments were way worse if you were a commoner or a slave. Nothing too special though. Really goes to show how easy access to writing quickly leads to written contracts and documents. Very very useful. I don't know much more about that overall though.
Anyways this is what I've been reading from if it helps: https://archive.org/details/letters-from-mesopotamia.-official-business-and-private-letters-on-clay-tablets-from-two-millennia/page/n4/mode/1up
Also anything with Irving Finkel on YouTube is good. He's the Mesopatamian curator at the British Museum and talks a lot about the writing they have on tablets and takes a very humanizing approach to his work which is really really nice. A couple of hours of podcasts here and there with him that lead me to sources.
Hope some of that helped or was interesting at all! I love writing about it LOL
Really cool to learn more about it! Was there any resistance towards legislation or commentary on it early on? Did they think deities emerged from events because of the geographical aspect? The north south divide is pretty interesting, did it matter in other contexts too? How was law enforcement over there like? The afterlife sounds strange, would this world technically be an afterlife for them too? Is it reincarnation? Did curses affect you in other lives? How'd one go through the process of buying a curse? How did most people view businesses back then? Did the Elamites bring their own businesses with them? Thank you!
-Not sure entirely about laws but every now and then there's mention of a new king establishing or clarifying them. Was probably just standard fare.
-Couldn't guess exactly on their rationale for deities and geography. Overall though, the relation between mortals and gods seemed pretty bilateral.
-Oh yeah! the north/south thing is a major theme in the region from the first empires up until the Roman conquest. Akkadian is a semitic language and Sumarian is a language isolate (might've come from south of Mesopatamia before the sea levels rose at the end of the ice age). Babylon, Assyria, Akkad is all northern and Akkadian-speaking and then there's 3ish major periods of Sumarian rule. They go back and forth. Because Sumarian is an isolate, Akkadian was more often the dominant language used/recorded in Mesopatamia because it could be learned by other peoples in the broader region more easily since they spoke other semetic languages.
In fact, IIRC, Akkadian was even a langua-franca across the wider near-east for a time. Egyptian rulers would send letters to foreign kings in Akkadian for a time. I forgot what period or for how long though exactly. Either way: both Sumarian and Akkadian were written in cuneiform script, and cuneiform was used to record many other languages too which was how archeologists were able to work backwards to translate Sumerian in the first place.
There were some periods where north/south had nationalist connotations. Sargon of Akkad had nationalist tendencies and he was Akkadian. The degree of it varried from king to king era to era etc.
Overall though, linguistically, Akkadian was far more dominant. However Sumarian existed for a while and would become elevated by Sumerian rulers in periods where they were the ones who united the region.
-It could be called a kind of reincarnation yeah! They definitely didn't treat the afterlife as a paradise and treated the soul as a kind of essential immutable thing.
-You would buy a curse from a sorcerer. Methods varry and were pretty vibes-based. You could buy a lot from a sorcerer in general. Pretty much just like any other business. There wasn't a lot of codified heresy or no-no's religiously about them as far as I know????? Sometimes you just would go to the local sorcerer for sorcerer things. Like getting rid of ghosts. Or helping your business. Or fighting off other curses a rival of yours put on you. Or you had cancer but didn't know what cancer was because it's 2,000bc and you think you're just possessed.
-Buisnesses went through different phases. A notable period I'm looking at is around 1800BC where you have businesses and proto-guilds running a lot of the economy. That's notable because in most other periods you have the state organizing large-scale commerce for the most part. But in this period it looks like they had a sort of ancient petite-bourgeois situation. Couldn't speak for other eras. Commerce was almost definitely a restricted activity for the gentry but it feels pretty common? Might be a bais because a lot of writing was done for business so that's what's still left.
Still though, from what I understand, population centers were pretty tightly packed with not a lot of small towns or villages. You just had mostly farms and singular estates in the country more so than other places at the time or in history in general. Not sure why. So I imagine commerce and business may have been more ubiquitous than most other places since your dense population centers are that much more dense and you /have/ to go into a city not just a town to sell your stuff? Totally spitballing that one.
-Elamites, from kind of what I know, would trade with the region but I don't know anything about their own businesses. They had hubs in the western zagross mountains that would sell Lapis Lazuli and goods from the east but I don't know how much moving around they did themselves personally. They probably also helped move a lot of tin and other precious metals into Mesopatamia in exchange for food goods. They also had a dynasty or two rule Mesopatamia here and there, you know for fun, as a treat.
Okay that's all my amateur self got. Hope that answers something LOL
Thank you!! These answers are all great, the scarcity of information is a bit disheartening to hear, going to the city being really important then is pretty interesting. Are there any records or reconstructions of cities back in that period? Were there sorcerers marketing themselves in a few sources later?
Yuh!
Yeah I think there's a few good reconstructions of Ur and some of Babylon I've seen. Ur they have pretty detailed street maps of. https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/9359/
Haven't seen any sources of sorcerers more just references to needing to go to one. There are however whole books preserved that are about divinations for court magicians. Like a whole guide on how to tell the future from the spots on a lamb's liver. It's all very a-matter-of-fact "this is just what you do".
Based history hours
I judt went down a rabbit hole myself about Babylon, which lead to reading about the Whore of Babylon and Aleister Crowley, then the Legacy of Kain games.
Folks we're MesoPOSTamianing LESSGOOO