chat

-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.

• I don't know much at all about enforcement but j don't think it's anything particularly special??? They settled a lot of disagreements with payment pretty often though from what I kind of know. Mesopatamian Small Claims Court was probably wild. Again though, that's just for the gentry.

-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