The Birth Of Western Civilization: Tigris And Euphrate

The Birth of Western Civilization Around 4000 B.C.E, the first people settled down next to the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia and alongside the Nile in Egypt. It wasn’t until another 1000 years that these civilizations began writing down what went on around them. This began a domino effect of people recording events, real or myth, that impacted them on an individual and a grander scale. Through these archives, one can analyze the congruencies and discrepancies between the culture that survived between the Tigris and Euphrates and the society that blossomed beside the Nile. Around 3000 years after the first settlements appeared, on of the best-known societies cropped up. It may be unknown to most that the Greeks before the Macedonians

The largest category of these laws dealt with family matters like marriage, inheritance, and adoption. It’s in this category that woman are labeled the property of their father before marriage. Though they may be under the ownership of their father, women are still entitled to a piece of their father’s estate. This may take the form of a dowry or profits from the land. As their father, men could choose whomever they saw fit to marry their daughter. Once married, the woman now belongs to her husband. As a product of their status as property, women could be damaged by having relations with a man she wasn’t married to. If both the man and woman committing adultery were wed, they could both possibly be put to death. Just as in Mesopotamia, Egyptian women were entitled to a dowry. If they were adulterous, however, they lost their dowry to their husband. In addition to losing her property, an adulterous woman could be subject to punishment. Bullough, Shelton, and Slavin state, “We have two folktales form the Middle and New Kingdom of women committing adultery: in the first the woman was burned to death; in the second her husband hilled her and threw her corpse to the hounds” Meanwhile, the men, just as in Mesopotamia, aren’t considered sinful if they slept with another woman. In both Egypt and

It wasn’t until the Hebrews came along did monotheism become a practice. Soler states that on of the chief ideas between the Hebrews was that, “Man has been made ‘in the image’ of God (Gen. 1:26-67), but he is not, nor can he be God”. This was a bit different than the Mesopotamian and Egyptian idea that the king was often divine. He was either chosen by the gods or was a god. And in Egypt around the Middle Kingdom, the common people could even hope to join the gods in the afterlife. So the Jews could never have the opportunity to be as divine as their God as the Mesopotamians and Egyptians did, but they did have a more reasonable and logical God. The Jewish God promised his people that as long as they followed his rules, they wouldn’t be punished. Unfortunately for the Mesopotamians and Egyptian, no such promises were