Dear Dr. Stanley,

I´ve seen this exciting work of prof. Jared so many times, and he convinced me. But, the History Channel is presenting a new program called "The great history" and is making me change my vision of how things happened!

Have you seen?

Best.

Prof. Hess

Yes, exactly.

You´re right. I need to be a little more careful... wait and read a little more before believe. " No professor or book can explain it all."

Thanks.

The Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu is the eldest legal document that institutes casuistic currency and weight formula, e.g. 1 shekel=11 gram of silver or 180 grams of barley; this predates Hammurabi by several hundred years. The Sumerian economy was market-based and the trade was based on commodity money; Sumerian temples were the first documented creditors at interest and facilitated the idea of interest-bearing debt for financial gain. Private houses got involved into this business, and laws regulating banking operations were included in civil codes, e.g. the privatization and transfer of land (natural resources) as banking collateral, which is the technical basis of our current accounting system !

The Sumerian city-states were a 'hydraulic culture' and most probably collapsed (depopulation) by a longer period (200-300 years) of drought (Konfirst, 2012), mass migrations followed towards different corners of the known world (attached; preprint: Universal Temporal Scaling, read: p. 4-5 , the Konfirst presentation, Global Wave Energetics and slide share/mesopotamia).

There evidence for river change, isolating some major cities, but not until late on. Ur is still mentioned, much diminished, until the 1st millennium. Akkad survived as Assyria, just slightly further north.

Mass migration? Unlikely with the rise of Babylon, but certainly some degree of desertification occurred.

If we look elsewhere other early cultures outside of Euroasia engaged in organised war, although often these had ritual basis-other cultures engaged in agriculture-and others formed states. But not only were the Mesopotamians first, they created the ways we run states, ideas of the nature of states and good government. They may even have had the first democracies.