The ancient Mesopotamians were freakishly ahead of their time

The ancient Mesopotamians were freakishly ahead of their time – and here are 8 reasons why Ideas developed by ancient peoples in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers still shape our lives today. Selena Wisnom explains why we should celebrate the pivotal roles they played in the development of beer, writing, AI, horoscopes – and even credit cards 1. Writing They gave us the means to pen novels – and official records The ancient peoples of the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’ – the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – grew up fast. In the five or so millennia BC, four major civilisations emerged in the region known as Mesopotamia – and the advances they made would leave an indelible imprint on history. From around 4000 BC, Sumerians built the first city-states in the region’s south. The next great power was the Akkadian empire, founded about 2334 BC. In the early 19th century BC, the Babylonians became the dominant force in southern Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, to the north, from the 21st century BC, the Assyrians conquered much of west Asia. Mesopotamia was a place of rich soils and access to plentiful water for irrigating crops. Unsurprisingly, it’s believed to be where settled farming emerged. Its inhabitants grew rich, with elites enjoying time to think and to develop ways of preserving their best ideas – most notably writing. Around 3500 BC, Sumerian accountants in the city of Uruk devised a method for keeping track of the rations they gave to their workers – and developed the most advanced bureaucracy the world had yet seen. Writing started here as a system of pictures, known today as proto-cuneiform, which could record any commodity going in or out. Delivered three jars of oil to the temple? Just draw a jar of oil three times. Proper writing, which can record abstract ideas and the sounds of speech, evolved by about 3100 BC. At this point, pictures were used to spell out the sounds of the objects for which they stood; to provide an analogy in English, drawing a bee and a leaf might spell the word ‘belief’. This writing system, known as cuneiform (from the Latin for ‘wedge’), involved pressing a reed stylus into soft clay tablets, combining multiple wedge-shaped marks to create pictures. Over time, these became more abstract and less like things they originally depicted. So by the first millennium BC, you’d never guess that the sign ‘ni’ was originally supposed to be a jar of oil. Cuneiform was still being written on clay tablets in the Middle East in the first century AD, some 3,100 years after the system was first devised – a period spanning well over half of recorded human history. Such tablets don’t decay in the ground, and they’re not destroyed by fire, so around half a million of them survive today, with more surfacing in excavations all the time. As a result, Mesopotamia is one of the best-documented parts of the ancient world, helping us learn about its extraordinary innovations. 2. Banking They invented spreadsheets, credit and interest payments Alongside those early accounting systems, the Mesopotamians developed the world’s first spreadsheets, as well as sophisticated banking systems. They also invented the concept of credit – and, with it, interest-bearing loans. As early as the third millennium BC, grid-like tablets recorded loans of grain from the palace to the temple, enabling lenders to keep tabs on how much was repaid and what was still owed. A series of surviving tablets detail how the royal granaries of Lagash – a city-state sited between the sites of modern Baghdad and Basra – supplied the White Temple, which failed to repay the full amount of grain the following year, necessitating the recording of a deficit on the loan. Temples functioned as banks, lending silver and barley at discounted rates in times of need. They also financed commercial ventures, charging annual interest at 33 per cent on barley. The private sector took off in the early second millennium BC, with fully fledged private enterprises in which people could invest. Assyrian merchants organised trading partnerships to finance their trips to Anatolia, where they sold textiles made by their wives at home. Traders were keen to invest their profits and not let their silver lie idle. Precious metals sitting in the money bag rather than being put to work increasing their value were described as ‘getting hungry’. The Babylonian word for interest, which translates as ‘increase’, originally referred to herds of animals. Just as the flocks would reproduce and multiply over time, money and debt could also burgeon. Given the huge interest rates levied by lenders, profits could grow quickly. But so could debts – and ordinary people who found themselves unable to repay their creditors were sometimes enslaved. In the second millennium BC, Babylonian kings frequently had to proclaim debt amnesties to provide relief. National deficits also caused problems. The first documented war in history, between the Sumerian cities of Lagash and Umma, a little to the north-west, flared up over a refusal to repay a loan. The conflict, which dragged on for 150 years (c2500–2350 BC), was a convoluted tale of claim, counterclaim, and battles won and lost – all over a dispute over a loan agreement based on a rich strip of fertile territory, the Gu’edena or ‘edge of the plain’. So you can thank the Mesopotamians for your credit card – and also be grateful that interest rates have, by and large, fallen in the past 4,000 years. - Read more | He tried to conquer knowledge itself – instead this ancient Mesopotamian king resorted to rule with terror 3. Pubs They adored beer, and created venues to drink it People have probably been quaffing beer for at least 12,000 years, but the earliest-known written evidence for brewing comes from Mesopotamia. Indeed, some of the very first surviving examples of writing were made by temple accountants working out how much grain they needed to make enough beer for festivals. The Sumerians adored beer. One list, albeit compiled later as a lexical teaching aid, records 38 different types including dark, light, red and “triple beer”, plus beer with and without foam – and the enigmatic “beer in the middle of the sea”. That’s enough varieties to make any modern craft brewery proud. Drinking beer was a highly social activity. People gathered around a communal vat and sipped through reed straws. Such a scene is depicted on cylinder seals belonging to Queen Puabi of Ur in the 26th century BC, who was later buried with a gold and lapis lazuli drinking straw. Straws were perhaps used to penetrate a floating layer of residue, or simply to enhance the fun of sharing a drink with others. Mesopotamians built the first pubs, too. One tavern in Lagash, established c2700 BC, had a kitchen, an outdoor seating area and 150 serving dishes as well as the all-important beer. It’s often assumed that early beer was low in alcohol, mainly because it was given to children. But there is plenty of evidence that Sumerian beer was highly intoxicating. One myth tells of Inanna, goddess of war, love and sex, getting the god Enki (or Ea) drunk so that she can steal from him the powers of civilisation. Later medical recipes contain cures for hangovers and even alcoholism. And one of the texts that gives us our most detailed information about brewing – the Sumerian hymn to the goddess Ninkasi – might have been taught to school children in the second millennium BC, along with a drinking song that has become famous via YouTube: As I spin around the lake of beer, while feeling wonderful, feeling wonderful, while drinking beer, in a blissful mood, while drinking alcohol and feeling exhilarated, with joy in the heart and a contented liver – my heart is a heart filled with joy! 4. Maths They had plenty of time for numbers and calculations Whenever you check a clock to tell the time, you are using a Mesopotamian system of counting – sexagesimal. Our modern decimal system uses the number 10 as the base, but the Mesopotamians used base 60 – which is why we have 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. It was also the Mesopotamians who decided that a circle should be divided into 360°; that’s neatly divisible by 60, and explains why it makes sense for clocks to have circular faces (though ancient Mesopotamians used water clocks). Unlike us, they counted lots of other things in 60s, a fact reflected in the Mesopotamian system of writing numbers. One vertical wedge could stand for 1, 60 or even 360 (6x60). You can tell which number is indicated only from the context which does make Mesopotamian maths a bit of a headache. And these people were extremely good at maths. Babylonian schoolchildren were learning a version of Pythagoras’ theorem more than 1,000 years before the Greek polymath triangulated his thinking in the sixth century BC. As early as the 18th century BC, they also knew the square root of two, needed to find the diagonal of a square. Babylonian students were taught methods of calculating areas of land so that they could be taxed efficiently. However – and seemingly just for the fun of it – teachers used some huge numbers when setting exercises. Later, the Babylonians came up with sophisticated maths that was key to the development of data science. - Read more | Long before the Bible, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation predicted one of its most famous stories 5. Poetry They gave us gloomy introverts who ponder life It wasn’t all admin in Mesopotamia. The region produced the world’s first literature, too, in all sorts of genres. The earliest named author in Mesopotamia – and, therefore, the first known writer in history – was Enheduanna, a priestess of the moon god in the city of Ur, who lived around 2300 BC. Known as “the Sumerian Shakespeare”, Enheduanna wrote wonderful poems about a turbulent world governed by capricious gods – classics that were still being studied in schools five centuries after she died. A snippet from Exaltation of Inanna gives a flavour of her verse: I approached the light but it burned me I approached the shade but was covered by a storm My honeyed mouth turned to spittle My talent for lifting spirits has turned to dust The Mesopotamians were also great storytellers. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh – dating back to at least the 18th century BC – charts the fate of a king on a quest for eternal life. It’s the earliest known example of the ‘hero’s journey’ that underpins so many of today’s Hollywood films. Babylonian stories about struggles between gods and heroes influenced the Homeric epics, Greek mythology and even the Bible: does a flood wiping out humanity and an ark that boards animals two by two sound familiar? But it wasn’t all serious. The Sumerians wrote the first rap battles – debate poems between entities such as Summer and Winter, Bird and Fish, and Date Palm and Tamarisk, arguing over who deserves the crown. Similar slanging matches also took place between people. A recently discovered text from c1740 BC describes a cat fight between two women from the city of Nippur. They accuse each other of being bad at baking and of buying ready-made food, hurling insults – “Your butt sticks out” – and accusations: “You can’t even operate a spindle.” Poems about the goddess Inanna describe the first instance of teenage rebellion, recounting how she sneaked out to meet her boyfriend without telling her parents. And some of the earliest jokes are written in Sumerian. One starts: “A dog walks into a bar and says ‘I can’t see a thing – I’ll open this one’!” The punchline, we can only assume, has been lost in translation. 6. Astrology They read the stars and created zodiacal archetypes Whether you’re a feisty Leo or a cool-headed Capricorn – indeed, whatever your star sign – you can thank the Babylonians for inventing it. Astrology was practised in Mesopotamia by at least the third millennium BC, when the stars and planets were thought to carry messages from the gods to the king. An eclipse usually meant that a king would soon die, whereas the rising and setting of Venus could portend a good harvest, reconciliation of kings, or even war. None of these outcomes was inevitable, though. Rituals could be performed to ask the gods to change their minds, or for help interpreting these astral signs: if a king will die, which king will it be? One surviving prayer to the moon god worries over “the evil of a lunar eclipse” and “portents and omens, unpleasant and unfavourable” as it pleads for intercession and the hope of a more “favourable” path. In the fifth century BC, Babylonian priests divided the sky into 12 equal chunks that we now call the zodiac. The Persians who ruled Babylon at that time had no interest in taking advice from the Babylonian gods, so astrologers started taking private clients – and invented horoscopes. These forecast the future based on a person’s date of birth and the exact positions of the planets, making predictions such as: “His days will be long” and “He will have sons”. The names of most modern star signs are direct translations into Latin of the Babylon constellations: Libra is a pair of scales, Cancer is a crab and Taurus is the Babylonian bull of heaven who, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes down from the sky to trample the land. Others took their classical names from Babylonian images – Aquarius the water carrier is depicted in the same way as the water god Ea (or Enki), often shown with water pouring from his shoulders. Meanwhile, Virgo the maiden was named after a Babylonian picture of a woman holding an ear of wheat (this constellation was ‘the Furrow’ in Babylonian). - Read more | Behold his nightmarish nether regions: this ancient Mesopotamian demon was secretly a divine hero 7. Data science They laid the foundations for modern machine learning Without the Babylonians, we would have no artificial intelligence – because they invented the algorithm. The roots of data science lie in astrology: the original purpose of the zodiac was to measure the sky more accurately. Babylonian astronomers measured the position of a star or planet by holding up hands to the sky: 12 fingers corresponded to an angle of 1°. They studied the heavens each night, recording observations in diaries maintained for at least 600 years – arguably the longest scientific project in history. With such a huge amount of data, they quickly spotted patterns. For instance, Venus moves in an eight-year cycle, so they could work out that planet’s position on a future date by simply checking their records to see where it had been recorded eight years before then. Eventually, astronomers developed mathematical formulae to calculate the positions of celestial bodies without having to consult past records – and the algorithm was born. The Greeks picked up these data and calculations along with the zodiac, and they became part of Greek science. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy used Babylonian eclipse records dating back to 747 BC. Modern mathematical astronomy, directly descended from that Greek work, exists only because of astrology – ancient scholars carefully observing the sky for messages from the angry gods. So the algorithm, along with the idea that trends can be extrapolated from data, comes from a core principle of Mesopotamian religion – the idea that the gods write messages in the heavens for humans to interpret. 8. Medicine They performed surgery and introduced the system of striking off dodgy doctors The Egyptians usually get the credit for producing the earliest known medical texts – but the Mesopotamians were first. The oldest medical recipe, for making a salve to heal a bite wound, dates from the third millennium BC in Ebla, Syria. The code of Hammurabi, which covered 282 legal scenarios – including disputes – attests that the Babylonians were performing eye surgery in the 18th century BC. These laws, which survive on a stele topped with a relief image of Hammurabi with Shamash – who worked double time as the sun god and the god of justice – mandated harsh penalties for medical malpractice. If an operation went wrong and the patient was blinded, the physician’s hand should be cut off – a hand for an eye, as it were. It was also stated that doctors should charge rates on a sliding scale based on the social class of the patient. Ordinary people paid half as much as the wealthy. Mesopotamian medicine was fundamentally holistic. A physician would give you drugs to treat symptoms, but an exorcist would also be called to fix the root problem, understood to have involved angering the gods. Incantations at the bedside would reassure a patient that the gods would soon calm down, while omens could tell the exorcist whether the patient would live or die even before that spirit-expeller arrived at the sufferer’s house. If, for example, he saw a potsherd standing up in the street, a patient was clearly too dangerously ill to go near. In the seventh century BC, Assyrian king Ashurbanipal commissioned an encyclopaedia to collect and standardise the vast numbers of medical texts and traditions that were circulating by then. These included treatments for everything from minor ailments, such as headaches and digestive problems, to serious problems such as mental illness and epilepsy – known to the Babylonians as ‘fallen from the sky’. To treat a headache, you should mix a selection of seeds then “boil down [the mixture] in vinegar, sprinkle parched grain flour [and] emmer flour on it, and smear [the mixture] onto a piece of leather. Shave his head [and] put it on as a bandage; he will get better.” Hippocrates is usually credited with inventing the concept of diagnosis based on observation, but the Mesopotamians pioneered this approach hundreds of years earlier, considering five grades of temperature variation, among many other factors. Their knowledge was then incorporated into Hippocratic writings, Roman treatises on eye disease and, later, Arabic medicine. Mesopotamian advances travelled widely thanks to the cosmopolitan nature of the ancient world. To the east, Sumerians had been trading goods and ideas with the Indus Valley and Afghanistan as early as the third millennium BC, while in the other direction Alexander the Great united lands from Babylon to Greece under one rule. Whether via commerce or conquest, people moved – and took their cultures with them. And Mesopotamian expertise survived and spread because successive cultures found it to be practical, useful and effective. Selena Wisnom is lecturer in the heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (Allen Lane, 2025) This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine