"Grandpa?" Laurie called, knocking on the study door.
"It's dinnertime!" She opened the door and found Grandpa bent over his desk, as usual.
He was an archaeologist and worked very hard.
When he wasn't out traveling and researching, he was home in his study. "What are you doing, Grandpa?"
"I’m tracing an ancient map of Mesopotamia," he said.
"Meso-what?" Laurie peeked over his shoulder and saw a piece of tracing paper covered in wavy lines.
Two lines were drawn in blue and made a sort of V. "What are those two squiggly lines?"
"Mesopotamia was the name of a region in the Middle East, where human civilization arose thousands of years ago.
These two lines are the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Thanks to them, humans in that area had water for farming, fish to eat, and mud and reeds to build houses.
You may have heard of the Sumerians.
They were the most powerful people there—in what became known as the cradle of civilization.
The Sumerians may have lived in mud houses, but they were very sophisticated and we owe a lot to their inventions.
For example, they developed the first writing system!
They began writing with pictures. So to indicate a star, they would draw a picture of a star.
And water would be written by drawing wavy lines, like the waves in the Tigris and Euphrates.
Later they developed those pictures into symbols that represented ideas or objects.
Eventually they created signs to represent the sounds of their language.
Their writing looks choppy because it was pressed into clay tablets using thin tools made from reeds.
After that they baked the tablets in the sun.
In addition to being masters of language, the Sumerians were clever mathematicians
who tried to use numbers to organize the world around them.
They were especially keen on dividing time.
Our calendar—with a 30-day month, 7-day week, 24-hour day, 60-minute hour, and 60-second minuteㅡis based on their math!
Can you believe we owe so much to people who lived over five thousand years ago?"
"No, but I can believe Mom will be mad at us if we don't go downstairs and eat dinner," Laurie said.
"Your mother is like the great King Hammurabi of ancient Babylonia, which was an area of Mesopotamia," Grandpa said.
"She lays down the laws around here!"
"I've heard of him! Wasn't he the scary king who asked for 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'?" Laurie shuddered.
"Yes, I guess we might say he sounds scary now.
But Hammurabi's laws kept society in order at a time when there was lots of fighting between tribes.
I think his laws are interesting because they teach us about what was considered important in ancient Mesopotamia.
For example, we know that people were expected to take responsibility for their work and actions.
If a house collapsed and killed the people inside, the builder was put to death.
But unfortunately, punishment wasn't always as clear-cut as it sounds.
You were often able to escape a harsh sentence by paying a large fine.
In ancient Babylonia it helped to be wealthy.
Would you like to see pictures of Babylonia's capital?
It was called Babylon and was one of the most impressive cities in Mesopotamia.
Those huge structures are called ziggurats. They were built entirely out of mud bricks.
They were probably very difficult to build.
People took great care in building them, however, because they were made for worshipping gods.
The steep sides were stepped and covered with beautiful gardens.
At the top was a shrine. The most famous ziggurat is the temple to the god Marduk in the city of Ur.
You recall the Tower of Babel from the Bible, don't you?
In that story people tried to build a tower that would reach the heavens, but they failed in the end.
Some believe the ziggurat in Ur is the basis of the biblical legend.
The city of Ur, which is in present-day Iraq, is thought to connect to other stories from the Bible as well.
It was the home of Abraham, and when archaeologists first discovered the ruins of Ur in the 1800s,
they found evidence of a great flood that had likely wiped out most of the city.
They believe this may have been the basis of the great flood story in the Bible as well.
You know, the one that led to Noah building his ark.
Wait a minute. I have something to show you from the excavation at Ur.
A British archaeologist uncovered some of the grandest treasures of the ancient world when he found the temples and cemetery there in the 1920s and ’30s.
The tomb of Lady Puabi, for example, was full of beautiful things.
This royal woman was buried with all her riches, and was covered from head to foot in jewels and gold.
Lady Puabi's real headdress is in a museum, but I have a replica.
A replica is something that's made to look exactly like the real thing.
Try this on for size, Lady Laurie."
Grandpa leaned over and placed a delicate headdress decorated with dangling golden leaves, rings, and flowers on Laurie's head.
"Laurie, didn't I send you to call Grandpa for dinner ten minutes ago?" Laurie's mom shouted.
"What are you two doing up there? Dinner is getting cold!"
"That's Lady Laurie to you, Mom!" Laurie said.
She turned on her heel and strode out the door, her headdress jingling.