The History of the Ancient World: Практическое пособие по английскому языку. Часть 1. Гончарова Л.Ю. - 15 стр.

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and Inanna, the queen of heaven. Inanna was also the godded of love, procreation
and war.
       The Sumerians also had a reasonably advanced mathematical system with
tables for multiplication, division and even square and cube roots. They also
possessed a knowledge of geometry.
       The most famous surviving piece of literature is the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, a
fictional story of an old king of the city state Erech who sets off in search of
immortality. It also includes a chapter dealing with a flood on the earth, and is clearly
the origin of the Christian and Jewish Old Testament story of Noah and the Biblical
flood.

      Babylon and Hammurabi
       Around the year 2000 BC the region was invaded by an Indo-European people,
the Amorites. The chaos caused by the Amorite invasion lasted until 1763 BC, when
a strong and capable king arose and united the inhabitants. From this time the city of
Babylon was built, and the region became known as Babylonia.
       The first king of Babylon – the one who managed to end the chaos and unite all
the tribes into a nation – was named Hammurabi.
       Kind Hammurabi has become most famous for his Code of Laws, dating from
1750 BC, which is widely but incorrectly held to be the first written legal code in the
world (it was the second, the first being the code drawn up by the earlier Sumerians).
Hammurabi’s Code of Laws was engraved in stone stelas and set up in the great cities
of the region. The 282 laws cover such things as offenses against other people and
property; disputes concerning land, trade, fees, professional services and family.
Some of the punishments would be considered harsh by modern standards, but on the
whole the laws present a picture of a well-ordered society which lived by recognized
standards and offered protection to all its citizens. To this day the Code is regarded as
the father of the all legal codes of the world.

      The Assyrian Empire
       Babylon was then invaded by new waves of Indo-Europeans and Indo-Aryans.
The Kassites and Hittites conquered large areas of the region by 1595 BC.
       Under Kassite rule, which lasted another 450 years, Babylonia once again
became a power of considerable importance. The Kassites were the first people to use
the chariot as a weapon of war, a skill later taken on by virtually every other nation in
the Near East and Europe. Horse riding itself originated with the Indo-Aryan tribes
who populated modern day Iran.
       The next large empire in the region was established by the originally Indo-
Aryan Assyrians (the word Assyrian is a corruption of the word Aryan) who, from
their base in modern day Syria, captured Babylon in 910 BC. In 722, the Assyrians
captured Palestine and by 671 BC their empire extended as far as the Nile delta.
       The Assyrians, like the Hittites, had mastered the art of iron working and iron
weapons (a skill which had come down from the Indo-Aryan north and had spread
with the Indo-Aryan invasions). As such, they had a massive advantage over their
opponents.