Chronology

   B.C.

   ca. 10,000-9000 Agriculture begins in the Fertile Crescent, an arc-shaped region lying along the northern rim of the Mesopotamian plains.

   ca. 5500 People from the Fertile Crescent begin to descend from the hills and settle in the Tigris and Euphrates river valley.

   ca. 5000-3500 One of a number of scholarly estimates for the period in which the people of the Ubaidian culture live in small villages in parts of Mesopotamia.

   ca. 3500-3000 The Sumerians begin to build the first Mesopotamian cities in the plain lying just northwest of the Persian Gulf; they also begin using a complex writing system that evolves into what modern scholars call cuneiform.

   ca. 2300 An ambitious individual named Sargon establishes the first-known empire - the Akkadian Empire - thereby uniting northern and southern Mesopotamia for the time.

   2112 Ur-Nammu, king of the city of Ur, establishes a new empire, the Third Dynasty of Ur.

   2004 The Elamites, from the hills east of the Mesopotamian plains, sack Ur; the Third Dynasty of Ur falls apart.

   ca. 2000 An unknown Babylonian scribe collects The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Ancient Mesopotamia and writes down the epic tales of the early Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh.

   ca. 1813-1781 The reign of Shamshi-Adad, founder of Assyria's first royal dynasty and the first of that nation's rulers about whom any details are known.

   1759 Babylonian king Hammurabi conquers the kingdom of Mari, located on the upper Euphrates, and soon afterward absorbs Ashur and the other Assyrian cities.

   ca. 1595 Babylon is sacked by the Hittites, whose homeland lies in central Anatolia (what is now Turkey); the Hittites fail to follow up on their victory, and a group of newcomers to the region, the Kassites, establish a dynasty in Babylon.

   ca. 1365-1330 The reign of Ashur-uballit I, the first major king of Assyria's second phase of expansion in Mesopotamia.

   ca. 1200 Many cities in the western parts of the Near East are sacked and burned, including those of the Hittites, by waves of people from southeastern Europe; in Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylonia largely escape the destruction.

   ca. 744-727 The reign of King Tiglathpileser III, who reasserts Assyrian domination over many areas in the Near East.

   ca. 722-705 The reign of Sargon II, founder of the Assyrian Sargonid dynasty, who crushes numerous rebellions and builds a new royal palace northeast of Nineveh.

   ca. 668-627 The reign of Ashurbanipal, who inherits the Assyrian Empire at its height of power.

   ca. 626 A Chaldean ruler, Nabopolassar, seizes Babylon and launches a war against Assyria.

   ca. 615 Media's King Cyaxares attacks Assyria from the east; the following year he captures and sacks Ashur, the most sacred of Assyria's cities; Cyaxares and Nabopolassar form an anti-Assyrian alliance.

   612 A combined Babylonian-Median army ravages the Assyrian heartland, destroying Nimrud and Nineveh.

   ca. 605-562 The reign of the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who oversees vast new building projects in Babylon, including temples, palaces, and the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

   589 Cyaxares invades the kingdom of Lydia in Anatolia.

   559 A capable, ambitious Persian nobleman named Cyrus rises to the throne of Fars, a small southern Iranian vassal of the Median Empire.

   539 Having conquered and absorbed Media, Cyrus captures Babylon.

   525 Cyrus's son, Cambyses, invades Egypt.

   ca. 522 A nobleman named Darius becomes king of the Persian Empire. Darius crosses into Europe and invades Scythia, lying west of the Black Sea.

   490 Two of Darius's generals land their army at Marathon, on Greece's eastern coast, where a small Athenian army defeats them.

   480 Darius's son, Xerxes, invades Greece with a much larger army; the Greeks soundly defeat the Persians in a large naval battle at Salamis, near Athens.

   401 Ten thousand Greek mercenaries who are backing a rebellious Persian prince find themselves stranded in the center of Mesopotamia but manage to fight their way across the plains to safety. Their story is later told by one of their number, Xeno-phon, in his Anabasis.

   334 Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great invades the Persian Empire and in a mere decade conquers it.

   323 Alexander dies at Babylon, after which his leading generals, the so-called Successors, fight a series of wars for possession of his huge empire.

   281 After carving out a new Near Eastern empire centered in Mesopotamia, one of the Successors, Seleucus, dies.

   141 The Parthians, having risen to power in northern Iran, are in control of most of the shrunken Seleucid realm, including Mesopotamia.

   A.D.

   224 The Sassanians, hailing from southern Iran, overrun the Parthian Empire.

   637-651 Muslim Arab armies conquer much of the Sassanian-controlled Near East, including the region of Mesopotamia.

   1845-1851 British-sponsored archaeologist Austen Henry Layard excavates the Assyrian capitals of Nimrud and Nineveh, making numerous important discoveries, including magnificent carved bas-reliefs depicting the exploits of Assyria's kings.

   1849 English linguist Henry C. Rawlinson makes great strides in the decipherment of the ancient Mesopotamian writing system called cuneiform.

   1872 English scholar and archaeologist George Smith translates the Mesopotamian epic tale of the hero Gilgamesh, which had a profound effect on the literatures of later ancient cultures.

   1902 A team of French archaeologists discovers a tablet bearing the famous law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi.

   1932 Establishment of the modern nation of Iraq, which covers much of the region of ancient Mesopotamia.