The Amorite King Hammurabi created one of the world’s earliest and most-complete written legal codes.

Its capital, the city of Babylon, was first occupied by people known as the Amorites. The 3,000-line poem “Epic of Gilgamesh” follows the adventures of a Sumerian king as he battles a forest monster and quests after the secrets of eternal life.īabylonia: Babylonia rose to prominence in the Bronze Age around 1900 B.C., in present-day Iraq. Sumerians invented cuneiform script, one of the earliest forms of writing and built large stepped pyramid temples called ziggurats. They also pioneered the use of levees and canals for irrigation. Sumerians called themselves the Sag-giga, the “black-headed ones.” They were among the first to use bronze.

Sumer: By the fourth millennium BCE, Sumerians had established roughly a dozen city-states throughout ancient Mesopotamia, including Eridu and Uruk in what is now southern Iraq. Bronze Age CivilizationsĪ map of Europe during the late bronze age, circa 1100 B.C. when humans began to forge an even stronger metal: iron. Prominent Bronze Age kingdoms included Sumer and Babylonia in Mesopotamia and Athens in Ancient Greece. Bronze Age states interacted with each other through trade, warfare, migration and the spread of ideas.

The Bronze Age was marked by the rise of states or kingdoms-large-scale societies joined under a central government by a powerful ruler. Civilizations in Greece began working with bronze before 3000 B.C., while the British Isles and China entered the Bronze Age much later-around 1900 B.C. The invention of bronze brought an end to the Stone Age, the prehistoric period dominated by the use of stone tools and weaponry.ĭifferent human societies entered the Bronze Age at different times. Bronze was harder and more durable than copper, which made bronze a better metal for tools and weapons.Īrchaeological evidence suggests the transition from copper to bronze took place around 3300 B.C. Ancient Sumer may have been the first civilization to start adding tin to copper to make bronze.

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