timescale.infoAncient Mesopotamia
From the first farming villages, about 7000 BCE, through Uruk's first cities and writing, Sumer, Akkad, Ur, Hammurabi's Babylon, the Kassites and the Assyrian empires, to Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon and its fall to Cyrus in 539 BCE, with Alexander's death in Babylon in 323 BCE as an epilogue. A sample timeline built from the sources cited on each moment, mostly their Wikipedia articles; not a definitive history. **How to read it.** Chapter headings mark the eras. Periods, empires and reigns are durations; inventions, writings, laws, cities, buildings and battles are moments, coloured by tag. **Dates.** Before about 1500 BCE they depend on the chronology: this timeline uses the conventional **middle chronology** (Hammurabi 1792–1750 BCE, the Hittite sack of Babylon 1595 BCE); the high and low chronologies put the same events decades earlier or later. Prehistoric dates are approximate, and each moment's **Date precision** says how its date is known. A moment known only to the year sits at the start of that year. The display is proleptic Gregorian; days known from Babylonian records keep the Julian date historians give beside them (**Original historical date**), about six days later in the sixth century BCE.
90 moments · 7000-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE – 0323-06-06T00:00:00Z BCE · by @athan · @athan
The Epic of Atrahasis
The gods send a flood to destroy humanity; **Atrahasis** survives in a boat. The same story is told in the later Gilgamesh epic.