Ancient State Systems: Sumeria, Persia and Assyria

The ancient state-systems of Sumeria, Assyria and Persia each rose, flourished and fell in the region known as Mesopotamia between 3500 BC and 330 BC. Each exerted a considerable, if highly variable, degree of authority over a large geographical area; authority created and maintained by governmental and administrative institutions and backed by diplomacy and military force. Each depended on complex trading and commercial systems, and each succeeding in growing wealthy and achieving advances in agriculture, technology and social organization. As Mesopotamia was the first region to experience the development of organized states based on urban civilization, the nature of these early states, their internal structures and relationships with the societies around them, and the ways in which they laid the foundations for, and ultimately gave way to, one another, are all significant issues for the history of politics, diplomacy and international relations.

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