Sumer and Akkad were the two city-states that produced the most sophisticated armies of the Bronze Age (Gabriel & Metz, 1991). The Greeks called the area Mesopotamia, meaning "the land between the two rivers," a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates basin; however, in the Bible, the region is referred to as "Shumer," the original Sumerian word for the southern part of Iraq, the site of Sumer with its capital at the city of Ur (Gabriel & Metz, 1991).

Modern social organization and therefore social conflict therefore find their collective historic basis in Iraq. According to Roux (1993), people first manifested the high degree of cooperative human effort necessary to make urban life possible in the early Sumerian cities of Eridu and Urak. Likewise, Gabriel and Metz report that these two cities "reflected the evidence of this cooperation in the dikes, walls, irrigation canals, and temples, especially the giant ziggurates,...
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