Compare And Contrast Egypt And Ancient Mesopotamia

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Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations would not be as successful as they were without living by the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers. Rivers shaped the development of civilization in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia by how they utilized the floods, what they traded, their views on religion, and controlling the rivers.
Both Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt utilized their rivers to trade with other civilizations. Common resources that were traded were wood, grains, textiles, and oils. The Nile River gave Egyptians access to the Mediterranean Sea, which made trade with the Greeks possible. As Professor Spaulding mentioned, prevailing winds blew up river, which made trading with other city-states possible and brought a sense of unity between them as a whole. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers fed into the Persian Gulf, which gave Mesopotamians access to trade with the Indus Valley. They traded things such as copper, gold, textiles, spices, and jewelry. For instance, the city-state of Dilmun was the main …show more content…

Grains, vegetables, and fruit produced from the floods are what fed the families and also brought in wealth and other resources from trading them. In Egypt, the Nile River flooded between August and October. The flood deposited nutrient-rich mud that was called “black mud”. The soil was so damp and rich the Egyptians hardly needed to work it. They could drop the seed and lightly stomp their feet for the seed to sink down and begin to grow. The Mesopotamians had a much harder time controlling the water coming from the annual flood. According to the Kagan Textbook, the people had to build dikes to keep the rivers from flooding the fields in the spring and for storage purposes for use of it in autumn. The floods shaped how water was controlled and utilized within the civilizations whether they needed to let the water run free or build waterways to keep it

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