Culture
Music, songs and instruments
Some songs were written for the gods but many were written to describe important events. Although music and songs amused kings, they were also enjoyed by ordinary people who liked to sing and dance in their homes or in the marketplaces. Songs were sung to children who passed them on to their children. Thus songs were passed on through many generations until someone wrote them down. These songs provided a means of passing on through the centuries highly important information about historical events that were eventually passed on to modern historians.
The Oud (Arabic:العود) is a small, stringed musical instrument. The oldest pictorial record of the Oud dates back to the Uruk period in Southern Mesopotamia over 5000 years ago. It is on a cylinder seal currently housed at the British Museum and acquired by Dr. Dominique Collon. The image depicts a female crouching with her instruments upon a boat, playing right-handed. This instrument appears hundreds of times throughout Mesopotamian history and again in ancient Egypt from the 18th dynasty onwards in long- and short-neck varieties.
The oud is regarded as a precursor to the European lute. Its name is derived from the Arabic word العود al-‘ūd ‘the wood’, which is probably the name of the tree from which the oud was made. (The Arabic name, with the definite article, is the source of the word ‘lute’.)
Games
Hunting was popular among Assyrian kings. Boxing and wrestling feature frequently in art, and some form of polo was probably popular, with men sitting on the shoulders of other men rather than on horses.[27] They also played majore, a game similar to the sport rugby, but played with a ball made of wood. They also played a board game similar to senet and backgammon, now known as the “Royal Game of Ma-asesblu.”
Family life
The Babylonian marriage market, in the Royal Holloway College.
Mesopotamia across its history became more and more a patriarchal society, in which the men were far more powerful than the women. Thorkild Jacobsen, and others have suggested that early Mesopotamian society was ruled by a “council of elders” in which men and women were equally represented, but that over time, as the status of women fell, that of men increased. As for schooling, only royal offspring and sons of the rich and professionals such as scribes, physicians, temple administrators, and so on, went to school. Most boys were taught their father’s trade or were apprenticed out to learn a trade.[28] Girls had to stay home with their mothers to learn housekeeping and cooking, and to look after the younger children. Some children would help with crushing grain, or cleaning birds. Unusual for that time in history, women in Mesopotamia had rights. They could own property and, if they had good reason, get a divorce.
That sort of thing?
littlenick
Central
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