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Mesopotamia is the name designed for a group of cultures located to the west of the Indus valley civilisation. This group of cultures and civilisations is arguably the second or third oldest in the world. Rather than a single cultural group, as several other origins of civilisation are, Mesopotamia has been consistently invaded and new civilisations have settled in the area, including tribes from Semitic, Uralic, Indo-Iranian and other groups.
Mesopotamian culture, however, acted as a sprachbund, with many languages sharing similar areal features and many cultural buildings being the same, despite the invasion records, from the first few appearances of Mesopotamian culture (Kiengiric records around -5000) until the appearance of iron age empires (such as the Suurkad and Aryanam civilisations) which prove long-standing cohabitation of several different cultural and linguistic groups that have moved into the region for centuries.
While always overshadowed by the nearby and much larger Indus civilisation, Mesopotamia was extremely important for the development of human civilisation.
Mesopotamia is characterised by the constant inclusion of previous cultures into the cultural substratum of the region, showing great diversity culturally religiously and linguistically. The major periods have seen civilisations stem from cities in the region. The cultures are extremely diverse, but they are characterised from division into four generalised regions; Kiengiri in the south (eventually partially replaced by the Elamites to the east), Semitic cultures in the centre and west of the nation (Assyrians to the north in the Euphrates basin and Akkadians to the south); Atur-osh and Suumi to the north (the newest culture group in the region, centralised in the Tigris basin): and Aryanam to the east near and around the Zagros.
|10,000 -8,000 BCE||Pre-pottery Neolithic A||Stone Age|
|8,000 - 5000 BCE||Pre-pottery Neolithic B||Stone Age|
|5000 - 4500||Hasuna, Samara, Uruk cultures||Late Stone Age|
|4500-4000||Kiengiric Golden Age||Early Bronze Age|
|3900-3700||Ur Dynasties; Nippur period||Early Bronze Age|
|3700-3500||Early Semitic influx; Akkadian Empire||Early Bronze Age|
|3500-3300||Akkadian downfall; Ur III||Middle Bronze Age|
|3300-3100||Fall of Ur III to Elamite influence||Middle Bronze Age|
|3100-2900||Incursions of nomadic Semites||Middle Bronze Age|
|2900-2500||Assyrian, Babylonian and Elamite bloom||Middle Bronze Age|
|2500-2300||Invasions of the Suomen and the Erza||Middle Bronze Age|
|2300-1900||Small State Period||Middle Bronze Age|
|1900-1625||Babylonian dominance||Middle Bronze Age|
|c.1625||Societal collapse after Minoan Eruption||-|
|1625-1500||Reconstruction of empires||Late Bronze Age|
|1500-1430||Aturoshic dominance||Late Bronze Age|