Family Life In Early Mesopotamia The Renaissance And The Pax Romana Term Paper

¶ … isolated life of the Old Testament Mesopotamians was strictly tied to the fertile plateau the varied civilizations occupied. The groups were largely divided into Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian; under the unifying leadership of Ur, the people were divided into three legal categories that defined their daily lives: aristocracy, commoners, and slaves. While documentation of the cultures are based most commonly in religious texts, further excavation by Sir Leonard Woolley in the Twentieth Century elaborated greatly among the lists of kings, artifact preservations, and spheres of influence among the united cultures. The daily life of the families was inevitably tied to their life source, the rivers. Marriage, with institutional roots dating back to the Mesopotamians, was more than just alliance among two people, but extended into the larger connections between family clans, exchanges of power, and utility in tilling the land. Overall, marriage served the purpose of being an economic, political, and agricultural relationship cemented with the reproduction of heirs. Land, passed down generational, was inextricable from power; marriage served as its gate. Religion, math, and sciences were important to the daily lives of the Mesopotamians, whose fertile irrigation patterns implied a quotidian knowledge and application of botany and honed skills. Children were educated by their families in not only the ways...

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The Mesopotamians were part of large family clans, an organization critical to the start of villages, then towns and cities, and provided a successful key to the power of Mesopotamia not only for the viability of the land, burgeoning trade with the Egyptians, and start of the Jewish people and Old Testament culture, but also for the dissemination of knowledge.
Like the Mesopotamians, the families of the Pax Romana assumed the role of educating their children. Through a variety of rulers, including the gentility of Marcus Aurelius and the madness of Caligula, the family life of the Pax Romana society was very homogenous. The families were organized on a patrilineal scale, and the most senior male served as the paterfamilias, controlling all aspects of the lives of "his children," those of all ages under his guise. While the life expectancy was still in the thirties, the power of the paterfamilias remained threateningly high; not only could a son work to earn wealth that would legally belong to his father, the father had pure legal right to kill his own children; infanticide was all too common. The household was large,…

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