Hervé Reculeau has been invited by the assembly of the Collège de France on the proposal of Prof. Dominique Charpin, Mesopotamian Civilization Chair.
If, as Herodotus wrote, Egypt is a gift of the Nile, then Mesopotamia is a gift of the Tigris and Euphrates, since much of the region's climate is too arid to allow the permanent establishment of agrarian societies without recourse to irrigation. It was all too quickly deduced that irrigation was the driving force behind the development of " hydraulic societies ", where priests and kings oversaw the organization of centralized agriculture. Today, however, it's time to take a more nuanced approach, highlighting the variety of interactions between societies and their environment, both in time and space. Mesopotamia is in fact plural : its geography and climate, and with them possible land uses, vary on a regional and local scale, while over the millennia, climatic fluctuations and changes in river readings have forced human groups to adapt - in turn modifying their environment. From Neolithic villages to Iron Age empires, Bronze Age city-states and territorial kingdoms, the Mesopotamian space was the scene of multiple social experiments, each with its own way of fitting into the surrounding environment.
In this series of lectures, we will examine the relationship between Mesopotamian societies and environments over the course of history, using a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on the natural sciences, anthropology, landscape archaeology, environmental history and the history of techniques, cultures and mentalities. By combining material data and written sources, a nuanced and dynamic vision of these relationships will emerge, attentive to the singularities and richness of human experience, which will lead us to question the major explanatory models commonly associated with these periods, among the most ancient in human history.
