Violence was an accepted part of life in ancient Mesopotamia.

Wars raged across the Near East in the ‘campaign season' during the hot months that followed the harvest, crime was often penalised by corporal and capital forms of punishment, and rituals and some medical practices included the killing of a scapegoat to restore order and purity to a fouled person or situation.^[920] However, the ritualised killing of humans in Mesopotamian society was a rare occurrence and, as far as can be deduced from the evidence, there were only two institutionalised practices of human sacrifice: the killing of the royal retinue at the death of the kings and queens of Ur during the Early Dynastic period; and the substitute king ritual, which was practised sporadically in the second and first millennia bce.

Before proceeding a clarification should be made about the term ‘cultures of Mesopotamia'. This chapter concentrates on the period from the mid third millennium down to the last centuries of the first millennium bce, which saw significant cultural and political changes in ancient Iraq. During the third millennium bce Sumerian-speaking societies ruled the south of Iraq and societies that spoke the Semitic Akkadian language lived in the region to the north around modern-day Baghdad. During the early second millennium bce the city of Babylon and other cities of the south came to replace the Sumerian and Akkadian cultures as the dominant power of the region. While this shift saw significant political and, to a lesser extent, linguistic changes (Babylonian is a major dialect of Akkadian), there is clear cultural continuity between the Sumerians and Babylonians to the extent that scholars often refer to ‘Sumero-Babylonian' culture, particularly in the area of religion and royal ideology. At the same time as the Babylonian culture became dominant in southern Mesopotamia, the Assyrians (also speakers of a major dialect of Akkadian) emerged in the Upper Tigris Valley in northern Iraq. The Assyrian culture was closely related to the Sumero-Babylonian cultures and by the age of empires in the first millennium bce the two major cultures of Mesopotamia had become intermingled.