Where the evidence comes from
Most surviving royal texts concern kings, gods and wars, but Mesopotamia also left an unusual number of everyday records: sales contracts, loan tablets, marriage agreements, letters, school exercises and household accounts. Together with the remains of excavated houses, they allow historians to describe ordinary life in some detail. The picture is uneven, however. It is better documented for some cities and centuries than others, and the people who could afford to write or commission a document are overrepresented compared with the poor.
Houses and neighbourhoods
Most buildings were made of sun-dried mudbrick, with timber scarce and stone imported. Houses commonly centred on an open courtyard, with rooms opening onto it and a flat roof used for work and sometimes for sleeping in hot weather. Streets in older cities were often narrow and irregular, and houses were built close together. Wealthier families had more rooms, and some houses included a small family burial place beneath the floor, a custom known from several periods.
Because mudbrick erodes and is rebuilt on its own remains, cities grew upward into mounds over the centuries. These mounds are the reason so much domestic evidence survives.
Farming and food
The great majority of people probably worked on the land. Barley was the staple crop, and wheat, lentils, chickpeas, onions, garlic and other vegetables were also grown. Date palms provided fruit and shade, and gardens beneath them could grow other crops. Sumerian irrigation farming required constant labour to maintain canals, and fields in the south were often long and narrow so that each could reach the water.
Typical meals combined barley bread or porridge with vegetables, dates and sometimes fish, which was plentiful in rivers and marshes. Meat from sheep and goats was eaten less regularly by most people. Beer, made from barley, was a daily drink and also a form of payment for workers, and wine was known but was more of a luxury. Cooking used ovens and hearths, and salt, spices and sesame oil added flavour.
Crafts and trade
Cities supported many specialists, including potters, weavers, leatherworkers, metalworkers, carpenters, reed-workers, stone-cutters and jewellers. Wool was among the most important products, and ancient weaving was a major industry, sometimes organised in large workshops attached to temples or palaces. Mesopotamian potters used the potters wheel, though much everyday pottery was still made by hand or with simple turning devices, and the exact development is debated.
Merchants carried goods such as textiles and grain to regions with metals, stone and timber. Silver, measured by weight, served as a common standard of value, and weights and measures were closely regulated by rulers. Barley was also used as a unit in payments.
Family and household
The family was the basic unit of society. Marriage was typically arranged between families and formalised by a contract, which could involve a bride-price, a dowry and agreements about what would happen on divorce. The husband was usually the head of the household, but women could own property, be party to contracts and, in some periods and cities, run businesses or serve as priestesses. Legal texts do show that women were generally subject to more restrictions than men, and their rights varied by place and time.
Children contributed to household work from an early age. A small number of boys, and occasionally girls, from wealthier families learned to read and write in scribal schools, where they copied signs and word lists for years. Most children probably learned a trade or farm skills from their parents, and the evidence for toys and games is limited but includes small clay animals and board games.
Social classes
Mesopotamian society was layered, though the terms used by scholars are modern simplifications. At the top were the king, high officials and temple administrators. Below them were free landholders and craftworkers, followed by dependent workers, who received rations from large estates and who laboured for the temple or palace. At the bottom were slaves, often people taken in war or those sold for debt. Debt slavery was commonly limited to a fixed term in the legal texts of some periods, and the Mesopotamian law codes also set out protections and penalties that varied by class.
Social status affected punishments and compensation in several law collections, which treated an injury to a free person differently from an injury to a slave.
Health, belief and daily rituals
Illness was understood as having both physical and supernatural causes. People could consult Mesopotamian healers, who used herbs, bandages and ointments, or exorcists who recited incantations. Households kept small figures and made offerings to protective gods, and religious festivals interrupted the working year. A regular calendar of monthly festivals gave rhythm to city life, though details differ by place.
Understanding these ordinary routines is a useful corrective to histories of Mesopotamia built only on conquerors, because it shows a society in which farmers, brewers, weavers and scribes did the work that kept its cities going.