The Natural Environment of Southern Mesopotamia: Animals, Plants, and Landscape in Cuneiform Texts

Southern Mesopotamia boasts an extensive corpus of written records dating back to the fourth millennium BCE, illustrating the region's early use of writing for resource management. After a presentation of the investigation tools of Assyriologists, the present contribution offers three case studies on the management of animal exploitation, plant cultivation, and hydraulic infrastructures, respectively, integrating zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, and environmental models to enhance our understanding of Babylonian management of resources.