History
The timelines of Mesopotamia and Egypt are the two pillars that ancient history is built around, unfortunately, as the Egyptian timeline was more developed by the early-1900s it has traditionally taken precedence over the Mesopotamian timeline. This means whenever the Egyptian timeline is changed by Egyptologists, the Mesopotamian timeline needs to be adjusted by Assyriologists to keep the two timelines in sync. Unlike Egypt, where one civilization rose and fell repeatedly for thousands of years, in Mesopotamia various civilizations rose and fell. The oldest known culture in the region was the Sumerian culture, which was ultimately supplanted by the Akkadian civilization. The Akkadian civilization then devolved into the Babylonian and Assyrian cultures. When the academic study of ancient Mesopotamian cultures began in the 1600s, Assyria was the oldest known Mesopotamian civilization, and as a result, the field of study is still known as Assyriology. Through the 1700s and 1800s, early excavations in Iraq uncovered the ruins of Babylon, and evidence of the Akkadian language, and by the 1850s evidence of the Sumerian language, although it was not translated until the early 1900s. The Sumerian civilization was established in history books by the 1910s, followed by the earlier Jamdet Nasr, Uruk, and Ubaid periods in 1930. The records that have survived from the Sumerian and Akkadian periods, list a series of ancient dynasties going back tens of thousands of years, which might have been considered history if Egypt did not exist. Unfortunately for Assyriologists, Egypt does exist. The similarities between the early dynastic periods of both cultures were documented by 1900, which essentially proved that one culture influenced the other. The question was which culture influenced the other. Both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Akkadian cuneiform had been translated by the late-1800s, and both have the same unique logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, which indicate that both derive from a common ancestor, and the question again was which one? Likewise, both cultures built flat-topped buildings in the early period, and then started building pyramidal structures, again, which culture influenced which? The common elements go far beyond writing forms and structural design, the two cultures even shared mythical animals, such as the serpopard.