Mesopotamia’s glory days ended when Babylon fell to the Persian king Cyrus in 539 B.C.
As time passed, people knew less and less about Mesopotamia’s achievements. Sand buried once-glorious cities. Other types of writing replaced cuneiform. Ancient Greek history texts and the Old Testament kept alive an awareness of Assyria and Babylon. But Sumer had died out long before. It was completely forgotten.
After the Persian rulers came the Greeks. Then the Arabs ruled it, and then the Turks. When Britain defeated Turkey in World War I, the land became part of the British Empire. It was renamed Iraq. The Arab natives of Iraq fought for independence and won it in 1932. More than a century before that, scholars and adventurers had begun to rediscover Mesopotamia.
