Everyday life: a day in the land between the rivers

Wood and stone were rare in southern Iraq, but mud was everywhere. People mixed it with straw, shaped it into bricks and dried them in the sun. A typical town house had rooms arranged around a small open courtyard, which let in light and air and kept the rooms cooler. Windows were small and few, to keep out heat and dust. Stairs led up to a flat roof, a handy place to dry food, work and sleep in summer.

At Ur, archaeologist Leonard Woolley dug up a whole neighbourhood from about 1900 to 1750 BCE, with narrow winding lanes, shops, and houses of two storeys. Families often buried their dead under the floor of the house, so the ancestors stayed at home.

A day started at sunrise. Women and girls ground barley into flour on a stone, baked flat bread in a round clay oven called a tinūru (a lot like the tannour still used in Iraq), fetched water and spun and wove wool. Men and boys went to the fields, the canals or a workshop. The main meal came in the cooler evening.

This website is named after the Sumerian school, the é-dub-ba or "tablet house". Pupils, mostly boys from families who could afford it, arrived at sunrise with a packed lunch. The head teacher was called the ummia, and an older student, the "big brother", wrote out model lines for younger pupils to copy.

Lessons began with single wedges, then signs, then long lists of words (trees, fish, gods, jobs), then maths, measuring and proverbs. Pupils often copied the teacher's line on one side of a small round tablet and their own attempt on the back, then smoothed the clay and started again.

A Sumerian story nicknamed "Schooldays" follows one pupil through a bad day. He is late, he talks in class, he leaves the building without permission and his handwriting is messy, and different staff members punish him for each mistake. His clever fix: he asks his father to invite the teacher home for dinner and give him a present. Suddenly the teacher has only nice things to say about him.

You'd fit right in: early starts, homework, a strict teacher, worrying about neat writing, and a kid trying to charm his way out of trouble. Four thousand years later, school still sounds familiar.

The Royal Game of Ur

Woolley found several game boards in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, dating to about 2600 to 2400 BCE. Each has 20 squares, decorated with shell and lapis lazuli, and is played with counters and pyramid-shaped dice. Versions of the game were played across the Middle East for more than 2,000 years.

How do we know the rules? Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, worked them out from a tablet written by a Babylonian scribe in 177 BCE, more than 2,000 years after the Ur boards were made. So the rules we play today are a careful reconstruction, not a rulebook from Ur itself.

Music

Music was everywhere: at temples, feasts and funerals. The Royal Cemetery also held beautiful lyres, harp-like instruments with a sound box decorated with a bull's head in gold and lapis lazuli. Three famous examples are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the British Museum and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. The one in Baghdad was damaged during the 2003 looting and later restored by Iraqi conservators.

The oldest substantially preserved melody, the Hurrian hymn, was written on a clay tablet around 1400 BCE. It was found at Ugarit on the coast of Syria, so it comes from outside Mesopotamia, but it uses Babylonian music terms written in cuneiform, which shows how far Mesopotamian learning had spread.

Mesopotamians believed illness could have natural causes and could also come from angry gods, demons or a person's wrongdoing. So there were two kinds of healer, and they often worked together.

• The asû (say "AH-soo") was the practical physician. He made medicines from plants and minerals, cleaned and bandaged wounds, and applied poultices (warm pastes on the skin).
• The āšipu (say "AH-shi-poo") was an expert in diagnosis and ritual. He examined the patient, worked out which god or spirit might be behind the illness, predicted what would happen, and recited incantations (healing prayers) to drive it out.

Medicines included herbs and plants such as thyme, mustard, liquorice, myrrh, willow, and juniper, plus salt and other minerals. They were mixed into beer, milk, oil or honey, rubbed on as ointments, or breathed in as smoke.

Around 1050 BCE, a Babylonian scholar called Esagil-kin-apli is said to have put together the Diagnostic Handbook, known as Sakikku ("symptoms"). Its 40 tablets list symptoms from head to toe and say what they might mean, and whether the patient is likely to get better.

Hammurabi's laws even set doctors' fees. A successful operation on a wealthy patient cost 10 shekels of silver, a poorer man paid 5, and an enslaved person's owner paid 2. The same laws set harsh penalties for a surgeon whose operation went badly wrong.

Mesopotamia ran on sheep, and most clothes were wool, with finer linen for priests and the wealthy. Weaving was one of the biggest industries, with temples and palaces employing thousands of women weavers.

In early Sumer, statues show men and women in the kaunakes, a skirt or cloak covered in tufts or flounces of wool that looks a bit like a sheepskin. Later, people wore long wrapped and fringed garments. Men's beards were a mark of dignity, and Assyrian kings are shown with long, carefully curled beards and hair.

Jewellery was for everyone who could afford it: beads of carnelian and lapis lazuli, gold earrings, and pins to fasten cloaks. The richest example of all comes from the tomb of Queen Puabi at Ur (c. 2600 to 2450 BCE): a headdress of gold leaves, rings and flowers, with strings of lapis lazuli and carnelian beads.