" Since that day, nothing has been invented ". The origins of civilization in Mesopotamia

As the ANR has decided not to fund the program into which the originally planned lecture on Upper Mesopotamia in the 18thcentury B.C. fell, the subject finally chosen will focus on the Mesopotamians' conception of their own civilization. We'll begin by examining how the priestBerossus presented it to the Greeks of the ^3rd century B.C. We'll focus on the absence of any notion of progress in a civilization where all great inventions were attributed to divinities, and where the ideal was a return to the perfection of the origins. This image will be confronted with reality, which in fact shows numerous evolutions in this multi-millennial civilization.