Mesopotamia, the land 'between two rivers'

Around 3,000 years before Jesus was born, an ancient civilisation was flourishing between two large rivers. It was called Sumer, and it sat between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in a place called Mesopotamia. These rivers made it an ideal place to grow crops due to the soil being fertile, just like the Nile in Egypt. The Sumerians did not just rely on the flooding of the rivers to make farming better. They built ditches and channels to divert water from the rivers to their fields, creating a reliable water supply.