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The "Cradle of Civilization", is a common term for the area comprising modern Iraq as it was home to the earliest known civilization, the Sumerian civilization, which arose in the fertile Tigris-Euphrates river valley of southern Iraq in the Chalcolithic (Ubaid period). It was here in the late 4th millennium BC, that the world's firstwriting system and recorded history itself were born. The Sumerian civilization flourished for over 3,000 years[citation needed] and was succeeded by the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 24th century BC. Over two centuries of Akkadian dominance was followed by a Sumerian Renaissance in the 21st century BC. AnElamite invasion in 2004 BC brought the Third Dynasty of Ur to an end. By the 21st century BC, a new Akkadian civilization, Assyria, had risen to dominance in northern Iraq, and by the 19th century BC a contemporaneous Amorite state, Babylonia, had formed in southern Iraq.
Iraq was to be dominated by the Assyrians and Babylonians for the next 14 centuries, and under the respective Assyrian and Babylonian empire of Shamshi-Adad I and Hammurabi in the 19th and 18th centuries BC, the Middle Assyrian Empire of 1365–1053 BC and the Neo Assyrian Empire of 911–605 BC, and the final Babylonian empire of 620–539 BC Iraq became a center of world power. The Neo Assyrian Empire in particular put Iraq at the heart of a massive empire stretching from the Caucasus to Egypt and Arabia, and from Cyprus to Persia.
In the 6th century BC, Cyrus the Great of neighboring Persia defeated the Neo-Babylonian Empire at the Battle of Opis and Iraq was subsumed into the Achaemenid Empire for nearly two centuries. In the late 4th century BC, Alexander the Great conquered the region, putting it under Hellenistic Seleucid rule for over two centuries. The Parthians (247 BC – 224 AD) from Persia conquered the region during the reign of Mithridates I of Parthia (r. 171–138 BC). From Syria, the Romans invaded western parts of the region several times. Christianity began to take hold in Iraq (particularly in Assyria) between the 1st and 3rd centuries, and Assyria became a center of the Church of the East. The Sassanids of Persia under Ardashir I destroyed the Parthian Empire and conquered the region in 224 AD. The region was thus a province of the Sassanid Empire for over four centuries, until the Muslim conquest of Persia in the mid-7th century, although a number of indigenous Neo Assyrian states evolved during the Parthian era, such as Adiabene, Osroene and Hatra.