After the invention of agriculture, farmers worked in the valley, but the community lived in the more easily fortifiable hills. In Prehistoric and Ancient Mesopotamia, the climate was cooler than in Egypt or the Indus Valley, meaning that the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were very different from the deserts of today in the highlands there were bands of forest interspersed with steppes and savannas rich in flora and abounding with goats, boars, deers, and fox. This succeeds an earlier period of development in the Levant, as in the Hayonim Cave, were carvings of animals such as horses are known from the earliest dates of the Upper Paleolithic, with dates ranging from 40,000 to 18,500 BP. The first artistic productions of Mesopotamia appear in the area of Upper Mesopotamia only, at the end of the Neolithic during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, with simple representations of humans and animals as well as megaliths (9,500–8,000 BC). The highland regions of Mesopotamia were occupied since the Neanderthal times, for example at the site of Shanidar Cave (65,000–35,000 years ago), but with no known artistic creation. The north and northwest of Mesopotamia were already settled by humans the center and south, with insufficient natural rainfall, were not. 7500 BC), with main Pre-Pottery Neolithic period sites. Prehistoric Mesopotamia Area of the Fertile Crescent, (c. Stone stelae, votive offerings, or ones probably commemorating victories and showing feasts, are also found from temples, which unlike more official ones lack inscriptions that would explain them the fragmentary Stele of the Vultures is an early example of the inscribed type, and the Assyrian Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III a large and well preserved late one. Favourite subjects include deities, alone or with worshippers, and animals in several types of scenes: repeated in rows, single, fighting each other or a human, confronted animals by themselves or flanking a human or god in the Master of Animals motif, or a Tree of Life. Mesopotamian art survives in a number of forms: cylinder seals, relatively small figures in the round, and reliefs of various sizes, including cheap plaques of moulded pottery for the home, some religious and some apparently not. Cylinder seals have survived in large numbers, many with complex and detailed scenes despite their small size. The main emphasis was on various, very durable, forms of sculpture in stone and clay little painting has survived, but what has suggests that, with some exceptions, painting was mainly used for geometrical and plant-based decorative schemes, though most sculptures were also painted. The art of Mesopotamia rivalled that of Ancient Egypt as the most grand, sophisticated and elaborate in western Eurasia from the 4th millennium BC until the Persian Achaemenid Empire conquered the region in the 6th century BC.

Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia brought significant cultural developments, including the oldest examples of writing. These empires were later replaced in the Iron Age by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires.

The art of Mesopotamia has survived in the record from early hunter-gatherer societies (8th millennium BC) on to the Bronze Age cultures of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires.

Shamash and son forest fabric