The Mesopotamian Civilization was a slave society.

Their society was hierarchically distinct in nature and the ceiling for each class was less of a glass one and more of one made out of reinforced concrete.

The class you were born in was the class you died in.

It was a place where the few ruled the many and resources were centralized in the hands of the aristocratic class.

But, slavery is an extremely wasteful form of governance, you say?

It is. Just take the pre-liberation American situation for example.

Boatloads of underfed and abused Africans shifted onto American soil only to be exploited as unpaid plantation labour.

Many died on the way and many more were rendered unserviceable by the journey.

Leaving the moral qualms aside, even the wasteful squandering of human resources was enough to speak against such forms of governance.

Then, there was the losses involved in suppressing slave rebellions, lack of motivation among slaves.

Most serious of all, lowered birth rates for slaves. After all, who wanted their child to be born in slavery and even if they did, the harsh living conditions meant that few survived to adulthood.

Thus, whenever more workforce was needed, more had to be shipped from the colonies in various parts of the world.

Wasteful. Inefficient in the extreme.

That was one of the major reasons why slavery failed. For unlike cattle, the human desire for freedom was a fire that could not be extinguished.

But… what if the slaves were made willing?

The Pyramids.

They are the inconceivable result of slave labour. Miracles performed by the bare hands of subjugated men.

The Mesopotamian Civilization’s forms of soul cultivation were shared by their neighbours such as the Assyrians and the Ancient Egyptians and from them we can gauge its effect and power.

Slabs of sandstone weighing tons were dragged from all corners of the desert, merely to consecrate the remains of their dead rulers.

The tombs of the Pharaohs were one of the favourites sites for exploration by archaeologists. Yet, it was only after soul cultivation was popularized in the form of Yoga and qi cultivation that one of the archaeologists who had an advanced level of soul cultivation thought of using his soul sight on the interior walls of the Pyramid of Khufu.

It was then that he realized that the hieroglyphics etched into the stone were mere camouflage for the true texts engraved into the walls.

Written by embedding a special type of scarab beetle, that could hibernate for thousands of years by forcing themselves into a condition of stasis in unfavourable conditions, into the stones, the hidden text shone under his soul sight as the nano-photons in the beetles glowed.

The text spoke of the secrets of the success of Mesopotamian and Egyptian slave societies.

The Pharaohs enslaved their ministers by granting a bit of their souls to them. In return, they took more of their minister’s souls back than they took, thereby advancing their cultivation and reducing the ministers.

A similar process was followed by the ministers for their subordinates, and this process continued down the chain of command.

In the end, not only were the higher classes able to influence the thoughts of the members of the lower classes, they were stronger than the lower classes while the lower classes were weakened.

This led to a distinct hierarchy among the classes which was extremely difficult if not impossible to surpass.

Combined with indoctrination from childhood and the inculcation of the belief that the Pharaoh was the representative of god on earth, the society ran like a smoothly oiled machine.

A machine where the purpose of each part was to serve the parts higher in the command chain.

This was the cultivation philosophy of the Mesopotamian Civilization.

The Path of heavenly communion.

Or rather, the path of enslavement.