Although Mesopotamia and Egypt are similar in many senses, they also have many distnctive differences. They both have many different ways of expressing themselves in art form, such as Cuneiform (Mesopotamia) and Hieroglyphics (Egypt). While Mesopotamia's people followed The Code of Hammurabi as their guide to the law, ancient Egypt used their famous Pharoah/Kingship method to govern their land. Many famous books that are still studied and analyzed come from these two countries such as Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia) and The Book of the Dead (Egypt). These topics will be further analyzed below.
Mesopotamia was a very well-developed civilization. They verbalize themselves artistically with what is called Cuneiform writing. The government officials declared that a way of transcribing records had to be made, and so they created a simple pictographic writing (Cuneiform). This form of art is much like Hieroglyphics, which is what probably inspired Egypt to form that kind of writing. The main structure of government the Mesopotamians followed was The Code of Hammurabi. As a king, Hammurabi created numerous changes that ameliorated society for the better. His "codes of law" brought society under one religion and covered many aspects of life, particularly government matters. This greatly differs from the government the Egyptians followed which was mainly the edicts of a royalty or Pharoah. Since the Pharoah was also considered to be a deity, his word was actually the word of "God". The most famous piece of literature derived from Mesopotamia is The Epic of Gilgamesh. This is the oldest written story in the world in dedication to Gilgamesh, the "most heroic priest- kings of his time" (http://www.ed.psu.edu/k-12/edpgs/su96/meso/mesopotamia.html#hero). The mythical saga was written onto clay tablets (in Cuneiform writing, of course). This story predates the bible as well as The Book of the Dead, which will be further discussed later on in comparison.