The spread of agriculture was a necessary condition for the rise of more complex societies. For a civilization of some complexity to arise, a greater concentration of population and a more structured social organization are required. Such civilizations could originate in a few exceptional regions where the natural environment demanded a high degree of communal organization and at the same time promised high rewards in the form of exceptionally rich harvests. In or close to Eurasia, that was the case in the river basins of the Euphrates and Tigris, of the Nile, the Indus, and the Huanghe.
In the course of the 6th millennium BC, the inhabitants of the stretches of land along the middle and lower Tigris and Euphrates began to use these soils for agriculture. This was the land, in present-day Iraq, that the Greeks would later call Mesopotamia, that is: land between the rivers. Perhaps this was the work of immigrants who had come here for the same reasons as other Neolithic groups who, tempted to bring into cultivation new lands because of a relative overpopulation in their places of origin, had spread their Neolithic way of life from one place to another. In southern Mesopotamia, where there is practically no rainfall and where only the rivers provide water, this cultivation required a communal effort to dig canals and construct dikes in order to maximize the use of the water supply. Here, larger settlements arose than were possible in the hilly and mountainous areas of the surrounding regions, because the land thus irrigated and put to cultivation yielded harvests that could feed many more people while at the same time requiring the collective labor of far greater numbers.
Each of the settlements in southern Mesopotamia appears to have had at least one large sanctuary, presumably serving as a center of religious and political organization. The settlement and its surrounding fields constituted a small “state.” We get the impression that between these states, strips of land were purposely left uncultivated as no-man’s land serving as frontier zones. Thus, toward the end of the 4th millennium BC, Mesopotamia must have known a few dozens of such mini-states. The temples and the walls around the
Antiquity: Greeks and Romans in Context, First Edition. Frederick G. Naerebout and Henk W. Singor. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 byJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Settlements were made of sun-baked brick covered with a layer of oven-baked tiles. We may call these settlements the oldest cities known, and hence we may speak, from around 3000 BC on, of the first urban civilization.
World History
