Ne of the wealthiest trade centers in Mes-opiotamia—and by about 2000 BC, center of the flourishing Sumerian civilization— the city of Ur stood as a paradigm of early urban life. Its crowded domestic dwellings, bazaars, and tiny alleys clustered around the huge, sprawling temple complex, which contained the stepped ziggurat dedicated to the moon-god Nanna. The city, raised high above the surrounding flood plain through successive building on top of crumbled mud-brick structures, was protected by a wall a mile and a quarter long and a pair of broad, encircling canals linked to the nearby Euphrates River. The canals not only allowed maritime trade access to Ur's two inner-city harbors but also fed the extensive irrigation system that crisscrossed the surrounding plain.
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A terra-cotta model of an oxcart from the Indian center of Mohenjo-Daro carries the vital grain that sustained all early cities.
Like most cities of the age, Ur's existence was defined by the endeavors of its farmers. The fertile land supplied an abundance of cereal crops, beans, and vegetables, as well as providing pasturage for the flocks of sheep whose fleece supplied the city's thriving textile trade. At the same time, this agricultural plenty had freed a large portion of the population to concentrate on other tasks. Weaving, metalworking, and stone carving were just a few of the skilled occupations open to the some 30,000 citizens who dwelled in the city.
To pick out individual centers amid the vast conurbations that covered some regions—people no longer needed to come to the town: The town was coming to them.
But it was not the size of cities that mattered so much as the changes they wrought in the lives of their inhabitants. Their teeming confines acted as seedbeds for social change, the exigencies of cheek-by-jowl coexistence spurring humanity to formulate new codes of behavior. The very concept of law, for example, differentiated the earliest urban dwellers from their rural cousins; the demands of the demos, or ordinary people of classical Athens, produced democracy; and the experience of nineteenth-century industrial cities prompted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write the Communist Manifesto. Nor was the change limited to politics. In art and architecture, education and entertainment, crime and commerce, indeed in almost every field of endeavor, the close human interaction of the city brought innovation.
From mud to metropolis, the rise of cities has been one of the most momentous phenomena in the history of humankind—and indeed of the planet. For some four and one-half billion years, life on earth had evolved according to the laws of natural selection. Each plant and animal existed within its own ecological niche, adapted to perform a given task within a given habitat, in an interdependent chain of survival. Humans, no less than any other life form, were restricted by this pattern. They may have been more intelligent than most creatures, but their role was still limited to that of the hunter-gatherer, roaming the inhabitable areas of the globe in search of food.
With the advent of cities, however, the mold was shattered irrevocably. By transforming their habitat, humans had found a new niche in which to survive—indeed, not just one niche, but as many as the mind could conceive. For the key to city life was opportunity. Freed from the constraints of a hand-to-mouth existence, city dwellers could turn their skills to a plethora of specialized trades: basketry, potmaking, spinning, weaving, leatherworking, carpentry, and stoneworking—whatever the market would bear. And as the market became larger and more diverse, so did the number of opportunities. The impact of this seemingly simple move was enormous. No longer did people need to battle to survive as hunters or gatherers, adapting over the centuries to become ever more proficient at these tasks; there was now an almost unlimited range of occupations open to them. Effectively, humanity had jumped several rungs up the evolutionary ladder.
It was not a sudden leap, more a series of infinitesimal shuffles that took place over thousands of years. And paradoxically, it was nature itself that gave impetus to this move away from the natural order. For as the last Ice Age waned, about 10,000 BC, the earth came to life again. As the glaciers melted, continents that had previously groaned under sheets of ice were revealed to the air. And the water that had been locked in frigid immobility was released into the atmosphere. Sea levels rose, and rain-bearing winds began to circle the globe, bringing fertility to previously barren areas. In this bountiful world, it became less and less necessary for humans to wander in search of food. In some areas, it was possible to set up year-round encampments where a community's needs could be supplied entirely from the surrounding countryside. From settlement to exploitation of the land was a short step. By about 7000 BC, these early villagers had mastered the art of domesticating crops and animals, and they had moved from being sedentary nomads to full-fledged farmers.
The new way of life was astonishingly productive—the same area of land that could support one hunter-gatherer now fed some 200 farmers—and population rose
Accordingly. Laborers who were not required in the fields were free to engage in specialized crafts. Walls sprang up around these farming settlements to safeguard both the inhabitants and their carefully hoarded stores of grain from marauding nomads. The allure of security—combined with plenty of food and the availability of basic manufactured products—acted as a magnet to other farmers in the neighborhood, and village populations grew apace.
Not everybody who came to these communities came to stay. Many were transient merchants. Since farmers had first begun to hoard their surplus crops, they had realized that their grain could do more than just feed their own people. It could also be bartered for necessities or even luxuries that were available only in other regions. Gradually, the contacts of traders spread farther and farther afield, exporting new technologies such as metalworking and glassmaking, and bringing home not only new goods but new ideas.
A necessary tool of commercial transactions was the ability to record the nature of goods and their amount. From the fourth millennium BC, entrepreneurs in the Middle East were recording their business deals with clay tokens imprinted with symbolic outlines that were universally understood—for instance, a horizontal crescent might represent horned cattle. And in time these symbols developed into a pictographic script that could record not only objects but also verbs. The pictograph for "eat," for example, would show an image of a head juxtaposed with an outline that could be understood to mean "food."
These advances had a profound effect on the social structure of the farming communities. The old, simple loyalties to family or clan enlarged as people banded together on mutually beneficial projects, such as irrigation or defense of their lands. As jobs became more specialized and artisans congregated to serve the needs of the neighborhood, workaday agricultural villages became small market towns where, say, a farmer could buy a bronze plow, a pottery storage jar, or a wooden bed in exchange for his surplus crops or livestock. Social stratification began to emerge as successful farmers bought land from their less-fortunate fellows, who were perforce reduced to earning a living by selling their labor. A mercantile class created a requirement for laws—codified by a newly literate population of scribes—on a host of matters such as commercial transactions, shipment fees, fair wages, the regulation of prices, and exchange rates for precious metals such as silver and gold. And as the number of regulations swelled, central governments and civil services arose to administer the town's multifarious activities. And when these interdependent factors coalesced in a single society, a city was created. In about 3500 BC, it fell to the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia to lead the world into civilization.
A major beneficiary of the glaciers' great thaw was the Fertile Crescent, a verdant arc of territory circumscribed by the Persian Gulf, the course of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into the mountains of Anatolia, and the eastern shoreline of the Mediterranean. It was good ground, its plains home to extensive stands of wheat and barley, and its lightly forested hillsides teeming with wildlife. This bounty was too great for the region's hunter-gatherers to ignore, and they gradually began to abandon their nomadic lifestyles and settle down in farming communities.
Among those to do so were the Sumerians, whose origins possibly lay to the northeast of the Fertile Crescent but who had, by the fourth millennium BC, found their way to the lush grassland surrounding the lower stretches of the Tigris and
Euphrates, just above the point where the two rivers converged in their southward flow to the Persian Gulf.
It was an unlikely spot for the birth of civilization. There was neither stone nor timber for building; there were no gems or precious metals for export—there was little, in fact, besides acres and acres of mud. But that was enough. Centuries of flooding by the Tigris and Euphrates had sloughed off a rich layer of alluvial sediment over the surrounding plains, and it was a relatively simple matter to divert the river water into irrigation channels that turned an arid expanse into an agricultural gold mine. The seemingly endless productivity of the land was enhanced still further by the Sumerians' development of a sturdy, bronze-bladed plow, and by about 3000 BC, their invention of the wheel. The waters that nourished the land also provided a convenient trade route along which excess grain could be exported in exchange for commodities the region lacked.
Harvests came and went, food stocks grew, and farming populations swelled. Villages became towns, which in turn developed into cities. By the middle of the third millennium BC, the Sumerians had established a political and cultural hegemony over much of Mesopotamia. In a dozen or so of its communities, Sumer had taken a lead in the improvement of irrigation, the development of trade, the formation of legal codes, and the establishment of central governments. And from these grew city-states—Ur, Eridu, Uruk, Nippur, and Larsa being among the first—whose authority encompassed both the city and the surrounding farmland.
Of all the cultural ties that bound these city-states, that of religion left the deepest imprint on the urban landscape. Each city had adopted a god or, according to Sumerian mythology, had been chosen by a god for an earthly abode. The city was believed to be the personal property of the deity and his or her family, and as a result, the temple, raised on a platform of mud, was the focal point of civic life. When a temple fell down, a new one was built on the holy site, and as successive buildings rose on ever-higher terraces of debris, the temple took on the form of a stepped structure—known as a ziggurat—towering above the maze of surrounding dwellings.
A silver model captures the sweeping lines of the boats that plied Mesopotamia's waterways during the third millennium BC. Constructed from tightly packed reed bundles lashed together and coated with waterproofing bitumen, such flat-bottomed vessels were invaluable for navigating the region's shallow lakes and marshes. Long before overland routes came into general use, river transportation was the primary link between urban trading centers in the ancient world.
The city god communicated with citizens through a human representative known as the en, while secular decisions, in the early cities at least, were arrived at democratically through a bicameral system consisting of an assembly of all free citizens and an upper house of "elders." In times of emergency, however, the citizens would appoint a lugal, or king. On occasion, the offices of lugal and en were combined, making the king the god's earthly representative. Over time, the office of lugal became permanent and, finally, hereditary, giving rise to dynastic power. At the same time, as wealthier families bought up fields and hired landless peasants to farm them, they became the nucleus of a nobility.
The distinctive silhouette of the ziggurat would have been a familiar sight to any Sumerian citizen traveling between the region's cities. Equally—and depressingly— familiar would have been the city walls. For, despite their strong cultural affinities, the city-states of Sumer remained individual and fiercely independent. Often built within sight of one another, and with their outlying fields merging, they were in constant dispute over irrigation rights and boundaries. This antagonism frequently erupted into armed conflict. And even when not fighting one another, the Sumerians kept a watchful eye out for raiding tribes, who regularly swept in from the desert to their west or the mountain ranges to the east. It was not until 2334 BC, some 1,000 years after the emergence of the first cities, that a king called Sargon of Akkad seized control.
A Theban girdle features cowrie shells made of Anatolian silver.
ANATOLIA
Mediterranean Sea
Memphis
A panel from Nimrud, showing a youth clad in Egyptian clothes, combines African ivory with Levantine craftsmanship.
’ Thebes
EGYPT
Black Sea
MESOPOTAMIA LEVANT • Babylon
ARABIA
Red Sea
First of Sumer, then of all Mesopotamia, and imposed a centralized system of government, based in one city, to run the whole country.
The inheritors of Sargon's unification of Mesopotamia were the kings of Ur, a city that in 2112 BC rose to a pinnacle of prosperity and governed the whole of Mesopotamia, from the Anatolian mountains to the Persian Gulf. During the following century, the rulers of this empire embarked upon a vigorous program of public building, which was supervised by specially trained architects. Ur's ziggurat was rebuilt in the form of a three-stage structure of beautiful proportions. Each terrace was cased by baked bricks decorated with buttresses and mosaics and possibly planted with trees. The whole, sixty-five feet high, was topped by a shrine, reached by a series
Afghan lapis lazuli adorns a head ornament made for a citizen of Ur.
AFGHANISTAN
* Harappa
Mohenjo-Daro
INDIA
Rade was the hallmark of the world's emergent cities. The surplus food produced from the surrounding countryside not only freed farmers to become artisans but provided a commodity that could be bartered for essentials, such as building materials, or as citizens grew wealthier, for luxury goods—gold, silver, ivory, and semiprecious stones. Nor was the trade confined to raw materials. Some cities prospered as manufacturing centers, using their new pools of skilled labor to turn crude imports
Into polished masterpieces for export.
As merchants ventured farther and farther afield, the tendrils of commerce reached out to link first cities and then, ultimately, civilizations. Into Mesopotamia, for example, flowed Egyptian gold, Lebanese timber, Anatolian obsidian, Indian carnelian, and lapis lazuli from the mountains of Afghanistan. By ship, donkey train, camel caravan, and oxcart, the world's resources were mobilized to serve the appetites of civilization.
World History
