5000 bce

By 5000 BCE the first experiments in human settlement density, agriculture and animal tending in the Levant, West Asia, and in the Indus had proven their viability for a thousand years or more. But that era was coming to an end. Khirokitia was abandoned in 6000 bce, Qatal Hoyuk in 5700 BCE, and Jarmo and Sesklo in 5000 bce. The reasons may have been manifold and are at the moment not quite clear. A series of changes in the climate might have played a role. But with these collapses we see in Mesopotamia not a cultural reduction, but on the contrary the emergence of more organized settlement structures and of a specialization of production, all of which required more hierarchical, political configurations. First Society traditions were slowly fading in this part of the world and being replaced by a worldview more suited to larger polities. Food production was becoming an instrument of power and control. And as agriculture became more specialized, trade became all the more necessary, and with it arose a whole new set of risks. The urban revolution was about to begin in the wide-open marshlands of the Euphrates and Tigris. The cities there quickly developed into kingships controlling ever-larger swaths of territory. Writing, needed to record trade transactions, and the wheel, needed for more rapid transportation, were the immediate consequence of this shift:. But places like Ur, Uruk, and Eridu were largely a single-product economy revolving around grain surplus produced as a trade commodity to exchange for metal and other materials not available in the marshes.