The creation of Mesopotamian cities
The inhabitants of Mesopotamia – which now forms part of eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and Iraq - lived for thousands of years on individual farms and in small, isolated communities, working relentlessly just to meet their basic needs. But then, about 6,000 years ago something remarkable happened. The people left the security of their family homes and villages and came together with others to create something far more complex and difficult: the world's first city, called Uruk.
There is not much left now of Uruk, which is about 250 kilometres south of Iraq's capital Baghdad, but enough does remain to show that this initial experiment in urban living was extraordinarily successful. At its height, around 5,000 years ago, Uruk was home to more than 40,000 people. The outlines of the city walls indicate an enclosed area of about 600 hectares.
The archaeological record of Uruk reveals the intensive building and rebuilding which went on for four or five centuries after the city's initial establishment. In that period the people of Uruk built a dozen or so large public buildings. They would carefully level what had stood before, and then build another structure on top, often trying out a different building material or an innovative technique. They seemed to be searching for ways in which architecture could express the revolutionary new social structures that had come into being there.
Soon Uruk was not the only Mesopotamian city. People all across the flat plains of southern Mesopotamia were enjoying many of the benefits of city life. By about 4,500 years ago, 80 per cent of the Mesopotamian population lived in cities over 40 hectares in size, with populations of between 15,000 and 30,000 people. The emergence of these thriving communities, made up mostly of individuals and groups with no blood ties, was unprecedented in human history. Why did these extraordinary advances happen?
Reasons for the creation of cities in Mesopotamia
Smaller communities in Mesopotamia sometimes decided to come together to make it easier to defend themselves from their enemies. But the underlying reason for the creation of cities can be found in the harshness of this particular environment. The area was a place of extremes, where narrow strips of fertile river valleys were bounded by thousands of kilometres of desert and unproductive wetlands. As the small amount of rainfall in the region was incapable of sustaining anything but very limited agriculture, it was only through sophisticated irrigation that isolated pieces of land were kept fertile. The Tigris and the Euphrates rivers provided water for irrigation, and were also the basis of a communication system that led to the spread of the latest concepts in farming.
In such a region, the only way for humans to prosper was by forming groups that could work together. The threat of famine, which could be caused by a prolonged drought or the sudden change in the course of a river, forced people to look outside their families, and work with their neighbours to create an elaborate system of dams, channels and canals to manage water. These projects needed specific skills and labour from outside the farmer's family, and this established more firmly the patterns of dependence that are at the heart of civilisation.
Changes in the organisation of farming
The intensive farming that came about in Mesopotamia was more efficient and productive and therefore generated a surplus of food, allowing crops in years of good harvests to be stored as protection against future less successful years. It also allowed more land for the production of a wider range of crops. It created a world where there was a need for traders and for skilled craftsmen: in short, it was the beginning of industry and consumerism. The concept of specialisation emerged within the population – with increasing numbers of soldiers, builders, musicians, doctors, fortune tellers - all supported directly or indirectly by agriculture. At the same time, this increased the control that powerful institutions, gradually emerging in the early cities, had over the urban population. Although large numbers of people were freed from the struggle of subsistence farming, they were now totally dependent on the institutions that employed them for their daily sustenance.
The role of the temples
The earliest and most powerful of these institutions was centred on the religious temple. Ever more temple structures were erected in the form of massive pyramids which had enormous storerooms for the output from the farming estates. Over time, the temples acquired these farms for themselves, and appointed a large number of staff to administer them and to deal with the storage of produce. The temples' greatest advantage was that each citizen was expected to give up some time to work for the temples. This meant that temples could easily store huge amounts of agricultural produce which could be used to buy yet more land. In addition, the revenues generated allowed the temples to serve as primitive kinds of banks making loans to people in difficult economic times.
The emergence of writing
We know a surprising amount about these times thanks to the development of an important new technology: writing. In Mesopotamia basic records were inscribed in wet clay, unlike the fragile papyrus used in ancient Egypt and Greece. These first writings were largely lists of people and things, simple bookkeeping. But within several hundred years, writing systems had become more advanced capable of recording concepts as well as lists. The clay tablets used for writing were tough, and the fires that often burnt down the archives where they were stored usually merely baked them for future generations.
