Essay 1

The root of civilization is the Latin civis city. So when we think about what makes an early civilization possible we need to think about what makes it possible for human beings to live together in a settled community, sedentary society? Most of our ancestors for the vast majority of our history have been migratory. They've moved from place to place often from season to season in search of resources. The earliest cities can only develop when human beings have a source of food that is sustainable over a long period of time and that means that civilization depends upon agriculture. So for the first time around ten thousand BCE human beings are involved what we often call the Neolithic revolution. They are revolutionizing the way that human beings feed themselves by practicing agriculture. Not only do you have to have a sustainable source of food, but you have to find a way to store it. So these human beings were also learning how to use stoneware or pottery vessels in order to store food safely against times of famine or drought. The other thing that we have to think about is what enables people to live together in a society without fighting with one another? When you are nomadic you can just simply, if you have a disagreement with another group, you can simply just split up and leave. In a sedentary society you need a method of just of settling disputes, which means that you need a law giver or a set of laws.

The earliest cities that we are studying in this chapter started in Mesopotamia what the Greeks called the land between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is actually a very forbidding landscape and so the only reason cities could actually emerge here is because of their sustainable water supply and yet these two rivers are rather unpredictable. So the inhabitants of these earliest cities had to start engineering the landscape by building an elaborate system of drainage ditches and dikes in order to channel water and to hold that water. The other thing that helps these cities to survive is that they are fortified. So the earliest cities are walled. They are defending themselves against their neighbors and that means they're defending their inhabitants and also defending their flocks of sheep and goats. They're defending their food supply. They were also ruled by relatively strong rulers what the Mesopotamians called Lugals or strong men and these rulers helped to keep the peace within the city and they were also war lords and war leaders in times of conflict. And remember we've talked about how a settled society needs to have a source of law and strong rule.