1 jan 3800 ano antes da era comum - Development of first Mesopotamian cities

Descrição:

"Mesopotamia (mehs-oh-puh-TAY-mee-uh), the Greek name for the land between the Euphrates (yoo-FRAY-teez) and Tigris (TIGH-grihs) Rivers (Map 1.1), which today is in Iraq. The earliest agricultural villages in Mesopotamia were in the northern, hilly parts of the river valleys, where there is abundant rainfall for crops. By about 5000 B.C.E., farmers had brought techniques of crop raising southward to the southern part of Mesopotamia, called Sumer. In this arid climate farmers developed irrigation on a large scale, which demanded organized group effort but allowed the population to grow. By about 3800 B.C.E., one of the agricultural villages, Uruk (OO-rook), had expanded significantly, becoming what many historians view as the world’s first city, with a population that eventually numbered more than fifty thousand."

"From the outset, geography had a profound effect on Mesopotamia because here agriculture is possible only with irrigation."

"To prevent major floods, the Sumerians created massive hydraulic projects, including reservoirs, dams, and dikes as well as canals."

"In addition to water and transport, the rivers supplied fish, a major element of the Sumerian diet, and reeds, which were used for making baskets and writing implements. The rivers also provided clay, which was hardened to create bricks, the Sumerians’ primary building material in a region with little stone. Clay was fired into pots, and inventive artisans developed the potter’s wheel so that they could make pots that were stronger and more uniform than those made by earlier methods of coiling ropes of clay. The potter’s wheel in turn appears to have led to the introduction of wheeled vehicles sometime in the fourth millennium B.C.E. Wheeled vehicles, pulled by domesticated donkeys, led to road building, which facilitated settlement, trade, and conquest, although travel and transport by water remained far easier."

"By 2500 B.C.E. there were more than a dozen city-states in Sumer. Each city developed religious, political, and military institutions, and judging by the fact that people began to construct walls around the cities and other fortifications, warfare between cities was quite common. Presumably their battles were sometimes sparked by disputes over water, as irrigation in one area reduced or altered the flow of rivers in other areas."

"The origins of writing probably go back to the ninth millennium B.C.E., when Near Eastern peoples used clay tokens as counters for record keeping. By the fourth millennium, people had realized that impressing the tokens on clay, or drawing pictures of the tokens on clay, was simpler than making tokens. This breakthrough in turn suggested that more information could be conveyed by adding pictures of still other objects. The result was a complex system of pictographs in which each sign pictured an object. These pictographs were the forerunners of the Sumerian form of writing known as cuneiform (kyou-NEE-uh-form) (Figure 1.1), from the Latin term for “wedge shaped,” used to describe the indentations made by a sharpened stylus in clay, which was invented about 3200 B.C.E."

"Over time, the system became so complicated that scribal schools were established; by 2500 B.C.E., these schools flourished throughout Sumer. Students at the schools were all male, and most came from families in the middle range of urban society."

"The king of the gods was Enlil, who was believed to rule over the gods just as the king of a city-state ruled his population."

"People believed that humans had been created to serve the gods and generally anticipated being well treated by the gods if they served them well."

"sometime before 2450 B.C.E. kings in some Sumerian city-states began transferring their kingship to their sons, establishing patriarchal hereditary dynasties in which power was handed down through the male line. This is the point at which written records about kingship began to appear. The symbol of royal status was the palace, which came to rival the temple in grandeur."

"The king and his officials held extensive tracts of land, as did the temple; these lands were worked by the palace’s or the temple’s clients, free men and women who were dependent on the palace or the temple. They received crops and other goods in return for their labor. Some individuals and families owned land outright and paid their taxes in the form of agricultural products or items they made. At the bottom rung of society were slaves. Some Sumerian slaves were most likely prisoners of war and criminals who had lost their freedom as punishment for their crimes; others perhaps came into slavery to repay debts. Compared to many later societies, slaves were not widely used in Sumer, where most agricultural work was done by dependent clients. Slaves in Sumer also engaged in trade and made profits. They could borrow money, and many slaves were able to buy their freedom."

"Most elite landowners were male, but women who held positions as priestesses or as queens ran their own estates, independently of their husbands and fathers. Some women owned businesses and took care of their own accounts. They could own property and distribute it to their offspring. Sons and daughters inherited from their parents, although a daughter received her inheritance in the form of a dowry, which technically remained hers but was managed by her husband or husband’s family after marriage."

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