Writing and City Life

This is the opening of Themes in World History (Class 11). It has two parts. First, the introduction to Section I, Early Societies, which races through millions of years — human origins in Africa, fire, language, hunting and gathering, and then the shift to farming that made villages and cities possible — and Timeline I, a table of world developments from 6 million years ago to 1 BCE. Second, Theme 1, Writing and City Life, a close study of the earliest cities, in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Its guiding question, in NCERT’s words of introduction: could all the activities of a city have gone on without writing?

• Links within this book: Theme 2 (An Empire Across Three Continents) takes up the Roman empire, whose farming NCERT says was less productive than southern Mesopotamia’s; Theme 3 (Nomadic Empires) returns to rulers from pastoral societies, like Mari’s Amorite kings here; Theme 5 explains how Mesopotamian time-reckoning reached medieval Europe.
• Links to the Indian history books: Theme 1 of Themes in Indian History – I (the Harappan civilisation) is the perfect contrast — contemporary cities, but with an undeciphered script; planned Mohenjo-daro versus unplanned Ur; stamp seals versus cylinder seals; and the Mesopotamian name Meluhha for the Harappan region.
• UPSC — be realistic: the GS1 Mains syllabus for world history covers events from the 18th century onwards, so ancient Mesopotamia is seldom asked directly. It still pays off: Prelims has asked the Neolithic shift, the first metal and the first domesticated animal (Section I and Timeline I); Mains 2015 asked you to compare Indian civilisation with Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece; and essays on cities, writing, water conflicts or migration gain from these examples.

• Section I links a long chain: farming (from c. 10,000 years ago) → settled life, pots, polished tools → metals and long-distance goods → small states → the first cities.
• Mesopotamia (Greek: ‘between rivers’) = land between the Euphrates and Tigris; the desert south, irrigated by river channels, had the first cities and writing.
• Cities need more than fertility: division of labour, organised trade and storage, cheap water transport, someone to command — and written records.
• Writing began c. 3200 BCE as temple lists at Uruk; cuneiform by c. 2600 BCE (Sumerian), Akkadian from c. 2400 BCE, in use till the 1st century CE; signs stood for syllables.
• Temples became the main urban institution; war leaders turned kings; Uruk reached 250 ha c. 3000 BCE; cylinder seals; unplanned Ur; trading Mari among herders.
• Legacy: maths (√2 correct to 5 decimal places), eclipse records, 12 months, 4 weeks, 24 hours, 60 minutes; Assurbanipal’s library (~30,000 tablets) and Nabonidus reviving the past.

The timeline focuses on the emergence of humans and the domestication of plants and animals, and highlights fire, metals, plough agriculture and the wheel, the growth of cities and writing, and the first empires (developed further in Timeline II). It has six columns: Africa, Europe, Asia, South Asia, the Americas, and Australia/Pacific Islands. Early rows are in mya and BP; from 8000 BCE the rows become millennia, then centuries.

Mesopotamian civilisation is known for its prosperity, city life, rich literature, mathematics and astronomy. After 2000 BCE its writing system and literature spread to the eastern Mediterranean, northern Syria and Turkey, so that kings across the region — even the Pharaoh of Egypt — corresponded in Mesopotamia’s language and script.

Archaeology in Mesopotamia began in the 1840s; at sites such as Uruk and Mari excavation went on for decades (NCERT remarks that no Indian site has seen such long projects). Besides buildings, statues, ornaments, graves, tools and seals, there are thousands of written documents. Europeans cared about Mesopotamia because of the Old Testament: Genesis speaks of ‘Shimar’ (Sumer) as a land of brick-built cities, and early excavators hoped to prove the Bible literally true — in 1873 a British newspaper funded a British Museum expedition to look for a tablet telling the story of the Flood. By the 1960s scholars had come to read such stories as memories of important changes rather than literal history; techniques improved and attention turned to the lives of ordinary people. Most of the chapter rests on these later studies.

Why the desert south could feed cities: the Euphrates and Tigris rise in the northern mountains and carry silt; when they flood, or when their water is let out on to fields, fertile silt is deposited. After the Euphrates enters the desert, its water flows into small channels that once worked as irrigation canals for wheat, barley, peas and lentils. NCERT’s striking claim: of all ancient systems, Roman included, southern Mesopotamia’s agriculture was the most productive, despite insufficient rain. Sheep and goats on the steppe, plains and slopes gave meat, milk and wool; rivers gave fish; date-palms gave summer fruit.

NCERT’s definition: cities are not just places with many people. Clustering in towns becomes worthwhile when the economy develops spheres other than food production — trade, manufactures and services. City people stop being self-sufficient and depend on the products or services of others. Its example: a seal carver needs bronze tools he cannot make and coloured stones he does not know how to get — his speciality is carving, not trading; the bronze-tool maker does not fetch copper and tin himself, and needs regular charcoal. Hence: the division of labour is a mark of urban life.

There must also be a social organisation: fuel, metal, stones and wood come from many places, so organised trade and storage are needed; grain arrives from villages and has to be stored and distributed; many activities must be coordinated. ‘Obviously’, NCERT concludes, some people give commands that others obey — and urban economies often need written records.

Movement of goods into cities. Rich in food, Mesopotamia was poor in minerals: the south lacked stone for tools, seals and jewels; date-palm and poplar wood was not good enough for carts, wheels or boats; there was no metal. So, NCERT surmises, Mesopotamians could have traded their abundant textiles and farm produce for wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell and stones from Turkey and Iran, or across the Gulf — regions rich in minerals but poor for farming. Such regular exchanges needed organisation to equip foreign expeditions, and were initiated by southern Mesopotamians.

All societies have spoken languages. Writing is verbal communication of another kind: spoken sounds represented in visible signs. The first Mesopotamian tablets, of about 3200 BCE, carry picture-like signs and numbers — about 5,000 lists of oxen, fish, bread loaves and so on, brought into or given out from the temples of Uruk. NCERT’s inference: writing began when society needed to keep records of transactions that happened at different times and involved many people and goods.

By about 2600 BCE the signs had become cuneiform and the language was Sumerian. Writing now did much more than keep accounts: dictionaries, legal validity for land transfers, narratives of kings’ deeds, and announcements of a king’s changes to customary law. After 2400 BCE Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian, and cuneiform in Akkadian continued until the first century CE — more than 2,000 years.

The system of writing. A cuneiform sign stood not for a single consonant or vowel (like m or a) but for a syllable (such as -put-, -la-, -in-). So a scribe had to learn hundreds of signs and write them fast on a wet tablet. NCERT calls writing a skilled craft and, more, ‘an enormous intellectual achievement’ — the sound system of a language put into visual form.

Literacy. Very few could read and write: the signs were many and complex. A king who could read had it recorded in his boastful inscriptions. Writing mostly mirrored speech: an official’s letter, to be read aloud to the king, opened by telling the reader to ‘speak’ to his lord the words of his servant; and a long poem about creation ends by asking elders to teach it, scholars to discuss it, fathers to repeat it to sons and even herdsmen to hear it. Point: texts were made to be heard, and knowledge passed orally around a small literate core.

From 5000 BCE settlements developed in southern Mesopotamia, and the first cities grew from some of them. NCERT names three kinds of city: those that grew around temples, those that grew as centres of trade, and imperial cities; it discusses the first two.

Temples. Early settlers, of unknown origin, built and rebuilt temples at chosen spots in their villages. The earliest known was a small shrine of unbaked brick. Temples were the residences of gods — the Moon God of Ur, or Inanna, Goddess of Love and War — and grew larger, with rooms round open courtyards. Some early ones were probably like ordinary houses, since a temple was ‘the house of a god’; but temples always had outer walls going in and out at regular intervals, which no ordinary building had. People brought grain, curd and fish (some temple floors have thick layers of fish bones). The god was the theoretical owner of the community’s fields, fisheries and herds. In time, oil pressing, grain grinding, spinning and weaving of woollen cloth were done in the temple; as organiser of production above the household, employer of merchants and keeper of written records of rations and allotments, the temple became the main urban institution.

Kings. Agriculture, though fertile, was hazardous. Outlet channels of the Euphrates flooded crops in one year and shifted course in another, and villages were periodically relocated. Upstream villagers could divert too much water or fail to clear silt, starving those downstream — so the countryside saw repeated conflict over land and water. In continuous warfare, successful chiefs distributed loot and took prisoners as guards or servants, but such leaders came and went — until their leadership began to benefit the community through new institutions. Victorious chiefs offered booty to the gods and beautified temples, sent men for fine stones and metal, and organised the distribution of temple wealth with accounts of what came in and went out. As the Enmerkar poem shows, this gave the king status and authority to command.

Uruk shows the result. It has depictions of armed heroes and their victims; surveys show that around 3000 BCE, as Uruk grew to 250 hectares — twice the size Mohenjo-daro would later reach — dozens of small villages were deserted: a major population shift. Uruk had a defensive wall very early; it was occupied from about 4200 BCE to 400 CE and reached 400 hectares by about 2800 BCE. War captives and local people were put to work for the temple or the ruler — this compulsory labour, rather than an agricultural tax, was the obligation — and were paid rations: hundreds of ration lists record grain, cloth or oil against people’s names. One temple is estimated to have needed 1,500 men working 10 hours a day for five years.

Technical advances at Uruk c. 3000 BCE: bronze tools for crafts; brick columns (no wood strong enough to roof large halls); hundreds of workers making and baking clay cones pushed into temple walls and painted to form a colourful mosaic; superb sculpture in imported stone; and the potter’s wheel, which lets a workshop ‘mass produce’ dozens of similar pots — a landmark suited to an urban economy.

A ruling elite. A small section of society held a major share of wealth — nothing shows it more clearly than the riches buried with some kings and queens at Ur: jewellery, gold vessels, wooden musical instruments inlaid with white shell and lapis lazuli, ceremonial gold daggers.

Family and marriage, from legal texts (disputes, inheritance): the nuclear family was the norm, though a married son and his family often lived with his parents; the father headed the family. Marriage steps: a declaration of willingness to marry, with the bride’s parents’ consent; a gift from the groom’s people to the bride’s; at the wedding, gifts exchanged, a shared meal and temple offerings; when the mother-in-law came to fetch her, the bride received her share of the inheritance from her father. The father’s house, herds and fields went to the sons.

After 2000 BCE the royal capital of Mari flourished — not on the productive southern plain but far upstream on the Euphrates, where farming and herding went on side by side. Some communities had both farmers and pastoralists, but most of the kingdom was pasture for sheep and goats.

Through Mesopotamian history, nomadic groups of the western desert filtered into the agricultural heartland — bringing flocks into the sown area in summer, working as herders, harvest labourers or hired soldiers, sometimes growing prosperous and settling. A few gained power to rule: the Akkadians, Amorites, Assyrians and Aramaeans. The kings of Mari were Amorites; their dress differed from the original inhabitants’, and they honoured Mesopotamia’s gods while raising a temple at Mari to Dagan, god of the steppe. NCERT’s conclusion: Mesopotamian society was open to different peoples, and its vitality was ‘perhaps’ due to this intermixture.

The kings of Mari stayed vigilant: herders of various tribes moved through the kingdom but were watched; letters between kings and officials often mention their camps — one officer reports frequent fire signals at night between camps and suspects a raid. Mari’s wealth came from trade: on the Euphrates between the south and the mineral-rich uplands of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, it saw boats carrying wood, copper, tin, oil, wine, grinding stones and wine and oil jars bound for the southern cities. Its officers boarded, inspected the cargo (one river boat could hold 300 wine jars) and levied about one-tenth of its value. Barley came in special grain boats. Tablets mention copper from ‘Alashiya’ (Cyprus) and trade in tin — vital, since bronze was the main industrial material. So Mari was not militarily strong but exceptionally prosperous.

Cities in Mesopotamian culture. Mesopotamians valued city life where many communities lived side by side, and recalled destroyed cities in poetry. The most moving reminder is the end of the Gilgamesh Epic, written on twelve tablets. Gilgamesh is said to have ruled Uruk some time after Enmerkar. A great hero, he was shaken by the death of his heroic friend and set out to find the secret of immortality, crossing the waters that surround the world. He failed, returned to Uruk, and consoled himself by walking along the city wall, admiring the foundations of fired brick he had laid. NCERT’s reading: he does not take comfort, as a tribal hero would, in sons who will outlive him — he takes comfort in the city his people built.

The legacy of writing. Stories can travel orally, but science needs written texts that generations can build on. NCERT calls Mesopotamia’s scholarly tradition of time reckoning and mathematics perhaps its greatest legacy. Tablets of about 1800 BCE give multiplication and division tables, tables of squares and square roots, and of compound interest. The square root of 2 was given as 1 + 24/60 + 51/60² + 10/60³ = 1.41421296, against the true 1.41421356. Students solved problems such as finding the volume of water covering a field of given area to a depth of one finger.

Time. The year of 12 months by the moon’s revolution round the earth, the month of four weeks, the day of 24 hours and the hour of 60 minutes came, NCERT says, from the Mesopotamians. Eclipses were recorded by year, month and day, and the positions of stars and constellations were noted. None of this was possible without writing and the urban institution of schools, where students copied earlier tablets and some boys were trained not as record keepers but as intellectuals building on predecessors.

Q1–4 are brief answers (about 100 words); Q5–6 are short essays (250–300 words). Try each first.

Numbers

One-liners

• Mesopotamia = ‘between the rivers’: Euphrates and Tigris, present-day Iraq.
• First cities in the dry, irrigated south — not in the rain-fed north.
• Fertility is a condition; organisation is the cause.
• The division of labour is a mark of urban life.
• Writing began as bookkeeping: lists of goods at Uruk’s temples, c. 3200 BCE.
• Cuneiform: wedges pressed in clay; each sign a syllable; hundreds of signs.
• The temple became the main urban institution; war leaders became kings.
• Mesopotamian seals were rolled cylinders; Harappan seals were stamped.
• Ur grew unplanned; Mohenjo-daro was planned.
• Mari prospered on tolls from Euphrates trade, among herders, under Amorite kings.
• Gilgamesh took comfort in his city’s wall, not in his sons.
• Assurbanipal collected; Nabonidus restored — the past was already precious.

Traps to avoid

• Cuneiform is from Latin cuneus (wedge); Mesopotamia from Greek mesos + potamos.
• Cuneiform was syllabic, not alphabetic; the earliest tablets were accounts, not religious texts.
• Order of names: Sumer and Akkad → Babylonia (after 2000 BCE) → Assyria (from c. 1100 BCE).
• Order of languages: Sumerian → Akkadian (c. 2400 BCE) → Aramaic (still spoken in parts of Iraq).
• Ur had no street drains; rainwater went inward to courtyard sumps.
• Mari is upstream on the Euphrates (today in Syria), in a pastoral zone; its kings were Amorites; ‘Alashiya’ = Cyprus.
• Uruk’s obligation was compulsory labour paid in rations, not an agricultural tax.
• Assurbanipal’s library was at Nineveh (Assyria, north); Nabonidus was the last ruler of independent Babylon.
• Uruk (250 ha) was twice Mohenjo-daro’s size; Babylon later exceeded 850 ha.
• NCERT’s Sargon date (2370 BCE) and Zimrilim bracket (1810–1760 BCE) differ from standard chronologies — quote NCERT.
• Timeline I’s ‘Persepolis capital in 546 BCE’ and ‘Australopithecus 5.6 mya’ are dated differently in standard references.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Early societies and Timeline I are where Prelims has actually struck: the first metal used by man (key: copper, 1979 — standard, though native gold was also worked very early, so the key is debatable), what the Neolithic was not characterised by (copper, 1980), the move from food gathering to food producing in the Neolithic (1988), and the first domesticated animal (dog, 1990). Learn the Section I chain — farming, settled life, pots, polished tools, then metals — and Timeline I’s ‘firsts’.
• Comparative civilisations: UPSC 1980 asked whom the Indus people had contacts with — key: the Mesopotamians. This chapter explains why the key is defensible but debatable: Sumer is southern Mesopotamia, so ‘Sumerians’ is also arguably correct; choose the broader ‘Mesopotamians’ when both appear. Pair with Meluhha in the Harappan chapter.
• Not yet asked, but cheap marks if they come: name–meaning pairs (Mesopotamia, cuneiform), river pairs (Euphrates and Tigris), seal types (cylinder versus stamp), Gilgamesh–Uruk, Assurbanipal–Nineveh, base-60 and time. Do not over-invest: ancient West Asia is a low-frequency area.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 2015: ‘Indian civilisation, unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, preserved its culture without a breakdown — comment.’ Use this chapter for Mesopotamia’s side: Sumerian ceased to be spoken (c. 1800 BCE), cuneiform ended (1st century CE) and had to be deciphered in the 1850s; successive conquests (Achaemenids 539 BCE, Alexander 331 BCE). Then qualify: Mesopotamian knowledge did continue — time divisions passed via Alexander’s successors, Rome and Islam to Europe; Aramaic is still spoken. Balance India’s continuity with its own breaks (the Harappan script is also lost).
• Be honest about the syllabus: GS1 world history officially starts in the 18th century, so use this chapter as illustration — in essays on cities, writing and information, water sharing (upstream–downstream conflict), migration and cultural mixing (Mari’s Amorites), and heritage (looting of the Iraq Museum, 2003, is a Beyond-NCERT example).
• Answer frame for ancient-history comparisons: condition → cause → institution → evidence (name the city, the find or the text) → caution (NCERT’s ‘we can imagine’, ‘surmise’).

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

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