Writing and City Life

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XI (Themes in World History), Chapter 1.

Why would anyone press wedges into clay?

Picture a temple storehouse at Uruk around 3200 BCE. Cultivators bring grain, herders bring sheep, weavers send out cloth, and hundreds of people take rations away. Nobody can remember who owes what. So a temple official takes a lump of wet clay, makes small picture signs of an ox, a fish, a loaf of bread, and presses in some numbers. That tablet is the oldest writing we know. This chapter explains why cities appeared in southern Mesopotamia, why writing appeared with them, and what the three great sites (Uruk, Ur and Mari) tell us about how early city people lived.

Where and what: the geography you must know

Mesopotamia means "land between rivers", from the Greek mesos (middle) and potamos (river). It lies between the Euphrates and the Tigris in present day Iraq. The land is not one landscape. It is four, and the southern one is the surprise.

The names of regions and languages change with time, and NTA likes to swap them.

Why a desert could grow cities. The Euphrates and the Tigris rush down from the northern mountains and, when they flood, drop fertile silt on the south. Channels cut from the rivers worked as irrigation canals. That made farming in the south among the most productive in the ancient world. But rich harvests alone did not create cities.

What makes a city, and why it needed trade

A city is not just a big village. Cities appear when an economy grows beyond food production into trade, manufacture and services. Division of labour, organised social life, storage and written records become part of daily life. So "farming got rich, therefore cities grew" is a trap. Prosperity helped, but these new ways of working are what made a settlement a city.

Southern Mesopotamia was rich in food but poor in almost everything else. It had few stones, no good wood and no metal. The first cities belong to the Bronze Age, around 3000 BCE, and bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, both of which had to come from far away. So the south exported textiles and farm produce and imported wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell and stones from Turkey, Iran and across the Gulf.

Pause and predict: southern Mesopotamia had farmland as rich as anywhere, so why did it still depend on long distance trade?

Check your answer: food was not the problem; materials were. Tools, seals, boats, carts and ornaments needed stone, wood and metal that the south did not have. Trade for these materials created records, officials and the need to write things down.

Temples, war leaders and the rise of Uruk

From about 5000 BCE settlements grew in the south. The earliest known temple was a small shrine of unbaked brick. A temple was the home of a god, such as the Moon God of Ur or Inanna, the goddess of love and war, and the god was the theoretical owner of the fields, fisheries and herds. In practice the temple organised production. It took in produce, employed weavers, smiths and merchants, and kept written records. You can spot a temple on a plan by its outer walls, which go in and out at regular intervals.

Conflict over land and water produced war leaders. A victorious chief rewarded his followers, beautified the temple and organised trade, and so gained authority. This is how kingship grew out of temple life. War captives and locals were made to work for the ruler or temple on compulsory labour, and they were paid rations. This was not a tax paid in grain. One temple needed 1,500 men working 10 hours a day for five years to build.

Cause and effect in one line: conflict over land and water → war leaders → chiefs patronise temples and trade → kingship and compulsory labour.

Two views. For the exam: the temple controlled the economy, and the god was the theoretical owner of the land. Another reading: many specialists in ancient Mesopotamia have argued that the early city was not purely a "temple state". Palaces and private families also held land, and the temple was one large landholder among several.

The story of writing

The first tablets, about 3200 BCE, are small (each under 3.5 cm) and carry picture like signs and numbers. About 5,000 of them are lists of oxen, fish and loaves of bread coming into or leaving the temples of Uruk. Writing began because city life produced transactions involving many people and goods. It did not begin as literature.

Over time the picture signs became wedge shaped. By about 2600 BCE the letters had become cuneiform (from Latin cuneus, wedge, and forma, shape) and the language was Sumerian. Cuneiform in Akkadian stayed in use until the first century CE, so the script lasted over 2,000 years.

How a tablet was made: wet river clay is shaped into a palm sized tablet → a scribe presses wedge shaped marks with a sharpened reed while the clay is moist → the tablet dries in the sun (important records were baked) → mistakes are fixed on a fresh tablet. Tablets in buildings that burned were baked hard by the fire, which is partly why so many survive.

Cuneiform signs stood for syllables, not single consonants or vowels, so a scribe had to learn hundreds of signs. That is why very few Mesopotamians could read and write. Kings who could read boasted of it in their inscriptions.

Writing was also used for dictionaries, for legal validation of land transfers, for telling the deeds of kings and for announcing changes in customary law. The epic of Enmerkar, king of Uruk, links writing with kingship, trade and the pride of the city.

Two views. For the exam: writing began in Uruk because temples needed to record goods, so the earliest signs show goods and numbers. Another reading: the scholar Denise Schmandt-Besserat argued that small clay tokens used for counting in earlier villages were forerunners of the first written signs. Other scholars do not accept a direct link, and see the Uruk tablets as a fresh invention of the city.

Pause and predict: if cuneiform had used one sign per sound, as in an alphabet, would literacy have been easier or harder?

Check your answer: easier. An alphabet needs a few dozen signs; a syllable script needs hundreds. This is why reading and writing stayed with trained scribes, and why the number of signs, not secrecy, limited literacy.

The seal: an urban object

A cylinder seal was a stone cylinder pierced down the centre. Fitted on a stick and rolled across wet clay, it left a continuous picture. It usually carried the owner's name, his god and his official position, and it worked as a mark of authenticity on goods and documents. Harappan seals, by contrast, were stamped, not rolled.

Three cities, three lives: Uruk, Ur and Mari

Ur: a city without a plan. A ruling elite emerged at Ur, and its graves held jewellery, gold vessels, instruments inlaid with lapis lazuli and gold daggers. The family was nuclear, the father headed it, and sons inherited the house, herds and fields. The streets were narrow and winding, house plots were irregular and there were no street drains. Drains ran in inner courtyards, and rainwater went through drainpipes into sumps. This shows no town planning, which is the opposite of Mohenjo-daro. Even the omens people noted were domestic: a raised threshold brought wealth, and a front door that did not open towards another house was lucky.

Mari: a trading town in a pastoral zone. After 2000 BCE, Mari flourished upstream on the Euphrates. This was not the farming plain of the south. Most of the land was pasture for sheep and goats, and farmers and herders lived side by side. Nomads (Akkadians, Amorites, Assyrians, Aramaeans) filtered in from the western desert. The kings of Mari were Amorites who respected the gods of Mesopotamia but also built a temple for Dagan, the god of the steppe.

Mari's wealth came from its position on the river, not from war. Boats carried wood, copper, tin, oil and wine, with a single boat able to carry 300 wine jars. Officers went aboard, inspected the cargo and levied about one tenth of its value before it moved on. Copper came from Alashiya (Cyprus). The palace of King Zimrilim (1810 to 1760 BCE) was the royal home, an administrative centre and a workshop for precious metal ornaments. It had 260 rooms over 2.4 hectares and a single entrance, on the north.

How we know about all this. Archaeologists did not always dig everything. At Abu Salabikh (about 10 hectares, around 2500 BCE, under 10,000 people) the surface of the mound was scraped so that differences in soil colour showed where the brick walls had stood. Sieving the soil recovered charred fish bones, seeds and pig teeth (pigs roamed freely), and microscopic study of floors showed which rooms were roofed.

How the past was used, and what was left to us

Mesopotamians took pride in their cities. The Gilgamesh epic, in twelve tablets, tells how Gilgamesh ruled Uruk after Enmerkar. When he failed to win immortality, he consoled himself by walking the wall of Uruk that he had built of baked brick.

Mesopotamian tablets from about 1800 BCE hold multiplication, division, square and square root tables, and compound interest tables. A tablet gives the square root of 2 as

$$\sqrt{2} \approx 1 + \dfrac{24}{60} + \dfrac{51}{60^2} + \dfrac{10}{60^3} \approx 1.41421$$

Our division of the year into 12 lunar months, the month into 4 weeks, the day into 24 hours and the hour into 60 minutes also comes from Mesopotamia. It passed through Alexander's successors to the Roman world, then to Islam and medieval Europe. Eclipses and star positions were recorded systematically.

Assurbanipal (668 to 627 BCE) built a library at Nineveh of about 1,000 texts on around 30,000 tablets, covering history, epics, omens, astrology, hymns and poems. Baskets carried cataloguing labels. Even in 650 BCE, tablets from 2000 BCE could be read, because Sumerian continued to be taught in schools using bilingual sign lists.

Nabonidus, the last ruler of independent Babylon, was an early archaeologist of a kind. He found a stele of a king from about 1150 BCE and repaired a broken statue of Sargon of Akkad (about 2370 BCE). By then Babylon covered over 850 hectares. The Achaemenids conquered it in 539 BCE and Alexander in 331 BCE.

Timeline

Key terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Next: An Empire Across Three Continents moves from the first cities to a Mediterranean empire whose cities, trade and records you can compare with Mesopotamia.
• Class XII link: Bricks, Beads and Bones: The Harappan Civilisation offers the contrast the exam loves: a planned Mohenjo-daro with drains in the streets, and stamped seals instead of rolled ones.
• Class XII link: Kings, Farmers and Towns returns to early cities, trade and the role of records and rulers in a different part of the world.