The Sumerians developed may have been the earliest system of writing as well as sophisticated art, architecture, and complex government bureaucracies to supervise agriculture, commerce and religious activity.

Others included Eridu, Bad-tibira, Sippar, and Shuruppak, according to the Ancient History Encyclopedia. One of the earliest and most prominent was Uruk, a walled community with 40,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. Roughly 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in Sumer, villages evolved into cities. They also milked sheep, goats and cows to make butter, and slaughtered them for meat.Įventually, the agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia led to what Diamond describes as the next big step in progress, the Urban Revolution. But they also created gardens shaded by date palms, where they cultivated a wide variety of crops including beans, peas, lentils, cucumbers, leeks, lettuce and garlic, as well as fruit such as grapes, apples, melons and figs. The NFL's Last Helmetless Player Didn't Even Like HatsĪccording to the British Museum, early Mesopotamian farmers’ main crops were barley and wheat. Additionally, he notes, the marsh provided a connection to sea routes on the Persian Gulf, which made it possible for people who lived in the south to eventually develop long-distance trade with other places. “The earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia developed on the margins of a great marsh that provided an abundance of natural resources for construction (reed) and food (wild game and fish), with water easily accessible for small scale irrigation that could be organized at a local level and did not require the supervision of large-scale state structures,” Reculeau writes. One factor that helped civilization to develop in both places was the climate of Mesopotamia, which 6,000 to 7,000 years ago was wetter than that part of the Middle East is today. As he explains, urban societies developed independently in Lower Mesopotamia, an area in what is now southern Iraq where the early civilization of Sumer was located, and Upper Mesopotamia, which includes Northern Iraq and part of present-day western Syria. 17th century map featuring Mesopotamia and the Tower of Babel.Ĭivilization didn’t develop in exactly the same way throughout the region, according to Hervé Reculeau, an associate professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago and an expert in the history of ancient Mesopotamia.

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