First Cities
Care to know how it all began?
Until recently, it was thought that the first cities were built by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago in the eastern segment of the Fertile Crescent - the area of the Middle East which lies between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and which became known as Babylonia. In Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur and other wealthy cities of the land of Sumer, civilisation was said to have begun. Before that, there was just the void of prehistory, time without written record.
Archaeologists have established a number of characteristics which, it is generally agreed, mark true urbanisation. They include permanence of settlement; specialization of skills and functions among the inhabitants who, to some extent, need to draw on the surrounding regions for their food supplies; the development of a characteristic style of building; the erection of communal or public buildings, which presupposes appreciable resources and a work force; and the attainment of a certain size.
All communities are born out of a need - for security, for companionship, for trade - but a community cannot survive without a supply of food. The critical change which enabled the nomadic hunter-gatherers to become city-dwellers was the development of a means of producing food, instead of relying on the luck of the hunt. This came around 8000 before our era, at the end of the last great ice age, with the arrival of the 'New Stone Age Revolution'. This revolution so rich in consequences for the whole future history of mankind, consisted of the cultivation of a few edible plants and the domestication of a handful of animals. It led to the transformation of hunters into farmers and of wanderers into settlers.
In the foothills of Iran, Israel, Jordan and Syria, archaeologists have found traces of the earliest settlements to be based on the cultivation of wheat and barley and the domestication of goats and sheep. They have discovered the remains of villages with the first grain silos and bakers' ovens - Jarmo and Zawi Chemi in Iraq. Ras Shamra in Syria, and others. And it is here that ruins of what can be called the world's earliest towns have been brought to light. Although the people who built them left no written records behind them it is possible to begin to see what these settlements were like in their original form.
Source: "The World's First Cities", by May Veber
