The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

In the Nile river valley, around 3200 BC, the Scorpion King unites northern and southern Egypt, and Narmer of the First Dynasty makes the union permanent

SOUTHWEST OF SUMER, beneath the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the first empire-builder stormed through the Nile river valley.

each city sent tentacles of power out into the countryside, aspiring to rule more and more land. Shepherds and herdsmen came into the city to bring gifts to the gods, to sell and buy—and to pay the taxes demanded by priests and kings. They relied on the city for trade and for worship, but the city demanded as much as it gave. The egalitarian structure of earlier hunter-gatherer groups had shattered. A hierarchy now existed: the city first, the countryside second.

The Tower of Babel, like the biblical flood, lies in the undatable past. But it gives us a window into a world where mud-brick cities, walled and towered, spread their reach across Mesopotamia.
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A dozen walled cities, each circled by suburbs that stretched out for as much as six miles, jostled each other for power: Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Nippur, Adab, Lagash, Kish, and more. Perhaps as many as forty thousand souls lived in these ancient urban centers.

Today we call these rivers the Euphrates and the Tigris, names given them by the Greeks; in more ancient times, the western river was called Uruttu, while the quicker and rougher east river was named after the swiftness of an arrow in flight: Idiglat.8

Between these two rivers, cities grew up. Archaeology tells us that by 3200, large groups of country-dwellers were shifting their whole way of life, moving into walled cities in a phenomenon called “streaming-in.”

But the hunters and gatherers were not entirely gone. From the earliest days of kingship and the first building of cities, settled farmers quarrelled with nomadic herdsmen and shepherds.

the Fertile Crescent, as villages grew into cities, more people had to sustain themselves on the same amount of dry land. Strong leadership became more necessary than ever. Human nature being what it is, city leaders needed some means of coercion: armed men who policed their decrees.

The leaders had become kings.

bureaucracy—the true earmark of civilization—needed.

civilization appears to be the result of a more elemental urge: making sure that no one seizes too much food or water. Civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, not because it was an Edenic place overflowing with natural resources, but because it was so hostile to settlement that a village of any size needed careful management to survive. Farmers had to cooperate in order to construct the canals and reservoirs needed to capture floodwaters. Someone needed to enforce that cooperation, and oversee the fair division of the limited water. Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves.

Civilization, after all, is what divides us from chaos. Civilized cities have walls that separate the orderly streets within from the wild waste outside.

Well-fed men and women produced more babies. Sickles and grinding stones, discovered from modern Turkey down to the Nile valley, suggest that as those children grew to adulthood, they left their overpopulated villages and travelled elsewhere, taking their farming skills with them and teaching them to others.