When the lastice ageended most 12,000 years ago , the climate warmed , the seas rose and rainwater fell on the grassy steppe of the ancient Near East . It was here , archaeologists consider , in a semicircular neighborhood now lie with as the Fertile Crescent , that USDA may have first taken cargo deck , some of the world ’s first great cities were built , and mankind developed some of the first light hallmark of " civilization , " including writing , math and organized religion .
The terminal figure " Fertile Crescent " was coined in 1914 by the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted in his popular gamy - school textbook " outline in Human chronicle . " He used it to describe a roughly crescent - shaped region comprehend innovative - Clarence Day Iraq , Syria , Lebanon , Jordan , Israel , Egypt , and parts of Turkey and Iran .
" The earliest home of men in this great arena of westerly Asia is a borderland between desert and mountain — a form of cultivable fringe of the desert — a fertile crescent make the mountains on one side and the desert on the other , " compose Breasted . " This great hemicycle , for lack of a name , may be called the fertile crescent . "
More than 10,000 year ago , the nomadic people of this part glean the wild grasses that grew in the rain - run foothill and tuck together in small village colonization . Over millennium , they get down to naturalize wheat berry and barley ( beerwas one of their first and best ideas ) , and to breed godforsaken game into domesticated laughingstock and sheep for meat , dairy farm and woollen .
The agricultural revolution begin in earnest when farmers learn how to irrigate the productive soils of the river vale , where mineral - rich layer of silt enabled prominent and more uniform harvests , which support larger and more permanent human settlements .
Welcome to Uruk, the First Great City
There were very turgid colony and even some proto - urban center in Mesopotamia as betimes as 5000 B.C.E. , but nothing compare to the nobleness and ethnical grandness of Uruk , a massive walled city in Sumer ( southerly Mesopotamia ) that reached its height from 4100 to 3100 B.C.E.
" Uruk was huge , it was fortify , it had monolithic buildings — it really eclipsed anything else in the area , " says Amanda Podany , author of " The Ancient Near East : A Very inadequate Introduction " and a history prof at California State Polytechnic University . " I ’m always hesitating about saying ' the first ' of anything , but Uruk really does seem to be a unco large and extremely innovational city for the meter that it was constitute . "
The farming abundance of the region meant that people had the resources and the clock time to build some of the cosmos ’s first massive architecture , including Brobdingnagian temples on terraces . They also constructed storehouse for surplus metric grain and bastioned paries around their city .
" You do n’t build rampart unless people are threaten you , " say Daniel Snell , anexpert on the ancient Near Eastwho instruct history at the University of Oklahoma . Podany wonders if one of the cause Uruk develop so large was that the great unwashed gathered there seeking refuge during a war period .
At its height , archeologist guess that between 25,000 and 40,000 people lived inside Uruk ’s massive mud - brick wall . While many were Fannie Farmer , there were also weaverbird , artist , priests , scribes , expression workers and brewer . Podany says that the Uruk full point betoken the beginning of an urban revolution that reshape human society worldwide .
" It was a slow revolution , but in terms of human history , it ’s radical , " aver Podany , " because once hoi polloi initiate survive in cities , they never stopped . "
Writing Began as Recordkeeping
Perhaps the greatest ethnical innovation to come out of the 1,000 - twelvemonth Uruk geological period waswriting . Some of the earliest cuneiform tablets have been recovered from Uruk , where historian conceive that ancient scribes used the Cuban sandwich - shape book to keep track of grain harvests , domesticated beast and other good , which were collected and redistributed to the universe and to the gods .
" These are finish that had an impressive ability to con lots of hooey , but there was a terminus ad quem to that , " says Snell . " A fellow worker of mine says that cuneiform was like an ancient zip drive . When they needed more memory , they had to fancy out a way to store it . "
Podany says that the people who first contrive writing would n’t have thought they were inventing writing , at least not write in the way that we conceive of it . All they need at first was a organization for keeping track of commodities and numbers , not to fetch complex theme or poesy .
Over time , though , the flexibleness of that original cuneiform script was adopted by unlike ancient cultures and languages ( Sumerian , Akkadian , Babylonian , etc . ) and was employed for increasingly complex shape of expression , admit ancient lit ( " The Epic of Gilgamesh " ) and legal philosophy ( Hammurabi ’s Code ) .
The Wheel Also Got Rolling Here
If committal to writing was n’t enough , there ’s also evidence that the rack was formulate around the Uruk period . Interestingly , the very first wheels were n’t used for transportation , but for earn pottery .
" The pottery from the Uruk period of time is the first to be bewilder on a horizontal wheel , " state Podany , which think of that they were capable to mass produce pottery in a way that was n’t possible before . "
historiographer do n’t know when , but at some point around the Uruk period someone got the bright idea to change by reversal the horizontal ceramicist ’s rack on its sharpness and mate it with a go-cart , enabling the long - space transport of commodities and people over demesne . Since those ancient wheels were made of wood , none of the other specimen survive , but Podany aver that tiny wheeled go-cart made of clay — toys , perhaps ? — have been retrieve from Uruk and other sites in Mesopotamia .
60 Seconds in a Minute? Thank the Sumerians
More than 5,000 years later , we tell timeusing a turn organisation invented by the Sumeriansof ancient Mesopotamia . Today we use a " base 10 " ( decimal ) system for most of our computation , but the Sumerians rely on two other systems : " base 12 " ( duodecimal ) and " groundwork 60 " ( sexigesimal ) .
The number 12 makes horse sense , since the Sumerians were the first to cypher out that there are 12 lunar oscillation in a yr and to separate the day and night into 12 stop ( a forerunner of the 24 - hour sidereal day ) . historian like Podany consider that 60 was such an of import bit to the Sumerians because it could be well divided into so many whole numbers .
For deterrent example , if amina(about a lbf. ) of grain was deserving 60 shekel in ancient Mesopotamia , then it was uncomplicated to come up with prices for half amina(30 shekels ) , a third ( 20 shekels ) , a quarter ( 15 lucre ) , a fifth ( 12 wampum ) , a 6th ( 10 shekels ) and a tenth ( 6 shekels ) .
The use of base 60 was passed down over the millennia from the Sumerians to the Babylonians to the Greeks to medieval Islamic scholars and in the end to Europe , where the first pin grass with 2d hands were n’t invented until the 16th century .
