2.1 - City-States in Mesopotamia

• Before 4500 B.C., people began to dwell and plow the flat, swampy regions of southern Mesopotamia.

  • Around 3300 B.C., the Sumerians, who you learned about in Chapter 1, appeared on the scene.

  • The advantage of good soil was what drew these settlers in.

  • There were, however, three drawbacks to their new surroundings.

• Sumer's inhabitants devised answers to these issues over a lengthy period of time.

• They created irrigation ditches to provide water, which brought river water to their fields and allowed them to cultivate a surplus of crops.

• They built city walls out of mud bricks for defense, and they exchanged food, cloth, and handcrafted tools with people from the highlands and the desert.

  • They were given raw commodities such as stone, wood, and metal in exchange.

• The temple priests were in charge of Sumer's early administrations.

  • Farmers thought that the gods' blessings were necessary for their harvests to succeed, and priests served as intermediaries between the gods and the farmers.

• The surplus food produced on Sumer's farmland helped the city-states grow.

  • Sumerians were able to increase long-distance trade by exchanging surplus grain and other goods for those they required.

2.2 - Pyramids on the Nile

• As in Mesopotamia, yearly flooding brought the water and rich soil that allowed settlements to grow.

  • Every year in July, rains and melting snow from the mountains of east Africa caused the Nile River to rise and spill over its banks.

  • When the river receded in October, it left behind a rich deposit of fertile black mud called silt.

• Egyptian farmers were significantly more fortunate than Mesopotamian people.

  • In comparison to the unpredictability of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Nile flowed like clockwork.

• Ancient Egyptians lived along the Nile from its mouth all the way into Africa's interior.

  • River navigation was frequent, but it came to a stop at the Nile's cascade, where rocks convert the river into churning rapids.

2.3 - Planned Cities on the Indus

• The Indus Valley was protected from invasion by the world's largest mountains to the north and a huge desert to the east.

• No one knows when human habitation in the Indian subcontinent began.

  • Those who arrived by sea from Africa may have settled in the south.

• Northern migrants may have passed over the Hindu Kush mountains' Khyber Pass.

• Harappa is a wonderful example of this type of urban development.

  • To defend the city from flooding, it was built largely on mudbrick platforms.

  • It was enclosed by a three-and-a-half-mile-long masonry wall.

• Inside was a fortification that protected the royal family while also serving as a temple.

• The Harappan cities exhibit exceptional religious and cultural unity.

  • The dwelling implies that there were not many socioeconomic distinctions in the society.

  • Clay and wooden children's toys indicate a highly rich civilization that could afford to manufacture non-essential commodities.

  • Few weapons of war have been discovered, implying that the conflict was brief.

2.4 - River Dynasties in China

• China's initial civilization, like the other ancient civilizations in this chapter, arose in a river valley.

  • Floods were a threat to China as well, but the country's geographic isolation posed its own set of problems.

• Early Chinese cultures were creating agrarian communities along the Huang He even before the Sumerians settled in southern Mesopotamia.

• Some of these communities matured into China's earliest cities around 2000 B.C.

• According to legend, the Xia (shyah) Dynasty, the earliest Chinese dynasty, arose about this time.

  • Yu, an engineer and mathematician, was the group's head. His flood-control and irrigation efforts enabled communities to expand by taming the Huang He and its tributaries.

  • Yu's mythology illustrates the technological level of a society transitioning to civilization.