ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Iwould like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my teacher as well as our principal who gave me the golden opportunity to do this wonderful project on the topic From the Beginning of Time, which also helped me in doing a lot of Research and I came to know about so many new things I am really thankful to them.

Secondly I would also like to thank my parents and friends who helped me a lot in finalizing this project within the limited time frame.

Manmeet SinghLife in the City 1.In Mesopotamian societythe nuclear familywas the norm,although a married son and his family often resided with his parents.The father was the head of the family.2.We know a little about theprocedures for marriage. A declaration was made about the willingness to marry by the brides parents. When the wedding took place, gifts were exchanged by bothparties, who ate together and made offerings in a temple.3.Ur was one of the earliest cities to have been excavated in Mesopotamia.Narrow winding streetsindicate that wheeled cartscould not have reached many of the houses. Sacks of grain andfirewood would have arrived on donkey-back. Narrow windingstreets and the irregular shapes of house plots also indicate anabsence of town planning.4.There were no street drainsof the kindwe find in contemporary Mohenjo-daro. Drains and clay pipes wereinstead found in the inner courtyards of the Ur houses and it isthought that house roofs sloped inwards and rainwater waschanneled via the drainpipes into sumpsin the inner courtyards.5.Yet people seem to havesweptall their household refuses into thestreets, to be trodden underfoot!This made street levels rise, andover time the thresholds of houseshad also to be raised so that nomud would flow inside after therains.6.Light came into the roomsnot from windows but fromdoorways opening into thecourtyards: this would also havegiven families their privacy.7.Therewere superstitions about houses,recorded in omen tablets at Ur:Araised threshold brought wealth;8.A front door that did not opentowards another house was lucky.9.If the main wooden door of ahouse opened outwards (instead ofinwards), the wife would be atorment to her husband.10.There was atown cemeteryatUr in which the graves of royaltyand commoners have been found,but a few individuals were foundburied under the floors of ordinaryhouses. Dead bodies of royal family were buried withjewellery, gold vessels, wooden musicalinstruments inlaid with white shell and lapis lazuli, ceremonial daggersof gold, etc.The Development of Writing in Mesopotamia1.All societies have languages in whichspoken soundsconvey certain meanings. This is verbal communication.Writing too is verbal communication but in a differentway.2.The first Mesopotamian tablets were written around3200BCE, which containedpicture-like signs and numbers. Thesewere about 5,000 lists of oxen, fish, breadloaves, etc. lists of goods that werebrought into or distributed from the temples of Uruk.3.Mesopotamianswrote on tablets of clay. A scribe would wet clayand pat it into a size he could hold comfortably in one hand. He would carefully smoothen its surface. With the sharp end of a reed, he would press wedge-shaped (cuneiform*) signs on to thesmoothened surface while it was still moist.4.Oncedried in the sun, theclay tablet would harden and tablets would be almost as indestructible aspottery. Once the surfacedried, signs could not be pressed on to a tablet: so each transaction,however minor, required a separate written tablet.5.By 2600BCE,the letters becamecuneiform, and the languagewas Sumerian. Writing was now used not only for keeping records,but also for making dictionaries, giving legal validity to land transfers,narrating the deeds of kings, and announcing the changes a kinghad made in the customary laws of the land.6.Sumerian, the earliestknown language of Mesopotamia, was gradually replaced after2400BCEby the Akkadian language. Cuneiform writing in theAkkadian language continued in use until the first centuryCE.The Legacy of Writing (Science and Technology) in Mesopotamia1.Perhaps the greatest legacy of Mesopotamia to the world is its scholarlytradition of timereckoning and mathematics.2.Dating around 1800BCEare tablets withmultiplication and divisiontables, square- and square-root tables, and tables of compound interest. For Example- the square root of 2 was given as:1 + 24/60 + 51/602+ 10/603.3.Students hadtosolve problemssuch as the following: a field of area such and suchis covered one finger deep in water; find out the volume of water.4.Thedivision of the year into 12 monthsaccording to the revolutionof the moon around the earth, the division of the month into fourweeks, the day into 24 hours, and the hour into 60 minutes all thatwe take for granted in our daily lives has come to us from theMesopotamians.5.Wheneversolar and lunar eclipseswere observed, their occurrencewas noted according to year, month and day. So too there wererecords about the observed positions of stars and constellations inthe night sky.6.None of these momentous Mesopotamian achievements wouldhave been possible without writing andthe urban institution ofschools, where students read and copied earlier written tablets, andwhere some boys were trained to become not record keepers for theadministration, but intellectuals who could build on the work oftheir predecessors.Urbanization in Mesopotamia and Egypt

The urban revolution was created by Mesopotamia and Egypt. Both these societies created material changes as well as brought about abstract concepts. There are a few differences in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. Both the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations left lasting effects on the way the civilizations of the world work today and both have important unique aspects to them.

The urban revolution brought about a couple material changes as well as some abstract concepts. The first material change was the irrigational systems. Mesopotamia and Egypt both created irrigation systems that were used to help build up their societies. They both build canals and dams, the canals brought water to the fields far away from the rivers while the dams raised the water level of the river so that gravity would cause the water to flow into the irrigation canals (Bulliet 32). With the emergence of the societies, priests and kings were appointed leaders of the land. The priests brought on the abstract idea of Animism, which is the belief that the forces of nature are controlled by spirits and ancient peoples gods reflected the nature of their surroundings (Vargas Chapter 2 lecture). The urban revolution was mostly thanks to Egypt and Mesopotamia.

There are a few differences between Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization based on the concept of urbanization. The first difference pertains to the rivers. Both Mesopotamia and Egypt are surrounded with rivers. Mesopotamia had to build irrigation channels to bring water onto the land as well as built dams and dykes to keep the water from flooded crops. Egypt has the fundamental geographic feature river called the Nile (Bulliet 41). The Nile river floods at just the right times so the Egyptians did not need to build dykes and dams. The next difference is in class systems. Although a lot of Egyptians were wealthier and had more power compared to Mesopotamians no formal class structure emerged in the Egyptian civilization (Bulliet 45). Another difference is the laws in the civilizations. Mesopotamia had a civil code of laws. Egypt used the divine will of the king as their way of controlling the people. A big difference is the Egyptians created were the monumental buildings called pyramids that consisted of a series of stone platforms laid one on top of another (Bulliet 43). The Mesopotamians did not have such amazing monumental buildings. The Egyptian civilization had a monopoly over the important economical aspects of production which was much more powerful than Mesopotamias economic production. Mesopotamias trade was under the control of middle class. Egypt eventually created the first form of writing known as hieroglyphics because they needed to keep track of their business with trade.

Egypt and Mesopotamia were considered the first civilizations of the world. They both created many lasting changes to create the world as we know it today. Egypt and Mesopotamia had many differences in their civilizations. Although both had an impact on society, Mesopotamia left the most impact on creating the civilizations we see them today.

a trading town in a pastoral zone

The archaeological evidence also indicates growing interaction between the west-central Zagros and the lowlands to the west and southwest in the late fifth and fourth millenniaBCEAs pastoral groups moved down to the lowlands in the winter months, they would have come into contact with settled farming communities and formed trading relationships. Archaeologists believe that economic exchange was a significant and mutually beneficial aspect of nomad-villager relations. Villagers received animal products and raw materials from the mountains in exchange for agricultural goods that the nomads lacked owing to their highly specialized economy. Manufactured items, especially pottery, also would have been exchangedas would ideas, styles, and other cultural information. Nomadic pastoralists may have served as intermediaries in longer-distance trade connecting different regions.

The economic ties forged between highland pastoralists and settled villagers may have contributed to the development of social complexity on a regional scale. During the late fifth and fourth millenniaBCEa number of sites in southern Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran began to exhibit signs of increasing socioeconomic and political complexity (for example, monumental architecture, urban planning, and the use of seals to regulate certain economic activities) that eventually led to the rise of early states. Mobile pastoralist populations in the Zagros may have helped to urbanize their neighbors to the southwest by, among other things, stimulating local economies through surplus production and trade. The rising urban demand for animal products and raw materials would have encouraged pastoralists to intensify production and exchange, strengthening economic ties between both groups. The growing economic interdependence between nomadic pastoral societies and early towns may have influenced such sociopolitical developments of the following millennia as the control of production and distribution of goods by centralized institutions, the emergence of inequalities in wealth and status, and the formation of a shared social identity among nomadic groups. Meanwhile, the construction of forts along the foothills of the Zagros by early Mesopotamian state societies indicates that relations with the nomads were not always amicable.

Bibliography

Websites

www.ducksters.com/.../mesopotamia/daily_life www.mesopotamia.co.uk/writing/.../sto_set.htm www.ancient.eu/urbanization

Books & Magazines

Early Human and his life by Dr. Hussain Shah Sidduqi Human Origin and its facts by George Randy