HistoryHow Two Rivers Built the World's First Cities
Enu the scribe sits on a sun-baked clay step beside the wide Tigris River, pressing a reed into a wet clay tablet while farmers guide water from the river into their fields below.
- Describe how the Tigris and Euphrates rivers supported life in Mesopotamia
- Identify at least two innovations that Mesopotamians developed near those rivers
- Explain why Mesopotamia is called one of the world's earliest civilizations
Key terms
- Mesopotamia
- The ancient region 'between the rivers,' between the Tigris and Euphrates in the modern Middle East
- cuneiform
- One of the earliest writing systems, made by pressing a wedge-shaped reed into wet clay
- law code
- A written collection of rules that everyone in a society is expected to follow
- irrigation ditch
- A dug channel that carries river water out to fields so crops can grow in dry land
Rivers Make a Surplus
The Tigris and Euphrates flooded each year, leaving fertile soil along their banks. Farmers extended this gift by digging irrigation ditches that carried water to fields the flood could not reach. The result was a steady food surplus, the foundation that let some Mesopotamians stop farming and build towns that grew into the world's first cities.
Inventions of City Life
Crowded cities created problems that farming villages never faced: tracking trade, settling disputes, and moving goods. Mesopotamians answered with cuneiform writing pressed into clay tablets, early written law codes such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, and some of the earliest uses of the wheel. Each invention grew directly out of the needs of dense, organized river-valley settlements.
Worked examples
How did city living lead to written law?
- Start with the setting: surplus food let thousands of people live together in cities.
- Identify the new problem: strangers traded and argued, and rulers needed to keep order fairly.
- Trace the solution: leaders wrote down rules so everyone could know them, like the Code of Ur-Nammu.
- Conclude the chain: dense city life created the need that written law codes were invented to meet.
Answer: City life put many strangers together, creating a need for shared, written rules that produced the earliest law codes.
Activity
Enu has found four objects from ancient Mesopotamia. Sort each one into the category it belongs to: Writing, Technology, or Government.
Practice
Explain how the two rivers made the first Mesopotamian cities possible.
Choose one Mesopotamian invention and explain what city problem it solved.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Mesopotamia grew up along the Nile River.The Nile is in Egypt; Mesopotamia developed between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East.
Check your understanding
Which two rivers gave Mesopotamia its name and supported its first cities?
What did Mesopotamians press into wet clay tablets to record information?
Recap
The flooding Tigris and Euphrates, aided by irrigation, produced food surpluses that built the world's first cities in Mesopotamia, whose needs led to cuneiform writing, early law codes, and the wheel.
Reflect
What new tools or rules do you think large groups of people always end up needing?