Early societies and Mesopotamia

For millions of years, people lived in forests, caves and rock shelters, moving from place to place. Humans first emerged in Africa and spread from there across the world. Archaeologists study this distant past by digging up and dating bones, stone tools and other remains.

One of the biggest changes in human history was the slow shift from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, which began about 10,000 years ago. It came in steps:

• People learnt where and in which season different plants grew, and began to grow crops: wheat, barley, peas and pulses in West Asia; millet and rice in East and Southeast Asia.
• They domesticated animals such as sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and donkeys, and later (about 5,000 years ago) yoked cattle and donkeys to ploughs and carts.
• Farmers had to stay until the crop ripened, so they built permanent homes.
• Earthen pots were made to store grain and to cook new kinds of food.
• Stone tools were ground and polished; new tools such as mortars, pestles, axes and hoes appeared.
• People began to use metals such as copper and tin, and to trade goods like shells, precious stones and obsidian (hardened volcanic lava) over long distances. Villages grew, then towns, then small states.

Mesopotamia (from the Greek mesos, middle, and potamos, river: 'the land between the rivers') lies between the Euphrates and the Tigris, in present-day Iraq. It is where city life began.

• Its south was first called Sumer and Akkad; after 2000 BCE, when Babylon became important, Babylonia; from about 1100 BCE, when the Assyrians ruled the north, Assyria.
• The first known language was Sumerian, replaced by Akkadian after about 2400 BCE. Aramaic, similar to Hebrew, spread after 1000 BCE and is still spoken in parts of Iraq.

Archaeology in Mesopotamia began in the 1840s. At first, European scholars dug there hoping to prove that stories in the Old Testament of the Bible were literally true. By the 1960s it was accepted that such stories were ways of remembering past changes, not exact history, and archaeologists turned to reconstructing the lives of ordinary people.

The land is varied:

• In the north-east, green plains and wooded hills get enough rain for farming, which began there between 7000 and 6000 BCE.
• In the north, an upland grassland called a steppe suits herding sheep and goats better than farming.
• The south is a desert, yet this is where the first cities and writing appeared. The two rivers carry fine mud (silt) from the northern mountains, and channels from the Euphrates watered fields of wheat, barley, peas and lentils.

Southern Mesopotamia had the most productive agriculture of the ancient world, along with plentiful meat, milk, wool, fish and dates. But the book warns: cities did not grow just because the countryside was rich. Other factors, such as trade, temples, kings and writing, were needed too.