Temples, kings and city life

From about 5000 BCE, settlements grew in southern Mesopotamia. Some cities grew around temples, some as trade centres, and some as imperial capitals.

Temples. Villagers built and rebuilt temples at chosen spots. The earliest known temple was a small shrine of unbaked brick. A temple was the house of a god, such as the Moon God of Ur or Inanna, goddess of love and war, so early temples looked much like ordinary houses, except that their outer walls went in and out at regular intervals. Over time, the temple:

• received offerings of grain, curd and fish;
• was thought to own the fields, fisheries and herds;
• ran production such as oil pressing, grain grinding, spinning and weaving;
• employed merchants and kept written records of what it gave out.
• So it became the main urban institution.

Kings. Farming had its dangers. Channels sometimes flooded the crops or changed course; people upstream could take too much water or let silt block the flow. There was repeated conflict over land and water. Chiefs who won wars shared out loot and took prisoners. In time, successful war leaders offered treasure to the gods, beautified the temples, sent men to fetch stone and metal, and organised the temple's wealth. This gave them the high status and authority of kings.

Leaders encouraged villagers to settle close to them, to raise an army quickly and for safety. Around 3000 BCE, Uruk grew to 250 hectares, twice the size Mohenjo-daro would later be, while dozens of small villages nearby were deserted. It built a defensive wall early, and by about 2800 BCE covered 400 hectares.

Work and new technology. War captives and local people were made to work for the temple or the ruler, and were paid in rations of grain, cloth or oil; hundreds of ration lists survive. One temple is estimated to have taken 1,500 men, working 10 hours a day, five years to build. Around 3000 BCE Uruk saw bronze tools, brick columns (there was no wood strong enough to hold up big roofs), walls decorated with painted clay cones forming mosaics, sculpture in imported stone, and the potter's wheel, which let workshops make many similar pots at once.

The cylinder seal. In Mesopotamia, a carved stone cylinder, pierced through the centre, was rolled over wet clay to leave a continuous picture, sometimes with the owner's name and position. Rolled over the clay sealing a package or a jar, it kept the contents safe; rolled on a clay letter, it proved the letter was genuine. It marked a city dweller's role in public life.

Life at Ur. A small elite held most of the wealth: royal graves at Ur were full of gold, jewellery and inlaid instruments. Legal texts show the nuclear family (a man, his wife and children) was normal, with sons inheriting the house, herds and fields. Ur's ordinary houses, dug up in the 1930s, show:

• narrow, winding streets and irregular house plots, so no town planning, and goods arriving by donkey rather than cart;
• no street drains; rainwater was led into sumps in inner courtyards;
• rubbish swept into the streets, so street levels rose and door thresholds had to be raised;
• light from doorways onto courtyards rather than windows, which also gave privacy.

Mari, upstream on the Euphrates, flourished after 2000 BCE in a zone where farmers and herders lived side by side. Herders and farmers needed each other but sometimes clashed. Pastoral groups often drifted into the farmlands, and some, including the Akkadians, Amorites, Assyrians and Aramaeans, came to rule. Mari's kings were Amorites, who honoured Mesopotamian gods and also built a temple to Dagan, god of the steppe. King Zimrilim's palace had 260 rooms over 2.4 hectares. Standing on the river route between the south and the mineral-rich uplands, Mari grew rich from trade though it was not strong in war.

Digging today. At the small town of Abu Salabikh, archaeologists traced walls by scraping the surface of the mound, sieved tons of earth for plant and animal remains, and studied floors under the microscope to tell which rooms had roofs. Charred seeds marked kitchens; piglets' teeth in the streets showed pigs roamed freely.