Chapter 2: Agrarian-Urban Centers of the Middle East andEastern MediterraneanThe end of the third millennium BCE, when Enheduanna lived, was a time when agrarian-urban society, with its villages and cities, had become well established in several different areas.- Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, ruler of Mesopotamia’s first recorded kingdom.- Agrarian-Urban Society: A type of society characterized by intensiveagriculture and people living in cities, towns, and villages.Agrarian Origins in the Fertile Crescent, ca. 11,500-1,500BCE - Farmers began to settle in the two great river valleys of the Tigris-Euphrates, in present day Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and of the Nile in Egypt. In these valleys, irrigation using river water allowed for larger plots and bigger harvests.- Geography and Environmento The western half includes Thrace and Greece in the north, together with numerous islands in the Aegean Sea, a branch of the Mediterranean Sea.o The terrain on the mainland as well as the islands is mostly mountainous, covered with forests or brushwood.o Recent historical climate research has established that between the end of the Ice Age (around 11,500BCE) and 4,000BCE monsoon rain patterns extended farther west than they do today.o At the eastern end of the Middle East is Afghanistan, a country with steppe plains and high mountains bordering on India—like the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia. It was also a center of early agrarian society. Agrarian Society: At a minimum, people engaged in farming cereal grains on rain-fed or irrigated fields and breeding sheep and cattle.- The Natufianso The richness of the Fertile Crescent in plants and animals during the early centuries after the end of the Ice Age seems to have encouraged settlement. o Each hamlet of the Natufians, consisting of about 60 inhabitants, contained a few semicircular pit houses made up of a stone foundation, posts, thatched walls, and a thatched roof.o To gather food, the Natufians went out into the woods with baskets and obsidian-bladed sickles.o When warmer and more humid weather returned following the Younger Dryas (a near-glacial cold and dry period from 10,9000BCE and 9,600BCE), the Neolithic Age began. Neolithic Age: Period from ca. 9,600BCE to 4,500BCE when stone tools were adapted to the requirements of agriculture, through the making of sickles and spades.- Selective Breeding of Grain and Domestic Animalso People continued to collect grain but also began planting fields. Both old and newly established hamlets began growing to around 300-500 inhabitants. o Parallel to the selective breeding of grain, farmers also domesticated pulses—the edible seeds of pod-bearing plants—beginning with chickpeas and lentils. o The original agriculture—the cultivation of grain and pulses and the domestication of goats and sheep—relied on annual rains in the Fertile Crescent and became more widespread when farmers tapped creeks for the irrigation of their fields during dry months.The Origin of Urban Centers in Mesopotamia and Egypt- In lower Mesopotamia, drier conditions forced settlers coming from upstream to pay closer attention to irrigation. All of these changes would contribute to the rise of the first agrarian-urban centers founded along rivers—in the Middle East, Egypt, the Indus valley in the Indian subcontinent, and layer, the Yellow River valley in China.- Euphrates and Nile Floodso The first farmers, coming from central and northern Mesopotamia, settled in the region where the Euphrates River united with the Tigris River, dispersing into swampland, lagoons and marshes. This settlement established the Ubaid culture of villages (6,000BCE-4,000BCE)o The annual snowmelt in the mountains of northeastern Anatolia caused the Tigris and Euphrates to flood devastating amounts of waterinto the plain in the early spring.o In spite of some drawbacks, irrigated farming in lower Mesopotamia, with its more predictable water supplies, was more abundant and reliable than it was the more irregular rain-fed agriculture in the Taurus—Zagros—Levant region to the north.o The Nile usually begins to swell in July, crests in August—September, and recedes during October. For the Neolithic inhabitants of Egypt these late-summer and fall floods created conditions quite different from those of lower Mesopotamia, which depended on the spring floods.o In Egypt, the floods coincided with the growing season of winter barely and wheat.o The first agricultural settlements appeared in the Fayyum, a swampy depression of the Nile southwest of modern Cairo, around 5,200BCE. By about 3,500BCE, agricultural had spread south along the Nile and north into the delta. - Early Townso Between 5,500BCE and 3,500BCE, villages in lower Mesopotamia and Upper Egypt developed into towns.  The Mesopotamian towns administered themselves through local assemblies.- Assemblies: Gathering of either all inhabitants or the most influential persons in a town; later, in cities, assemblies and kings made communal decisions on important fiscal or juridical matters.o Sharecroppers: Farmers who received seed, animals, and tools from landowners in exchange for up to two-thirds of their harvest.o Nomad: People whose livelihood was based on the herding of animals,such as sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and camels; moving with their animals from pasture to pasture according to the seasons, they lived intent camps.o Eventually, the landowning priestly families stopped not only farming their own land but also making tools pottery, cloth, and leather goods, turning the production of these goods over to specialized craftspeople,such as toolmakers, potters, weavers, or cobblers and paying them with grain rations.o Around 4,300BCE, some mountain people in the region had mastered the crafts of mining and smelting copper.- Templeso In the fifth millennium BCE, wealthy landowners gained control over the communal grain stores and clan shrines and enlarged these into town shrines.o In Upper Egypt, landowner-priests presided over the constriction of the first temples around 3,500BCE, together with elegantly embellished tombs for themselves.- The World’s First Citieso City, City-State: A place of more than 5,000 inhabitants with non-farming inhabitants (craftspeople, merchants, administrators), markets, and a city leader capable of compelling obedience to his decisions by force.o The first place in Mesopotamia to fit the definition of a city was Uruk, founded