Mesopotamian City-States and Early Urban Geography

The world's first cities emerged on the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where irrigation agriculture produced the food surplus needed to support large, non-farming populations. Uruk, in particular, is regarded by many archaeologists as the world's first true city — the historian V. Gordon Childe's influential 1950 essay "The Urban Revolution" took it as the paradigm case — growing to an estimated population in the tens of thousands by around 2900 BCE, with monumental precincts such as the Eanna district, dedicated to the goddess Inanna, and the White Temple ziggurat rising over the city on its platform. It was at Uruk, around 3200 BCE, that the earliest cuneiform tablets appear, initially simple administrative records of goods and rations impressed with a reed stylus into wet clay, a technology that evolved from an older system of clay tokens and sealed bullae used to track agricultural surplus.