Writing and City Life | Class 11 History

14 September 2022 · 9 min read

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This chapter, Writing and City Life, takes you into ancient Mesopotamia, one of the earliest places on Earth where people built cities, learned to write and kept records. These notes cover its geography, the growth of towns, the invention of the cuneiform script and why writing and city life grew up together. They are part of your Class 11 History notes on the NCERT theme of early civilisations.

What is Mesopotamia?

The word Mesopotamia comes from two Greek words: mesos, meaning middle, and potamos, meaning river. So the name simply means the land in the middle of rivers. It lies between the Euphrates and the Tigris, in the region that is today mostly part of the Republic of Iraq.

Mesopotamian civilisation

Mesopotamia is remembered for its wealth, its busy city life, its rich literature, and its early work in mathematics and astronomy. After about 2000 BCE, its writing system and its stories spread far beyond its borders, reaching the eastern Mediterranean, northern Syria and Turkey.

Rulers across the region wrote to one another, and even to the Pharaoh of Egypt, using the Mesopotamian language and script. Writing had become the common tool of trade and diplomacy.

The regions and their names

Sumer and Akkad were the names given to the earliest urbanised lands of the south.
After 2000 BCE, Babylon became a major city, and the southern region came to be called Babylonia.
Around 1100 BCE, the Assyrians built their kingdom in the north, and that region became known as Assyria.

The languages

Sumerian was the earliest known language of the land.
Speakers of Akkadian arrived around 2400 BCE and their language gradually replaced Sumerian. Akkadian flourished, with regional variations, right down to the time of Alexander the Great (336 to 323 BCE).
Aramaic began to appear around 1400 BCE. This language, close to Hebrew, became widely spoken after 1000 BCE and is still used in some parts of Iraq today.

Why Uruk and Mari matter

Archaeology in Mesopotamia began in the 1840s at sites such as Uruk and Mari. These sites gave us not only statues, buildings and ornaments, but also a huge number of written documents, which is why we can study Mesopotamian history in such detail.

How geography shaped life in Mesopotamia

Iraq is a land of very different landscapes, and the way people lived depended closely on where they lived.

Agriculture

Farming began in this region between about 7000 and 6000 BCE.
In the north east, green rolling plains rise into tree covered mountains with clear streams and wildflowers. These areas received enough rain to grow crops without much effort.

Animal herding

In the northern uplands, known as the steppe, sheep and goats fed on the grasses and low shrubs that sprang up after the winter rains. Here, herding animals was a better living than growing crops.

The rivers

The tributaries of the Tigris gave access to the eastern mountains of Iran. South of the river lay a desert, and it was here, surprisingly, that the first cities and the first writing appeared.
The Euphrates and the Tigris rise in the northern mountains and carry fine mud called silt. When they flood, or when their water is led onto the fields, they leave behind this fertile silt.
Once the Euphrates enters the desert, it breaks into small channels. In the past these channels flooded their banks and worked as natural irrigation canals, letting farmers water fields of wheat, barley, peas and lentils.

Because of this silt and irrigation, the farmland of southern Mesopotamia was the most productive of all, even though it received too little rain to grow crops on its own. Sheep and goats gave plenty of meat, milk and wool, the rivers gave fish, and date palms gave fruit through the summer.

Metals and the Bronze Age

The first cities of Mesopotamia appeared around 3000 BCE, during the Bronze Age. Making bronze meant bringing metals from far away. Bronze tools were needed for careful carpentry, drilling beads, carving stone seals and cutting shell for inlaid furniture, and Mesopotamian weapons were made of bronze too.

Urbanisation: why towns grew

An economy beyond farming

Cities are not just crowded places. A town becomes worthwhile when an economy grows in areas other than farming, such as trade, manufacturing and services. Once that happens, it makes sense for people to gather together.

City dwellers gave up being self sufficient and came to depend on the goods and services of others. This division of labour is one of the clearest marks of urban life.

Fuel, metal, stone and wood reached city workshops from many different places, so organised trade and storage became necessary.
Grain and food had to be carried from villages to the city, then stored and shared out.
In such a system, some people give orders and others follow, and city economies almost always need written records to keep track.

Moving goods into the cities

A land short of resources

Mesopotamia had very few minerals of its own. Across most of the south, stone for tools, seals and jewels was scarce. There was no metal for tools, vessels or ornaments, and the local date palm and poplar wood were too weak for carts, cartwheels or boats.

Trade across the Gulf

The Mesopotamians exchanged goods with Turkey, Iran and lands across the Gulf, trading for wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell and various stones. Those regions were rich in minerals but short of farmland, so the two sides needed each other. Social organisations helped arrange these regular exchanges and supply the foreign expeditions.

Why transport mattered

Efficient transport was vital for a city to survive. If grain or charcoal took too long to move by bullock cart, the city economy would collapse. The cheapest way to move goods was by river: boats loaded with sacks of grain simply floated along with the current, and animals could be carried by boat as well. Canals and natural channels linked the large and small settlements together.

The development of writing

Clay tablets

The first Mesopotamian tablets, from around 3200 BCE, were written with picture signs and numbers. A scribe would pat wet clay into a shape that fit in one hand and smooth its edges. Using the sharp end of a cut reed, he pressed wedge shaped marks into the damp surface. The sun then hardened the clay into a tablet almost as tough as pottery. Since signs could not be added once the clay had dried, every transaction needed its own fresh tablet.

The Sumerian script becomes cuneiform

By about 2600 BCE the script had developed into cuneiform, and the language written in it was Sumerian. The word cuneiform comes from the Latin for wedge, after the shape of the marks.
Writing was now used for far more than records: for dictionaries, for legalising land transfers, for recording the deeds of kings and for announcing changes to the customary laws of the land.
Sumerian was gradually replaced by Akkadian after around 2400 BCE. Akkadian cuneiform then stayed in use for over 2,000 years, right down to about the first century CE.

How the writing worked

A cuneiform sign did not stand for a single consonant or vowel, like the letters m or a in English. Instead each sign stood for a whole syllable, such as put, la or in. Because of this, a scribe had to learn hundreds of signs, and had to write on a wet tablet before it dried. Writing was a skilled craft, and also a remarkable achievement of the mind, since it captured the sounds of a spoken language in visible form.

Literacy

Very few Mesopotamians could read or write, so literacy was low. There were hundreds of signs to learn, many of them complicated. If a king could read at all, he would proudly record the fact in his inscriptions.

The uses of writing

A long Sumerian epic poem about Enmerkar, one of the earliest rulers of Uruk, shows the link between city life, trade and writing. Uruk was seen as the city above all cities, and the poem connects Enmerkar to the setting up of Sumer's first long distance trade.

Why lapis lazuli was needed

Enmerkar wanted lapis lazuli, a blue gemstone, along with precious metals, to decorate a temple. He sent a messenger to fetch them from the lord of Aratta, a distant land. The messenger grew, in the poem's words, weary of mouth, and could no longer repeat the messages correctly. So Enmerkar wrote the words on a clay tablet instead. The lord of Aratta was amazed to see writing for the first time. The story suggests that in Mesopotamia it was kingship that organised both trade and writing, and that writing was seen as a sign of the superiority of urban culture.

Southern Mesopotamia: temples and kings

How cities grew

Settled life in southern Mesopotamia began around 5000 BCE, and the earliest cities grew out of some of these settlements. They were of a few different kinds:

cities that slowly grew up around temples,
cities that grew as centres of trade,
and imperial cities.

Early settlers built and rebuilt temples at chosen spots in their villages. The oldest known temple was a small shrine of unbaked brick.

Temples

Temples were the homes of the gods, such as the Moon God of Ur or Inanna, goddess of love and war. Built of brick, they grew larger over time, with many rooms around open courtyards, and their outer walls stepped in and out at regular intervals, a feature no ordinary building had.

People brought grain, curd and fish for the god at the centre of worship. The floors of some early temples were thick with fish bones.
The god was seen as the owner of the community's fields, fisheries and herds.
The temple was also a place of work: oil was pressed, grain was ground, and wool was spun and woven there.
Over time the temple grew into the most important institution in the city, acting as employer, storekeeper and record keeper.

Floods and uncertainty

Farming carried real risks. The natural channels of the Euphrates might carry far too much water one year and flood the crops, or shift their course entirely. Villages had to be moved from time to time. People living upstream could pull so much water into their fields that villages downstream ran dry, or could let silt block a channel and starve those further down of water.

Conflict in the countryside

Disputes over land and water were common in early Mesopotamia. In times of frequent warfare, a victorious chief could reward his followers with a share of the spoils and put captured enemies to work. Some of these chiefs began to beautify the temples, sending men to gather precious stones and metals, and managing the temple's wealth by recording what came in and went out.

The growth of Uruk

Around 3000 BCE, Uruk grew to a huge 250 hectares, twice the size Mohenjodaro would later reach, while dozens of small villages nearby were abandoned. This was a major shift of population into the city. Uruk was among the first cities to build a defensive wall. The site was lived in continuously from 4200 BCE to 400 CE, and by 2800 BCE it had grown to 400 hectares.

Rations and the agricultural tax

An agricultural tax was compulsory. People were made to work and were given rations in return. Hundreds of ration lists survive, recording the grain, cloth and oil handed out to individuals. According to one record, 1,500 men worked ten hours a day for five years to build the temples. Rulers of Uruk ordered people to fetch stones and metal ores, to make and lay bricks, or to travel to distant lands for materials.

Crafts and technology

Bronze was used in many crafts. Since wood could not support the roofs of large halls, architects learned to build columns of brick.
Hundreds of workers baked and painted clay cones that were pressed into temple walls to form colourful mosaics.
Sculpture was superb, carved not in clay but in imported stone.
The potter's wheel arrived, a landmark for a city economy, since it could turn out dozens of identical pots at a time.

The lasting importance of writing

Mesopotamia's greatest gift to the world was its scholarly tradition of timekeeping and mathematics. Clay tablets from around 1800 BCE carry tables for multiplication and division, squares and square roots, and even compound interest.

On one tablet the square root of two is recorded, in the base 60 system, as roughly 1.41421296. The true value is 1.41421356, so the Mesopotamian figure was astonishingly close. Students were even set problems such as working out the volume of water covering a field to the depth of one finger.

Many everyday measures come straight from Mesopotamia: dividing the year into 12 months by the moon's journey around the earth, splitting the month into four weeks, the day into 24 hours, and the hour into 60 minutes. These divisions passed from the successors of Alexander to the Roman world, then to the Islamic world, and finally to medieval Europe. Mesopotamian scholars also recorded the year, month and day of every solar and lunar eclipse, and watched the movements of stars and constellations.

Why it still matters today

The very land this chapter describes is back in the news. The southern Mesopotamian marshes, fed by the same Tigris and Euphrates, together with the ancient cities of Uruk, Ur and Tell Eridu, were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016 as The Ahwar of Southern Iraq. The listing has seven parts: four wetland marshes and three of the Sumerian cities you have just studied.

But these marshes are drying out. Conservation assessments record a fifth straight year of severe water scarcity in 2025, made worse by dams and irrigation projects upstream in Turkey, Iran and Syria that hold back the rivers. The same rivers, silt and floods that once made cities possible, and the same upstream and downstream water disputes this chapter mentions, are now at the centre of a modern struggle over water. It is a striking reminder that geography still shapes how people live.

Writing from this world is also being read in a brand new way. In 2023, researchers from Tel Aviv University and Ariel University, writing in the journal PNAS Nexus, trained an artificial intelligence model to translate Akkadian cuneiform into English. Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets have survived, far more than the handful of experts could ever read by hand, so the tool is meant to help scholars and students reach texts that have sat unread for thousands of years. The same script pressed into wet clay 4,000 years ago is now being decoded by machine learning. You can follow how history connects to geography, economics and technology on the Learnacy Hub, or read more study notes over at Resources.

Quick recap

Mesopotamia means the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, in modern Iraq.
Its geography, fertile silt, rivers and steppe, decided whether people farmed or herded.
Cities grew when the economy spread beyond farming into trade, crafts and services, creating a division of labour.
Writing began around 3200 BCE with picture signs on clay and became cuneiform by about 2600 BCE.
Each cuneiform sign stood for a syllable, so only a few skilled scribes could read and write.
Temples and kings organised trade, labour and records, and Uruk became one of the world's first great cities.
Mesopotamia gave the world the 60 minute hour, the 24 hour day and the 12 month year.

Sources

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