Mesopotamia and Sumer

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Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers" Tigris and Euphrates (modern Iraq), hosted the world's first cities around 3500 BCE in Sumer, such as Ur and Uruk. Because rainfall was scarce but river floods were rich in silt, farmers needed organized labour to dig irrigation canals, and that cooperation helped create governments. Sumerians built ziggurat temples and city-states, and invented cuneiform writing on clay tablets, the wheel, and a base-60 number system that survives in our hours and minutes.

Each city-state had its own ruler, patron god and walls, and cities often fought over water and land. Scribes pressed a reed stylus into wet clay to record grain stores, taxes and contracts; writing began as bookkeeping before it recorded poetry. Later empires such as Akkad, Babylon (with Hammurabi's law code) and Assyria followed.

For example, a farmer might owe a share of barley to the temple, and a scribe would mark the amount on a tablet as proof. The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story of a king who seeks immortality, is among the oldest surviving stories. A useful tip is to remember Mesopotamia as the place of firsts: first cities, first writing, first wheel, first written laws. Its legacy shapes how we measure time, count, and write contracts.