ABSTRACT
Mesopotamia and adjacent territories of the Near East (the modern Middle East; Figure 5.1) provide the earliest examples of complex societies in the ancient world, together with other “firsts”— first farming, first cities, and first writing-that supported and propelled that complexity. Over the span of several millennia, the Near Eastern world saw a range of political and social forms, from villages to city-states, to territorial states, to empires. Despite, or perhaps because of, environmental limitations, Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern societies developed political organizations that featured a deep intertwining of social, economic, military, and religious power. Political leadership required the support of the Mesopotamian gods and temples; it also relied heavily on high-yield agriculture that was the basis for each city’s survival. As the first examples of complex societies in this book, ancient southwestern Asian states and empires provide a full range of types of political and economic organizations and social complexity.
