ABSTRACT
T he city of Uruk and the invention of writing together stand at the heart of early Mesopotamian civilization. People had lived in village settlements for several thousand years, farming the fi elds around them, producing their pottery and food, and perhaps coming together from time to time for seasonal feasts and festivals. But never before had they lived permanently together in such numbers-a concentration of several thousand people clustered cheekby-jowl. Such a community was not simply larger than anything that had gone before. It involved a wholly different way of life, a society divided into craftspeople, farmers, and priests. Among these were scribes, the trained specialists who alone understood the wedge-shaped cuneiform signs used to record the multifarious commercial transactions of temple and city. At the base of the whole majestic edifi ce was the natural fertility of the Mesopotamian plain, the essential prerequisite for the emergence of civilization in these extensive riverine lowlands.
