Yet othersdeveloped the skills to carve intricate cylinder seals used bymembers of the elite to identify their goods.

Other men and womenwent off to distant lands and set up smaller versions of Uruk,certainly keeping in touch with home through messengers, andpresumably sending goods that could be useful to their mothercities.

Whereas earlier peoples had manufactured their pottery by hand,adding eye-catching designs and glazes, the Uruk craftsmen mostlyproduced pottery on the newly invented wheel, rarely adding anyadornments. Quantity, now possible with a type of mass production,seems to have taken priority over quality in ceramic manufacture.

The sign for “food” (also for“bread”) in proto-cuneiform is the shape of a beveled-rim bowl.

A cylinder seal was a stone cylindrical beadcarved in relief with a scene, so that when rolled on a piece of clay itproduced an endless tiny frieze of figures or patterns.

The scribes do not seem to have thought of this scriptthat they had invented as a representation of language.

The people of Uruk started out with at least thirteen differentnumerical systems; they counted differently depending on what theywere counting, and the signs indicated different numbers fordifferent commodities. And about 30 percent of the signs they firstcreated to represent nouns had no later equivalents, so scholars donot know how to read them.

This proto-cuneiform tablet from Uruk includes signs forsheep and the goddess Inanna, but its meaning is unclear.

The investment of time and manpower devoted to the constructionof this complex would have resembled the work on a medievalcathedral. As early as 3600 BCE work had begun on the so-calledLimestone Temple in the Eanna precinct. Quarrymen and masonsremoved limestone from a rocky outcrop around fifty kilometers (31mi) to the southwest. Other men transported the stone to Uruk. Stillothers formed hundreds of thousands of mud bricks and clay cones,and set them out to harden in the sun. Others brought timber fromfar to the north for the roofs. Someone supervised all the workmenwho set the bricks and stones and mosaic cones in place. The menwould have been fed and provided for during the construction. Thebuilders were all probably residents of Uruk, united in their desire tocreate a magnificent home for their beloved divine queen.

It is writtenin a script known as proto-cuneiform, a script that did not representsounds or even language at all; signs served as memory aids.

facts that no one couldconceivably commit to memory.

Datesafter ca. 1400 BCE are fairly reliable and uncontroversial (the morerecent, the less controversial). For dates before 1500 BCE, however, adebate revolves around the Middle Chronology. Some scholars proposelower dates (from eight years to as much as a century later). But until aconsensus is reached, it seems best to use the dates that are familiar, ifprobably wrong.

The widely used Middle Chronology—which gives the dates ofHammurabi’s reign as 1792 to 1750 BCE—is followed in this book.

Later letters, inscriptions, and prayers, in which one mightexpect to see frequent references to flooding if it had been a majorconcern, mostly describe the rivers as a blessing.

cuneiform was occasionallyemployed in both Canaan and Egyp

These lands were Mesopotamia (modernIraq, with its variously named regions: Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, andAssyria), Syria, Elam (part of what was later known as Persia), andAnatolia (modern Turkey).

The ancient Near East is defined here as comprising the “cuneiformlands,”

to the waysthat documents were organized in archives,

Law, for example,once invented in Mesopotamia around 2100 BCE, was never forgotten,even though the actual laws of the Mesopotamians bear littleresemblance to those in use today.

For example, women in early times had many rights andfreedoms: they could own property, run businesses, and representthemselves in court.

The popularimage of history as a story of progress from primitive barbarism tomodern sophistication is completely belied by the study of the ancientNear East.