Mesopotamia and the First States

Writing and Cities

Writing was invented to track sheep, not write poetry. Clay tokens were sealed inside hollow bulla balls. When someone pressed tokens onto the wet surface to show what was inside, they realized the marks alone were enough. Tokens became marks, tokens were thrown away, and receipts for barley, oil, and beer began. Literature arrived a thousand years later.

Southern Mesopotamia lacked stone, timber, and metal, driving irrigation demands, trade, and storage. The Uruk result by 3000 BCE was a city of 40,000.

Coordination created problems, but determinism is false: the state followed the canals.

Laws and Propaganda

Hammurabi's Code (c. 1750 BCE) is not a modern law code; it is an advertisement. The lex talionis (eye for an eye) is a price list graded by class, costing silver for commoners and eyes for nobility.

$$\text{tokens} \rightarrow \text{tokens} + \text{marks} \rightarrow \text{marks}$$

It tells us what justice had to look like: protecting widows, fixing prices, and dredging canals.