Mesopotamia: Specialisation, inventions and new social classes

About five thousand years ago, cities and small countries - city states begin to emerge around the world’s river basins. Cities develop around rivers because the soil there is good for growing crops. The Latin word for growing things, cultus, which becomes the word ‘culture’ in English, doesn’t only refer to the cultivation of plant life. The term culture is used to describe how people in an area live, how they think, what they manufacture, and how they create their society during a certain period of time. Ancient societies that develop quickly and successfully are called high cultures.

As the cities develop, new professions emerge. Previously, family groups handled most things themselves: they cultivated, hunted, and made their own tools and clothes. Now, some people become specialists in manufacturing tools and weaving fabrics. With the rise of cities comes major differences among people. Various social classes arise, with different amounts of power.

The king and those who help him, priests, and military commanders have the most power and riches. They constitute the upper class of society. Next is the middle class, consisting of merchants, artisans, tax collectors, and soldiers. They are well off. Below them, those in the lower class work with agriculture, fishing, and hunting.

They pay much of what they produce in taxes. At the very bottom there are slaves, with no power nor freedom. In order for everything to work in a city with 50,000 inhabitants, the Mesopotamians invent writing. It’s necessary for priests and merchants to be able to keep track of their business, stocks, and wages. Writing is important for knowing who paid taxes, and for writing down common rules and laws.

The first font ever used looks like wedges and triangles pressed into clay: cuneiform. Cuneiform doesn’t use letters, but characters. In order to be able to read cuneiform you have to know over 2,000 different characters. Therefore there are only a few in the community who can read and write. Those who can have high status.

Keeping track of wages, taxes, or how much water is needed in a dam, needs a system of calculation. The Mesopotamians invent one. Now it's possible to count plus and minus, multiply and divide, and make advanced calculations of surfaces. When people don’t need to work all the time with farming, they invent things that make life easier. The most important technical invention during this time is the wheel.

The oldest wheels that archeologists have found are about 5,500 years old and they appear at roughly the same time in different places on earth, in Mesopotamia, Russia, and in Eastern Europe. The wheel makes work more efficient. Now an ox can pull a carriage, with three times more load than before. You can also transport things a lot further. People had already discovered metals 11,000 years ago, probably by chance.

Grains of copper and gold can be found in sand, and they might find their way into a fire, and melt. When the fire burns out, there is a lump of copper. This can be heated and shaped into something, maybe a piece of jewelry! But now, between 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, people begin large-scale quarrying of stones containing metal: ore. The ore is crushed and heated in the oven until it melts.

The metal can be shaped into different things. Gold and copper are soft metals not very suitable for making tools. But 5,000 years ago someone figures out that it is possible to mix copper and tin to produce a metal alloy: bronze. Bronze is hard and works well in manufacturing tools and weapons. About a thousand years later, someone in Turkey manages to melt iron ore to produce metallic iron.

Iron becomes the most important metal. There is a lot of iron ore on earth, and iron is a hard metal that works well for manufacturing tools. Now it’s possible to build things that could not be built before. Iron changes the world in many ways.