Abstract/Summary

From around 10,000 BCE, communities in Southwest Asia developed an increasingly settled way of life supported by farming and animal husbandry. Demographic and social changes underpinned increasingly complex societies, until, between 4000 and 3000 BCE, Southwest Asia hosted the emergence of a new kind of society: the first city states. Urban life in Southwest Asia developed in association with mechanisms of social control, including early writing and bureaucracy, social hierarchy, elite ideology, and the formation of states and empires. In this chapter we follow the story over 5,500 years, from the expansion of farming settlements around 6000 BCE to the age of empires beginning in Mesopotamia in 2300 BCE and continuing to the conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE.