A period named after an ancient and successful city that was found in south Mesopotamia (?)
First artifacts from the city date back from around 4000bc and the city is thought to have lasted until the beginning of the third century bc.
This is the first city in known history!
Dating via pottery
More recent historical artifacts such as those from Roman and Greek periods were traditionally written on papyrus, which is very fragile and suseptable to damage
The people of the Uruk period hadn't developed this technology yet, and were entirely using rock and clay for documentation
__ is the name of a dating method where certain designs and methods for creating pottery are connected to a specific time period, and thus can be used for dating
Pottery from different periods had different styles from the way they were painted to the actual functional design
Geography, why was this area so good for the development of cities? (TODO)
Diversity in resources
Scarcity from natural landmarks
Desert
Mountains
How the city started
Religion and ritual
"Sacrifices" (wrong word here) were collected by officials and rations were then given back out to the people of the city
revolved around a temple in the city center
The development of writing and numeric system to keep track of these collections, land, people, etc (?)
A script named ___ was developed comprised of mostly single syllable representations
Lexical lists were found at Uruk and then at surrounding villages and cities that described this written script
These are hard to use for translation due to their just being lists of words, but translations were later found from ** to _** , a much more obtainable language which gave us many translations
One of these was the word for King or Royal or ___ which is how we came to realize there was some sort of religious significance to the city center
___ is a cylindrical tool that was rolled on tablets or pottery and used as a stamp for authorization
Pottery was used to hand out rations
Specialization built around ration pottery and especially the ___ tool which would be more useful the more complicated it was! The complexity was a very effective form of security at this time.
NOTE: more on this tool could warrant it's own document it's so cool
It is believed that these types of necessities from the ritual are what lead to professions and eventually hierarchical societies
Why did people even move to the city?
Death rate was so high that historians believe massive amounts of immigrants were necessary to keep the population rising
Most likely the same reason people moved to the horrible conditions of cities in the industrial revolution, because the chance of prosperous work was higher