Reading Passage: The World's First Cities
TEST 2. READING rAssh® ‘3 hich
i ions 1-13, which ai
You should spend about 20 minutes on Question re baseg n
. n pages 2 and 3.
Reading Passage 7 on PAGS e world’s first cities
The creation of Mesopotamian citie® now forms part of eastern gy
The inhabitants of as - lived for thousands of years on individual farmg
southes-iemt Turkey ve munities working relentlessly just to meet their basis
and in small, isolated comm . something remarkable happened, .
eds, But then, about 6,000 years ago n he
neers ecuri it family homes and villages and came together wi
people left the security of their family ‘I dificult: the world 1 ith
others to create something far more complex and difficult: rld's first City,
ihe pm much left now of Uruk, which is about 250 kilometres south of Iraq's
capital Baghdad, but enough does remain to show that this initial experiment ia
urban living was extraordinarily successful. At its height, around 5,000 years ago,
Uruk was home to more than 40,000 people. The outlines of the city walls indicate
of about 600 hectares. _
The renecological record of Uruk reveals the intensive building and rebuilding
which went on for four or five centuries after the city's initial establishment. In that
period the people of Uruk built a dozen or so large public buildings. They would
carefully level what had stood before, and then build another structure on top,
often trying out a different building material or an innovative technique. They
seemed to be searching for ways in which architecture could express the
revolutionary new social structures that had come into being there.
Soon Uruk was not the only Mesopotamian city. People all across the flat plains of
southem Mesopotamia were enjoying many of the benefits of city life. By about
4,500 years ago, 80 per cent of the Mesopotamian population lived in cities over
40 hectares in size, with populations of between 15,000 and 30,000 people. The
emergence of these thriving communities, made up mostly of individuals and
groups with no blood ties, was unprecedented in human history. Why did these
extraordinary advances happen?
Reasons for the creation of cities in Mesopotamia
Smaller communities in Mesopotamia sometimes decided to come together to
make it easier to defend themselves from their enemies. But the underlying reason
for the creation of cities can be found in the harshness of this particular
environment. The area was a place of extremes, where narrow strips of fertile river
valleys were bounded by thousands of kilometres of desert and unproductive
wetlands. As the small amount of rainfall in the region was incapable of sustaining
anything but very limited agriculture, it was only through sophisticated irrigation
that isolated pieces of land were kept fertile. The Tigris and the Euphrates rivers
provided water for irrigation, and were also the basis of a communication system
that led to the spread of the latest concepts in farming.
{n such a region, the only way for humans to
Could work together. The threat of famine, wh
drought or the sudden change in the cours
outside their families, and work with their
prosper was by forming groups that
ich could be caused by a prolonged
e of a river, forced people to look
neighbours to create an elaborate
system of dams, channels and canals to manage water. These projects needed
specific skills and labour from outside the farmer's family, and this established
more firmly the patterns of dependence that are at the heart of civilisation.
Changes in the organisation of farming
The intensive farming that came about in Mesopotamia was more efficient and
productive and therefore generated a surplus of food, allowing crops in years of
good harvests to be stored as protection against future less successful years. It
also allowed more land for the production of a wider range of crops. It created a
world where there was a need for traders and for skilled craftsmen: in short, it was
the beginning of industry and consumerism. The concept of specialisation
emerged within the population - with increasing numbers of soldiers, builders,
musicians, doctors, fortune tellers - all supported directly or indirectly by
agriculture. At the same time, this increased the contro! that powerful institutions,
gradually emerging in the early cities, had over the urban population. Although
large numbers of people were freed from the struggle of subsistence farming, they
were now totally dependent on the institutions that employed them for their daily
sustenance.
The role of the temples
The earliest and most powerful of these institutions was centred on the religious
temple. Ever more temple structures were erected in the form of massive pyramids
which had enormous storerooms for the output from the farming estates. Over
time, the temples acquired these farms for themselves, and appointed a large
number of staff to administer them and to deal with the storage of produce. The
temples' greatest advantage was that each citizen was expected to give up some
time to work for the temples. This meant that temples could easily store huge
amounts of agricultural produce which could be used to buy yet more land. In
addition, the revenues generated allowed the temples to serve as primitive kinds
of banks making loans to people in difficult economic times.
The emergence of writing
We know a surprising amount about these times thanks to the development of an
important new technology: writing. In Mesopotamia basic records were inscribed in
wet clay, unlike the fragile papyrus used in ancient Egypt and Greece. These first
writings were largely lists of people and things, simple bookkeeping. But within
several hundred years, writing systems had become more advanced capable of
recording concepts as well as lists. The clay tablets used for writing were tough,
and the fires that often burnt down the archives where they were stored usually
merely baked them for future generations
Questions 1 -6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
1?
In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOTGIVEN _ if there isno information on this
Some physical evidence of Uruk still exists in Iraq.
The people of Uruk lived in large apartment buildings.
Builders in Uruk frequently experimented with new construction methods.
Urban settlements were unusual in Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago.
anewn =
The Tigris and the Euphrates rivers were important for the interchange of
ideas. °
6 When there were food shortages, farmers relied mainly on the help of their
relatives
