Agriculture

Need help with Archaeology Essay. Ancient Sumeria: environment and agriculture?

Tomorrow morning is my open book/online Anthropology: Digging up the past final. It’s at 8am and it consists of multiple choice and essay questions. My professor gave us a list of possibly essay questions but didn’t say which ones would be on the final, or even how many he was planning on using. So, I’m writing all of the essays tonight so I can concentrate on the multiple choice since I know thats what I’m going to have trouble with. Problem is, I went through all of my notes and I can’t find anything about the second essay option (that’s where you guys come in)

Ok so this is basically your answer, I’ll do it in bullet points otherwise this would be pages long.

The Sumerians were a mix of semetic speaking nomads who migrated into the levant and ended up settling down with and mixing with the native inhabitants of the area who had a some what sedentary lifestyle. We know this because of language and some words pertaining to agriculture have a different origin than the rest of the Sumerian language.

The environment is a desert, with 2 important rivers running through it, the Tigres and Euphrates, most Sumerian civilization were formed along the banks of those rivers. They settled near rivers for the water source and with that never ending source of water you can grow a sufficient amount of crops for your society. The environment also dictates what kind of crop you can grow and dictates the base of their diets.

Nomadic societies were egalitarian ones, everyone was equally because everyone pitched in a separate but equal way. There was no sense of property or money. You didn’t need money because there was nothing to buy and you didn’t need property because you were always on the move.

But with the advent of agriculture people were able to settle on one ideal area and survive. The longer people settled the better thy became at growing crops, they had bigger families, it’s much easier to raise kids when you’re not Always on the move and food was no longer an issue. Populations grew and the surplus of food kept growing. The surplus of food is the most important factor of all.
With such a great surplus of food not everyone in the community had to be farmers, and with that you get specialization. You had your farmers and then you started getting: basket weaver, clothes makers, builders, etc… . At first these people would barter the things they made for the things they need, say I make shirts, I also need food so I would trade you clothes for food. Populations continued to grow and so did there settlements and barter would no longer works so what do we humans do? We create money!! Some jobs were considered more important than others, not unlike today and so those jobs made people more money and with more money comes bigger houses, power and everything else we associate with money today. And if you had s lot of money and were “ambitious” you would start to think “hey I’m the coolest person ever. I should be in charge of every because I’m awesome.” now how do I make people do what I say even if they don’t want to? Well you create an army, you have a lot of extra money so you pay men to kill and fight other people and eventually if you’re winning they’ll submit. Then you extrapolate on that idea, i.e. That settlement over there has resources we’d like to have and some we need to have, so I’ll take my army over there and beat them into submission and they’ll give me all I want. Oh and I can use these conquered people to do all the shitty work now one wants to do here. Now you have slavery and war and a “king”.

This is a very brief explanation, just take these ideas and add in supporting evidence for them. In a nutshell what I wrote is your answer. Hope this works.

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