discuss the development of urbanization in a Southern Mesopotamia answer in 200 words
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Answer:
Aerial View of Pompeii (by Brooklyn Museum Archives. Goodyear Archival Collection. Visual materials [6.1.024]: Pompeii. Theaters, Pompeii, Italy., Public Domain)
Urbanization is the process by which rural communities grow to form cities, or urban centers, and, by extension, the growth and expansion of those cities. Urbanization began in ancient Mesopotamia in the Uruk Period (4300-3100 BCE) for reasons scholars have not yet agreed on. It is speculated, however, that a particularly prosperous and efficient village attracted the attention of other, less prosperous, tribes who then attached themselves to the successful settlement.
The historian Lewis Mumford notes that:
...though permanent villages date only from Neolithic times, the habit of resorting to caves for the collective performance of magical ceremonies seems to date back to an earlier period…The outline of the city as both an outward form and an inward pattern of life might be found in such assemblages (1).
This process, then, gave rise to the densely populated centers which came to be known as 'cities’. The historian Helen Chapin Metz proposes that the growth of the cities in Mesopotamia was the result of the inhabitants struggling to cope with the environment.
Answer:
Once upon a time, in the land known as Sumer, the people built a temple to their god who had conquered the forces of chaos and brought order to the world. They built this temple at a place called Eridu, which was “one of the most southerly sites, at the very edge of the alluvial river plain and close to the marshes: the transitional zone between sea and land, with its shifting watercourses, islands and deep reed thickets” (Leick, 2).
Mythological Origins
This marshy area, hemmed about by hard land and sand dunes, represented to the people the life-giving force of the god and provided a physical manifestation of the order their god had created from chaos; the sweet waters of life were celebrated at Eridu as they were associated with what the Sumerians called the abzu, the primordial source of all existence, the realm in which the gods lived and from which they emerged.