Planting and harvesting grain; ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs 

                      (credit: Norman de Garis Davies and Nina Davies, via Wikimedia Commons)

Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherer ones, and values such as patience, foresight, diligence, and perseverance quadrupled in importance. These values, which farming requires, would not replace the hunter-gatherers’ values totally and immediately, but the farmers’ values and their way of life grew until they, in their multiplying societies, had largely made the old values obsolete. The new agricultural way of life was just better at making more humans over more time. Population is the way to production and then to armies and power.

   

                                             Ruins of Ur, ancient Mesopotamian city 

                                           (credit: M.Lubinski, via Wikimedia Commons)

When hard grains that could be stored indefinitely were domesticated, towns were formed as an efficient ways to store the community’s food wealth in a central, defensible site. Of course, the progress from stage to stage had many recursions. Nomadic tribes with little food and plenty of aggression to spare were lurking, and the most aggressive tribes might for a time subjugate and exploit the city dwellers. Two ways of life tested themselves against each other. But in the end, the city dwellers won. They had more people, more goods, weapons, and soldiers.

Inside the new cities, governing bodies with administrative offices became necessary to ensure fair distribution of the tribe’s food and to organize the tribe’s members in ways that brought domestic order and protection from invaders. Following them came craftsmen and merchants who found a protected, central site with a large population more conducive to the practice of their arts than their old rural settings.

                                                     

                                                                        A potter in action at a potter’s wheel 

                                                        (credit:  © Yann Forget, via Wikimedia Commons )