The Neolithic Age and the First Civilization

Before kings and laws, there was continuity: ritual, surplus, and the quiet rise of power.

I always found it hard living in a world with such an oversimplified beginning. Perhaps our love of clean origin stories feeds the notion that civilization was born five thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia.

Maybe you’ve heard the names Gilgamesh, Hammurabi — the kings who supposedly invented law, cities, and the first proto-moral order.

More likely, if you’re among the 63% of Americans who are Christians, you’ve heard different names — Adam, Eve, Abraham, Noah — mythic forerunners planting earthly seeds of order and divinity.

The truth is less cinematic. There was no “civilization-boom” — no sudden sprouting of thirty cities on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. It wasn’t a master plan revealed by power brokers at some Vegas-style convention.

Like leavened bread, the ideas that would underwrite civilization would have risen long before anyone named them. They were myths carried by voice alone, passed through generations of Mesopotamians before writing caught them on clay.

Culture—and with it, the human urge to revisit and retell—was central to ancient identity. A shared ethic lay beneath the stories: a couple cast out for stealing fruit from their master’s orchard; brothers divided when famine made survival scarce; wanderers who trusted dreamlike visions, building boats to escape disaster.

Yet alongside these stories, power endured. More precisely, it was those who learned to shape power—who conditioned desire, who bent memory into history—who persuaded others to follow their rules.

Ancient Sumer is a convenient entry point to watch these forces at work, but its culture did not spark in a vacuum. Civilization was seepage — a long accumulation of experiments and adjustments. Treatments to traumas. It wasn’t a sudden invention.

By the time the Pleistocene ended, Homo sapiens had been fighting an existential war against the elements for tens of thousands of years. They had outlasted Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other proto-humans, becoming the unquestioned masters of the Levant, Europe, and East Asia just as the glaciers receded. Sedentarism was not a gift of good weather; it was a strategy rehearsed and plotted through generations.

Fig 0.1: A comparison of recent eras of our world

Viewed through this frame, modern-day Turkey sets the early standard of social stratification as we know it. Here stands the world’s oldest known megalithic complex — Göbekli Tepe, the first great ritual center. Around 9600 BC, at Göbekli Tepe, people gathered to hunt, feast, and carve stone as their wild herds of aurochs dwindled under environmental pressures. To survive, they harvested wild cereals on an imaginative scale, storing surplus grain in underground pits.

The resulting stability over the next millennia will allow the Anatolians to turn their migratory aurochs into cattle. They got the idea from the Zagros Mountains of Iran, where its inhabitants made sheep out of horned rams, and goats from the ibex.

The landscape of this ancient world forced societal change in different ways. It also looked different from today. Alluvial floodplains reached further inland, while any comparatively ancient coastal settlements would have been washed away by melting glaciers that lifted the sea.

The cataclysms, paired with the extinction of humanity’s cousins, support the apparent void in ritual evidence: a long silence between the cave art that flourished from Iberia to Mesopotamia before the Last Glacial Maximum, and then the sudden monumental evidence at Göbekli Tepe after the waters rose.

However, nothing would halt this newfound continuity in the Anatolian uplands, where ritual, herd, and harvest converged to shape the Neolithic Age. Where else but at the crossroads of the continents, right?

Out of that convergence came hierarchy — the capacity to direct surplus labor, to plan seasons ahead, and to bind groups under rules greater than kinship. For millennia their ancestors had gathered seeds of einkorn grass; now, as these Anatolians shared grains with their flocks, mutations produced sturdier cereals, staples that would one day raise emperors.

By 8500 BC, with the onset of cattle domestication, the scale of surplus and social differentiation expanded again. While pottery was unknown in this area of the world, settlements showed us the outlines of modern life: mud-brick houses clustered together, animal pens beside einkorn plots. A temple down the road. These were not yet cities, but they were the first experiments in stratified life.

At Nevalı Çori (8400–8100 BC), the ritual life of Göbekli Tepe merged with nascent pastoral traditions. Here, time, season, and cosmos combine with consumption, yielding a comparative sort of measurement to seed the foundations of knowledge and power.

Other sites from this era chart different emphases. Jerf el Ahmar (9500–8700 BC), on the Euphrates, and Tell es-Sultan at Jericho (c. 10000–7500 BC) reveal peoples tinkering with subsistence: inventing proto-breads, cultivating cereals in damp valleys, and venerating ancestors beneath plastered skulls.

They were not less productive than their Anatolian neighbors, but their gaze turned inward, toward the underworld of kinship and burial. The highlanders, on the other hand, looked upward — to sky and cycle — and in that orientation noticed a trait required of every farmer since: pattern recognition.

By 7,000 BC, the idea of staying in one place to tend a field had spread well beyond Anatolia. Wheat and barley became rooted in South Asia, while millet and rice were scaling up along the Yellow River. Archaeologists like to say these were independent inventions. But we’re human. Our words and symbols travel faster than goods. And need — need travels faster than both. That’s why agriculture, wherever it appears in the Old World, follows the same pattern: it follows megafauna collapse.

I don’t deny that the ancient Chinese domesticated millet on their own. However, I believe they only needed to do so around 7,000 BC, when their herds of wild grazers had thinned.

In that environment, I see more than coincidence. I see fragments of cultural exchange between different ‘factions’ of the world exiting the Ice Age.

Take far-off Japan, where the Jomon were making ceramics as early as 16,000 BC. For thousands of years, the idea lingered, obscure and unnecessary to a world cooking in pits and carrying subsistence in baskets. Pottery appears in the Near East, crossing through Siberia in the late 9^th Millenium. Not long after millet takes root in China, pottery explodes in the Fertile Crescent, becoming an indispensable tool for storing grain. The usefulness of this inadvertent cultural exchange ended there, however. China would have no use of sheep, goats, or cattle for another four thousand years. They were doing just fine with pigs, domesticated locally since 8,000 BC.

Europe, by contrast, hadn’t the need for farming or herding until 6,500 BC, when Anatolian migrants carried their livestock and wheat with them. This uneven spread of ideas is our first glimpse of proto-power. Ideas could leap freely between peoples, but moved only when needed. Whether born of necessity or guarded out of animus — power emerged from the choice of what could be shared, and what must be hoarded.

While the origins of pottery and its uses have been debated, just like agriculture — as separate regional developments versus waves of exchange — its need was never questioned. Pottery ‘contained’ the civilizational jump: it turned food into a commodity.

When sealed off from the elements, grain could be stored, measured, and traded. Food became power. But pottery isn’t the reason food became the power that forged civilizations. That was irrigation.

By 6000 BC, in southern Mesopotamia, rainfall could no longer be trusted to match the pace of growth. To hedge against scarcity, villagers cut shallow channels to divert river water into their fields. This idea spread quickly to other parts of the world. The first levees in Egypt appeared along the Nile by 5000 BC, and the Indus Valley saw canals by 4000 BC. Such projects required coordination and discipline across entire communities. To build a city, you didn’t just need a large population—you needed an influenced population.

Picture a village with a surplus of barley. The villagers trade it to their starving neighbors in return for help in building a wall. No longer able to tend a field of their own, the neighbors become wall-builders. Soon the village is feeding dozens more who prefer living behind the safe walls. Some tend the fields and herds, making them larger; others build a temple in thanksgiving. The initial villagers, having now become spiritual leaders, slaughter cattle in their temple, proclaiming heaven’s favor.

Kingship, still thousands of years away, was not a priority for the Anatolians. Archaeology suggests their energies were directed less toward civic authority than toward communal ritual and shared burial. Cattle, for instance, were not raised for daily meals but reserved for sacrifice, their slaughter marking moments of collective feasting and memory.

Across the northern Euphrates, temples and sacred spaces reinforced bonds of goodwill rather than consolidating political command. In the south, however, the pattern shifted. During the Ubaid period (6500–3800 BC), at sites like Eridu (5500–6000 BC), temples grew in step with irrigation works, expanding together in scale and complexity. What began as symbolic centers of ritual gradually took on administrative weight.

Anatolian, living in rainy highlands didn’t need to fuse priestly and administrative power. But in sweltering Mesopotamia, the stakes were different: survival now depended on diverting, storing, and rationing water from the Euphrates.

The Ubaid culture, forerunners of Sumerian city-states, started as small villages along the Euphrates. Like the Greeks, they pooled resources into a cooperative league of sorts, their fates tied to the river. In the Ubaid towns of Eridu, Ur, and Uqair, surplus was no longer an accident of good rain, but the result of planning, oversight, as well as scheduling.

At the nearby temples, clay tokens were sealed in round envelopes called bulla, representing how much barley, how many sheep, and how many jars of oil moved in and out. Eridu gives us that first fusion of priest and administrator—where gods were honored in the same rooms the grain was counted.

Other goods moved through these temples as well. Ubaid sites show evidence of long-distance trade in obsidian from Anatolia, shells from the Persian Gulf, and later, copper from the Arabian Peninsula. Surplus grain underwrote these imports. After all, in a land devoid of other natural resources, you couldn’t trade for luxury with anything other than calories.

Ubaid pottery, the intermodal container of its day, has been found in Syria, southwestern Iran, even as far as Oman. What entered Ubaid villages in return changed their character: exotic stone blades, ornaments, and new raw materials tied ritual life and status to distant landscapes.

Ethnography of Ubaid times comprised a heterogeneous blend of peoples from the Levant, Zagros, and Anatolia. Working together, they turned irrigation from an agriculture practice into a civic one. Once dug, canals had to be dredged and maintained – not once, but season after season. Yields across administrators and locales were measured and recorded. Any surplus was stored away in handy pottery.

With the rise of the Uruk period (4000-3100 BC), the ritual authority of rain-fed Anatolia contrasted with the labor-intensive canal cultures downstream. Archaeologists argue if the sheer abundance transformed the small-scale cooperative Ubaid settlements into flourishing cities like Uruk. No mass graves or burn layers have been discovered from the transition, and both Eridu and Uruk share a continuity in their sacred spaces. These were eras as much as they were cultures.

We can confirm the climate became more unpredictable in 4000 BC, when Mesopotamia fully tilted toward the arid desert it is today. Whether the Uruk culture expanded out of cataclysm or cooperation, without the canals, the region wouldn’t have cradled civilization.

It’s also during this millennium that we see at the edges of this irrigation culture, evidence signaling the establishment of trade outposts answerable to Uruk. Trade was emerging as the most powerful agent of advancement.

Surplus had become an economy linking these villages to the wider world, and Uruk reaped the spoils. At its zenith in the late 4^th millennium BC, it had swelled considerably, possibly reaching tens of thousands of inhabitants who subsisted off a porridge made from surplus barley.

This resulting gratitude for life saw Uruk’s temple district grow to a complex of shrines, workshops, and administrative courts. Later, in those same workshops, potters started working with a curious device for spinning clay. Hundreds of years later, descendants would turn the idea on its side, birthing the wheel.

As if Uruk hadn’t achieved enough, its accountants inadvertently created the first writing system. I like to imagine the anxiety of these first bean counters, their desks sprawling with clay tokens, their work piling up, stacking to the ceiling. I’d like to think cuneiform, the first written script, began with a neat freak, hoping to clear out the clutter by flattening wet clay to diagram a plan. I imagine the shared elation among coworkers once realizing they’d created a way to prevent surplus from ever falling into the wrong hands. Or maybe, the right ones.

To most citizens of Uruk, the achievement of written records would have meant little. Such is the rhythm of history: a technology born in one place often finds its destiny in another. The proto-cuneiform devised in Uruk comprised over six hundred symbols, the vast majority of which are abstract. This suggests that long before writing, people already shared intricate conceptual frameworks, philosophies, and dogmas. Yet the scribes of Uruk, in their ledgers of grain and sheep, pressed nothing of themselves into clay. No hint of belief, no art, no sense of the world as they lived it. The priestly classes, who had organized life for millennia, cared only for tallies—which would become a problem with rivals at their borders.

By 3200 BC, the Uruk system, for all its numerical brilliance, had little to offer its hinterlands for defense. To the east, Elamites in the Susiana plain developed their own script and harnessed their highland resources—timber, copper, silver—to build their own trade networks and launch raids. To the north, Uruk’s Anatolian outposts faltered. Ration bowls start appearing in the archaeological record, and with them, the first hints of ‘civic service’ being potentially involuntary.

And yet, as Uruk cedes the limelight to the upstart city of Kish, it does maintain the distinction of being the first city worth writing about. Six centuries after its peak, as Sumerian kings dominated the land, Uruk became the stage for the world’s first work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Historians view Sumer as the first civilization partly because its written language illuminated a societal structure where power shaped law into order. That’s not to say prior generations of these ancient peoples didn’t perform civilizational acts—we just simply don’t have a record of it.

The archaeological record is straightforward: what preceded the first Sumerian kingships in Kish was an age of conflict. The cultural and economic shifts between the peoples of the Zagros, Levant, and Mesopotamia could no longer support harmony.

Because later accounts of Sumerian kings were inscribed using the same symbols as Uruk’s grain accountants, we can say that Uruk was, in a structural sense, already Sumerian.

And yet Sumerian itself was a language with no discernible relatives. Sumerians called themselves sag̃-gí-ga (literally ‘head’ + ‘black’). Their artistic likenesses showed them bald, while their writings revered Dilmun—present-day Bahrain—as a sacred homeland. If Uruk’s decline cannot be chalked up to Semitic intrusion, can we suggest Sumerian identity was itself a kind of foreign intervention? The Sumerian’s otherness might explain their isolation atop the social hierarchy in the years following conflicts with the Elamites. Later, Akkadian rulers—speakers of the region’s Semitic lingua franca—would adopt the Sumerian script while keeping their own words.

This ascension of outsider kingship marks the start of Sumerian civilization and its Early Dynastic period (2900-2350 BC) when palaces, independent of temples, first rise in Uruk and, more successfully, Kish. Evidence suggests kingship grew out of strife: beyond raiding Elamites, the retreating Persian Gulf forced a profound reordering of coastal life. For the people of the comparatively ancient cities of Ur and Eridu, finding themselves now miles from shore would have had a harrowing effect on the temple order.

To say the Sumerians who followed invented civil society by writing laws is the equivalent of saying the chicken comes before the egg. Before the egg, it wasn’t a chicken.

Civilization becomes cheapened when applied as a sequential criterion, confirming the threshold ‘crossed’ only after verified kingship and writing. Proto-cuneiform provided verifiable proof of complex administration in this area for six hundred years, and archaeological proof of industry stretches thousands more before that. Chiefdoms along the Nile had been digging ditches for nearly two thousand years when Narmer united the river’s upper and lower thrones in c. 3100 BC.

Can’t this ‘Egypt,’ the first clear nation-state, having traded with Mesopotamia for thousands of years stand as evidence of a world order anatomically similar to our own? Sure, our advanced nuclear capabilities perturb the possibility of global war. But in the Early Dynastic, with its staggering populations and absence of horseback writing, wouldn’t it be difficult to sack a walled Sumerian city with copper tools? It would be much easier, however, to plunder trade.

Theoretically, the absence of bronze meant peace. Was its development in Sumer, and the wars to ensue, be the real reason we call it the first civilization?

Humans of the Fertile Crescent had been working with copper for two thousand years before ‘needing’ bronze. It’s not out of the question to think outside pressure squeezed inward, forcing Mesopotamian temple classes to balance external trade with an aggrieved population. It’s quite plausible that a similar resource scarcity in the Upper Nile spurred Narmer onward to dynasty and kingship. Regardless of motive, kingly actions possess clear intent: earthly dominion. These men would seem themselves assuming a role too-long held by priests and implied gods.

Narmer, now the first archeologically evident king, implies: ‘I am your god now.’ So too would every king thereafter.

It’s hard to imagine the idea of a god-king not spreading like wildfire in an already interconnected world. Boats on the Euphrates could travel 40 kilometers per day: how could there not be unwritten world news?

Viewing Sumer as the inverse of Egypt, a land of cities so vast they couldn’t be subjected by any one upland force, a domineering culture would need to control trade, not weaponry. From this perspective, we see the dynamics of civilizational struggle to play out in more varied ways than typically imagined following periods flush with violence.

Perhaps Uruk and Kish faced an embargo and turned to hardier people of the sea for protection? Maybe the Sumerian language was spoken by foreigners who realized Mesopotamian cities had now become an ideal investment.

That doesn’t sound like a political culture springing from nothing. Until the late fourth millennium’s authoritarian turn, we’ve dug up a world that never had to boast about any one person. In all prior iconography, we see the gods of wind, rain, livestock—they were the idyll. Art and expression were thanksgivings for a prosperous existence because of a prosperous temple. Sumer then, by 3000 BC, is the answer when ritual no longer provides the control it once did six thousand years ago in Anatolia.

The archaeological record shows us that possessing a written language does not make individuals as worthy of permanence. Only later, after power structures are solidified, do they need reinforcement with ‘memory.’ The Elamites, as we’ve mentioned, developed their own writing in near parallel, as did Egypt, now a unified kingdom of over two hundred years.

Yet the earliest historically attestable king is Enmebaragesi of Kish, who won’t appear until c. 2700 BC—and even then, isn’t recorded in surviving text until seven centuries later, when Akkadian scribes compiled the Sumerian King List. Written in Sumer’s cuneiform script adjusted to their own tongue, the King List, like all ancient literature, is best read as an almanac straddling myth and history, not literal truth.

But there is widespread belief that Enmebaragesi is the first king whose ‘talk’ to some extent, matches the ‘walk.’ While the King List states he ruled for a staggering nine hundred years, his own dedicatory inscriptions recount both battles and temple works in Kish. It is under his name that we find the first record of war with Elam (not the first conflict, proper) — and the earliest glimpse of the lugal, or ‘big man’ whose authority was no longer confined to the temple, and cemented on the battlefield.

Now, I acknowledge this book is entitled Eighteen Batons: Lessons in the Spokes of Empire, so I’d imagine revisionist interpretations of Ancient Sumer wasn’t sold to you on the jacket.

In truth, describing the eighteen handoffs of civilizational hegemony isn’t so much an exercise in threading history as it is interpreting it. For that, I had to meet you where you were at: sitting there, with ancient Sumer in your mind as the first civilization. And what better way to start this journey together than to totally wreck that worldview in a short amount of words.

I see the Neolithic Age itself as the first civilization. We’ve traced the connections over thousands of years between people in different places, who shared best practices and genetics.

Intuitively, long before Sumer, humans were ‘civilized’ in purer ways. Meso- and Paleolithic structures reveal communities that, when not crushed by environment, were curious, cooperative, and striving for better ways to weather existence.

Instead of assuming these women had no agency in otherwise joyous times, can we not imagine rituals invoking fertility goddesses weren’t celebrations of inter-clan ‘unions?’ A proto-wedding of sorts?

I’m not saying ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia were feminist utopias, but you can acknowledge utopian aspects in their existential ascent. In other ways, their advancement was so slow, they would have ‘crossed into’ civilization mostly without noticing.

It will take another thousand years after Sumer before anyone expresses the notion of what it meant to be ‘civilized’ in writing. Later, the Romans would give this notion of civilization its most enduring typecast: empire.

The single most dominant idea of human existence, stalking us in much the same form today as it did five thousand years ago, empire is an inheritance bargained for life in a dying world.

To say that civilization was born at Sumer really means to say civilization was born out of scarcity. This feels incorrect. Does that mean that before, in times of plenty, we were uncivilized?

Reorienting Sumer’s meaning doesn’t mean diminishing it. I would argue much more effectively than being this arbitrary marker in your mind for where society started, Sumer serves as the first legible place to critique our relationship with structure.

As humans, we are born with no choice of place. What birth assigns becomes identity, and every iteration of ourselves until death will be in relation to that origin. So too it is with civilization.

Narratively, birth is legacy, family. Scientifically, it is version control. Ideas and conceptual frameworks like that have never been difficult for humans to imply, so why do we think we developed a complex idea like self or civilization suddenly because we have a translatable record of it? Would you consider an illiterate person alive today adaptable?

To this day, nonverbal communication carries 65% of the meaning shared in a face-to-face interaction. A new medium of exchange simply requires an egg.

Better phrased, we may be giving the invention of writing outsized credit for the resulting events of history. Now I recognize the danger, as a writer—and a reader—of that statement for the purposes of keeping you reading this book. But it’s because of that bias for writing I can show you how a continuous hegemony is as readable as identity.

Empire. Self. You must know—it’s all symbolic. And knowing that is the first step in learning how to reach for the baton, the next spoke in the empire wheel.