Class 11 History Chapter 1 Writing and City Life Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. What does the word Mesopotamia mean?

Answer: It comes from the Greek mesos, middle, and potamos, river, and means the land lying between two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris.

Q. What is cuneiform, and where does the word come from?

Answer: Cuneiform is the wedge-shaped writing pressed into damp clay with a cut reed, and the word joins the Latin cuneus, wedge, with forma, shape.

Q. What is a ziggurat?

Answer: A ziggurat is a stepped, tower-like temple platform built in ancient Mesopotamian cities, and Babylon had one in its ritual centre.

Q. What is a cylinder seal?

Answer: It is a small pierced stone cylinder, fitted on a stick and rolled over damp clay so that a continuous picture, and sometimes writing, appears.

Q. What is meant by a nuclear family?

Answer: A nuclear family is a household of a man, his wife and their children, rather than a large joint or extended household.

Q. What is a sump, and where were sumps found at Ur?

Answer: A sump is a covered basin sunk in the ground into which water and sewage flow, and at Ur they lay inside the courtyards of houses.

Q. What is a stele?

Answer: A stele is a stone slab carved with inscriptions or images, and Nabonidus used the carving on one to decide how a priestess should be dressed.

Q. Why did using bronze mean organising long-distance trade?

Answer: Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and neither metal was found in southern Mesopotamia, so both had to be fetched from far away.

Q. What first drew European scholars to the ruins of Mesopotamia?

Answer: The Bible, because the Book of Genesis speaks of Shimar, that is Sumer, as a land of brick-built cities, and early excavators hoped to prove such stories literally true.

Q. Why do historians say that rich soil and plentiful food alone do not account for the rise of the earliest cities?

Answer: Villages with good harvests existed for thousands of years without becoming cities. A city needs an economy of trade, manufacture and services on top of farming, and the social organisation to run storage, exchange and records. Food surplus makes cities possible, it does not create them.

Q. What is the division of labour, and why is it treated as a mark of city life?

Answer: It means people specialise, so that no one is self-sufficient. A seal carver needs bronze tools and coloured stones he cannot get himself, and the toolmaker does not mine his own copper and tin. That constant dependence on each other is exactly what village life does not require.

Q. Why was carriage by water the cheapest way of moving goods in Mesopotamia?

Answer: Pack animals and bullock carts have to be fed all the way, which makes long journeys expensive. Boats and barges are pushed along by the current or the wind at almost no cost, and Mesopotamia’s canals and channels ran between settlements, so they served as trade routes as well as irrigation works.

Q. Why did the very first Mesopotamian writing take the shape of lists rather than stories?

Answer: Writing began in the temples of Uruk as a way of recording goods coming in and going out. About 5,000 of the oldest tablets survive, and they are lists of oxen, fish and bread loaves. Stories could be remembered and retold, but the quantities of a hundred daily transactions could not.

Q. How was a clay tablet made, and why did every transaction need a fresh one?

Answer: The scribe patted wet clay into a flat piece he could hold in one hand, smoothed both surfaces, and pressed wedge-shaped signs into it with the obliquely cut end of a reed. Once it dried in the sun it grew as hard as pottery and would take no further sign, so each new deal needed a new tablet.

Q. Why would the earliest temple have looked much like an ordinary house?

Answer: The temple was thought of as the house where a god lived, so it was built on the same idea as a human dwelling: a small shrine of unbaked brick, with rooms set around an open courtyard. Only its outer wall was different, going in and out at regular intervals.

Q. How did the temple grow into the leading institution of a Mesopotamian city?

Answer: It was rebuilt larger and larger, and became the theoretical owner of the local fields, fisheries and herds. It also organised production, pressing oil, grinding grain, spinning and weaving, and it kept the community’s written records, so economic life and religious life both ran through it.

Q. What did the poem about Enmerkar tell Mesopotamians about their own past?

Answer: It told them that kingship organised both trade and writing: Enmerkar sent messengers to Aratta for lapis lazuli and metals, and wrote on clay when spoken messages failed. It also let them treat writing as proof that their urban culture stood above its neighbours.

Q. Why is the seal described as an object belonging to city life?

Answer: Rolled across the knotted string of a package or the mouth of a jar, it kept goods safe from tampering, and rolled on a clay letter it proved who had sent it. Both uses matter only where strangers deal with each other regularly, which is a city.

Q. Describe the different environments of Mesopotamia, and explain why the earliest cities appeared in the south.

Answer: 1. The north-east is green rolling plain rising to wooded mountains, watered by streams and enough rain for farming as far back as 7000 to 6000 BCE.
2. The north is upland steppe, better suited to herding sheep and goats than to crops.
3. In the east the tributaries of the Tigris open routes into the mountains of Iran.
4. The south is desert, yet it is where the first cities and the first writing appeared.
5. This was possible because the Euphrates and the Tigris carry fine silt from the northern mountains and lay it down when they flood, and because the rivers break into channels that could be used for irrigation.
6. The result was farming that the textbook calls the most productive of any ancient system, more productive even than the agriculture of the Roman empire.

Q. Trace how writing developed in Mesopotamia and what it came to be used for.

Answer: 1. The first tablets, about 3200 BCE, carried picture-like signs and numbers, and recorded goods moving in and out of the temples of Uruk.
2. Writing was needed because city transactions involved many people, many goods and many occasions, so memory alone would not serve.
3. Signs were pressed into damp clay with a cut reed, and the dried tablet was almost as hard as pottery.
4. By about 2600 BCE the signs had become fully cuneiform and the language written was Sumerian.
5. From then on writing did far more than record: it was used for dictionaries, for giving legal force to the transfer of land, for narrating the deeds of kings, and for announcing changes a king had made to customary law.
6. Cuneiform in the Akkadian language stayed in use until the first century CE, more than two thousand years in all.

Q. Explain how war leaders in southern Mesopotamia turned into kings, and what Uruk shows of that process.

Answer: 1. Farming in the south was never safe: channels flooded or shifted course, and upstream villages could take too much water or let silt block a channel, so quarrels over land and water were constant.
2. Leaders who won these fights rewarded their followers with loot and took prisoners from the defeated as guards and servants, which built up a personal following.
3. The shrewdest offered their booty to the gods and beautified the community’s temple, so their power looked like service to everyone.
4. That won them the standing to organise the distribution of temple wealth and to command the whole community, and the position hardened into kingship.
5. Uruk shows the outcome: its art shows armed heroes and their victims, it built a defensive wall early, and by about 3000 BCE it covered 250 hectares while dozens of villages nearby emptied.
6. Labour for the temple or the ruler was compulsory rather than a tax, and was paid in rations, one temple alone taking an estimated 1,500 men working ten hours a day for five years.

Q. What did the excavation of Ur reveal about ordinary houses and daily life?

Answer: 1. Ur was dug systematically in the 1930s, and its narrow winding lanes show that there was no town planning at all, and no room for wheeled carts, so donkeys brought in grain and firewood.
2. Unlike Mohenjo-daro of the same period, Ur had no drains under its streets. Drains and clay pipes lay inside the courtyards, and roofs sloped inward so that rain ran into covered sumps.
3. People swept household rubbish into the lanes, so street levels rose steadily and thresholds had to be raised again and again to keep mud out.
4. Rooms had no windows, and light came in from doorways opening on the inner courtyard, which also gave the family privacy.
5. Omen tablets record the superstitions attached to houses: a raised threshold brought wealth, a front door not facing another house was lucky, and a main door opening outward meant a wife who would torment her husband.
6. The town cemetery held graves of royalty and of ordinary people alike, and a few individuals were buried under the floors of their own houses.

Q. Why were herders on the move not necessarily a danger to a town such as Mari?

Answer: 1. Farmers and herders needed one another. Herders gave young animals, cheese, leather and meat, and took grain and metal tools in exchange.
2. A flock penned on a harvested field manured the soil, so the herder’s animals improved the farmer’s next crop.
3. Herders also filled real gaps in the settled economy, coming in as harvest labourers and as hired soldiers.
4. The friction was real but limited: a flock crossing a sown field to reach water could ruin it, herdsmen could raid stored grain, and villagers could block herders from canal water.
5. Mari managed this rather than fighting it. Tribes were allowed to move through the kingdom while being watched, and officers’ letters mention night fire signals passing between camps.
6. The openness went further still: Mari’s own kings were Amorites, newcomers from the western desert, who honoured the old gods of the land and also built a temple to Dagan, god of the steppe.

Q. How was Abu Salabikh excavated, and what did the method uncover?

Answer: 1. Modern teams rarely have the funds for the huge digs of a century ago, so excavation is now smaller and far more careful. Abu Salabikh, about 10 hectares and under 10,000 people around 2500 BCE, was dug this way.
2. Archaeologists scraped the top few millimetres off the mound while the soil beneath was still damp, which let them read the colour and texture of buried brick walls.
3. Tons of earth were then sieved to recover tiny plant and animal remains, including large quantities of charred fish bones swept out into the streets.
4. Kitchens were identified by the plant seeds and fibre left where dung cakes had been burnt as fuel, and living rooms by having far fewer such traces.
5. Young pig teeth scattered along the streets showed that pigs roamed freely, and one house burial held pig bones, probably food for the dead person’s afterlife.
6. Microscopic study of floor surfaces separated roofed rooms, with traces of poplar logs, palm leaves and straw, from rooms open to the sky.

Q. What did Mesopotamia leave the world in mathematics and the reckoning of time?

Answer: 1. Stories travel by word of mouth, but a scholarly tradition needs written texts that later scholars can read and build on, so this legacy rests entirely on writing.
2. Tablets from about 1800 BCE already carry multiplication and division tables, tables of squares and square roots, and even tables of compound interest.
3. One tablet gives the square root of 2 as 1 + 24/60 + 51/60 squared + 10/60 cubed, which works out to 1.41421296 against a true value of 1.41421356.
4. Students were set practical problems, such as finding the volume of water covering a field of a given area to the depth of one finger.
5. The division of the year into 12 months, the month into four weeks, the day into 24 hours and the hour into 60 minutes all come from Mesopotamian astronomy, which took the month from the moon’s revolution round the earth.
6. This knowledge passed to the successors of Alexander, then to the Roman world, then to the world of Islam, and finally to medieval Europe, which is how it reached us.

Q. Describe the palace of Zimrilim and explain what made Mari wealthy.

Answer: 1. Zimrilim ruled at Mari between 1810 and 1760 BCE, and his palace was at once the royal family’s home, the headquarters of the kingdom’s administration, and a centre of production, above all of ornaments in precious metal.
2. It had 260 rooms across 2.4 hectares, with a single entrance, on the north.
3. It was famous enough that a minor king from northern Syria travelled there simply to see it, carrying a letter of introduction from a friend of Zimrilim.
4. Daily lists record the enormous quantities of food served at the king’s table, and the scribes’ room had benches and clay bins for storing tablets.
5. Mari’s wealth came from position rather than power. It stood on the Euphrates between the cities of the south and the mineral-rich uplands of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, so wood, copper, tin, oil and wine all moved past it.
6. Officers inspected each cargo, a single boat could carry 300 wine jars, and took a toll of about one tenth of the value, which is how a state that was never militarily strong grew exceptionally prosperous.

Q. Once city life had begun, new institutions came into being. Which of them would have depended on the initiative of the king? Give reasons.

Answer: What the king clearly set going
1. Compulsory labour. War captives and local people were put to work for the temple or the ruler and paid in rations, and the ration lists survive. Only a ruler with military power could impose this, and without it a temple needing 1,500 men for five years could never have been built.
2. Organised long-distance trade. The poem of Enmerkar says in so many words that the king organised the first trade of Sumer, sending messengers to Aratta for lapis lazuli and metals. Equipping such expeditions needed authority and resources no single household had.
3. The city’s defences. Uruk’s early defensive wall, and the wall of fired brick that Gilgamesh is said to have built, are works of the same kind: too large for anything but royal command.
4. Writing itself, in the tradition’s own telling. Enmerkar is credited with first writing words on clay, which shows that Mesopotamians saw record keeping as something kingship brought into being.

What grew without him, or alongside him
5. The temple came first. It began about 5000 BCE as a small shrine of unbaked brick, long before kings existed, and grew into the owner of fields, fisheries and herds. Kings later beautified it with booty, but they did not create it.
6. The division of labour and the use of seals came out of the working of the urban economy itself, not from any royal order.

Conclusion
7. The institutions that depended on the king are the ones needing force or large-scale coordination, that is compulsory labour, organised trade and city defences, while the temple and the specialised crafts grew out of community life and were then taken over and enlarged by kings.

Q. What do the old Mesopotamian stories let us see of that civilisation?

Answer: They show what Mesopotamians valued
1. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written on twelve tablets, ends with its hero returning defeated from his search for immortality and finding consolation in walking along the wall of Uruk, admiring its foundations of fired brick, the wall he had built.
2. A tribal hero would console himself with the thought that his sons would outlive him. Gilgamesh takes pride instead in the city his people built, which tells us the city, and not the family line, was the real legacy.

They show how they understood trade and writing
3. The poem of Enmerkar makes an early ruler of Uruk organise the first trade of Sumer and then invent writing on clay when his messenger grew weary of mouth. Mesopotamians therefore saw both trade and writing as gifts of kingship.
4. The same poem treats writing as a mark of superiority over neighbouring lands, which tells us how they ranked their own urban culture.

They preserve memories of real events
5. The flood story, whose hero is called Ziusudra or Utnapishtim, matches the Bible’s account of Noah closely enough that a British newspaper funded a British Museum expedition in 1873 to find the tablet. By the 1960s scholars had concluded that such stories were ways of remembering historical change rather than literal reports.

They show pride in city life itself
6. Mesopotamians took pride in living beside people of many communities and cultures, and when a city was destroyed in war they mourned it in poetry, which is why the destruction of cities is a theme of their literature.

Conclusion
7. Taken together the stories give us the inner life of the civilisation: its idea of kingship, its pride in its cities, its explanation of writing, and its memory of disasters, none of which the account tablets record.

Q. Sort highly productive agriculture, water transport, the shortage of metal and stone, the division of labour, the use of seals, and the military power of kings, into necessary conditions, causes and outcomes of early urbanisation, and justify each choice.

Answer: Necessary conditions
1. Highly productive agriculture. A city holds people who grow no food, so a surplus must exist first. Yet villages had surpluses for centuries without becoming cities, so this is a condition and never a cause.
2. Water transport. Boats and barges moved goods for almost nothing where pack animals would have eaten the profit. Without cheap carriage the trade that a city lives on could not be sustained, so this too had to be in place.

Causes
3. The shortage of metal and stone. Southern Mesopotamia had no good stone, no metal ore and only weak date-palm and poplar wood, so it had to exchange its textiles and farm produce for wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell and stone from Turkey, Iran and across the Gulf. Regular trade on that scale needed organisation, storage and records, which is what pulls people into a city.
4. The division of labour. Once a seal carver depends on a bronze toolmaker, and the toolmaker on an importer of copper and tin, everyone must live within reach of everyone else. That mutual dependence is what makes clustering worthwhile, so it drives urbanisation forward.

Outcomes
5. The use of seals. A cylinder seal marks a package as untampered and a letter as genuine, which matters only where strangers deal with one another often. It appears because city life already exists.
6. The military power of kings that made labour compulsory. Kingship grew out of repeated conflict over land and water inside an already settled and crowded landscape, and compulsory labour paid in rations is what that power then produced.

Conclusion
7. The order is therefore: agriculture and cheap transport made cities possible, scarcity and specialisation made them happen, and seals and royal power are what city life then generated.

Q. How did the Mesopotamians themselves collect and study their own past? Answer with reference to Assurbanipal at Nineveh and Nabonidus at Babylon.

Answer: The setting
1. In the iron age the Assyrians of the north built an empire that at its height, between 720 and 610 BCE, reached as far as Egypt, and ran on a predatory economy of tribute in food, animals, metal and craft goods.
2. Even so the Assyrian kings looked to Babylonia in the south as the centre of high culture, which is why their scholarship faced southward.

Assurbanipal’s library
3. Assurbanipal, who ruled from 668 to 627 BCE and was the last of the great Assyrian kings, gathered a library at Nineveh, sending his own scribes south to hunt out old tablets on history, epic poetry, omens, astrology, hymns and songs.
4. It held roughly 1,000 texts on about 30,000 tablets, arranged by subject, and baskets of tablets carried clay labels naming the subject and the scribe, which is cataloguing in everything but name.
5. This was possible because Babylonian scribal schools trained students to copy tablets by the dozen, and because Sumerian, though it had stopped being spoken by about 1800 BCE, went on being taught through vocabulary texts, sign lists and bilingual tablets. So around 650 BCE a scribe could still read a tablet written in 2000 BCE.

Nabonidus as an early archaeologist
6. Nabopolassar freed Babylonia from Assyrian rule in 625 BCE, and Babylon grew into the premier city of the world, over 850 hectares, with a triple wall, palaces, temples, a ziggurat and a processional way.
7. Nabonidus, its last independent ruler, restored the forgotten office of High Priestess of Ur after a dream, found a stele of a king we date to about 1150 BCE, and copied the priestess’s dress and jewellery from its carving for his own daughter. He also had a broken statue of Sargon of Akkad, who ruled about 2370 BCE, repaired out of reverence for the gods and respect for kingship.

Conclusion
8. Both men treated the past as something worth recovering and preserving: Assurbanipal by collecting and cataloguing texts, Nabonidus by seeking out objects and reading evidence from them. That is why Mesopotamia can be said to have produced the first libraries and the first archaeologists.