Class 11 History Chapter 1 Writing and City Life NCERT Solutions in English

Q. Why do we say that it was not natural fertility and high levels of food production that were the causes of early urbanisation?

Answer: A good harvest is what makes a city possible, but it is not what brings one into being. Southern Mesopotamia had extremely productive irrigated agriculture, yet villages there had been growing food for thousands of years before any of them turned into a city, and the fertile north-eastern plains, farmed from about 7000 BCE, never produced the first cities at all.
What actually distinguishes a city is its economy. In a city, food production is only one activity among several, alongside trade, manufacturing and services, and people are no longer self-sufficient. A seal carver needs bronze tools and coloured stones he cannot obtain himself, and the man who makes those tools does not go out and dig for copper and tin. That constant exchange between specialists is the division of labour, and it needs social organisation to store goods, equip trading expeditions and keep records.
There is a second point the chapter makes strongly. Southern Mesopotamia had no good stone, no metal ore and only weak date-palm and poplar wood, so it had to trade its textiles and grain for wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell and stone from Turkey, Iran and across the Gulf. Scarcity, not abundance, is what forced the organisation that city life rests on. So high food production was a necessary background condition, while the real causes were trade, specialisation and the organisation both demand.

Q. Which of the following were necessary conditions and which the causes, of early urbanisation, and which would you say were the outcome of the growth of cities:
(a) highly productive agriculture,
(b) water transport,
(c) the lack of metal and stone,
(d) the division of labour,
(e) the use of seals,
(f) the military power of kings that made labour compulsory?

Answer:
Necessary conditions
(a) Highly productive agriculture. A town holds many people who grow no food of their own, so a dependable surplus has to exist before a city can. It is a condition rather than a cause, because surpluses existed in villages for centuries without cities appearing.
(b) Water transport. Pack animals and bullock carts eat their way through the value of a long journey, whereas boats and barges are carried by the current or the wind. Mesopotamia’s canals and channels ran between settlements and so served as trade routes. Without this cheap carriage the trade a city lives on could not have been sustained.
Causes
(c) The lack of metal and stone. Because the south had neither, it had to send out organised expeditions and exchange its textiles and produce for wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell and stone. Trade on that scale required storage, coordination and written records, which is exactly what pulls people together into a city.
(d) The division of labour. Once specialists depend on one another, living within reach of one another stops being a choice. This mutual dependence is what actively drives clustering, so it belongs among the causes.
Outcomes
(e) The use of seals. A cylinder seal rolled over the knot of a package or the mouth of a jar showed the contents were untouched, and rolled on a clay letter it proved the sender’s identity. Both uses matter only where strangers deal with one another regularly, so the seal is a product of city life.
(f) The military power of kings that made labour compulsory. Kingship grew out of repeated conflict over land and water in a settled, crowded landscape. Once established, kings put war captives and local people to compulsory work for the temple or for themselves, paid in rations. This is something urban society produced, not something that produced it.

Q. Why were mobile animal herders not necessarily a threat to town life?

Answer: Because the two ways of life fed each other. Herders brought young animals, cheese, leather and meat into settled districts and carried away grain and metal tools in return, and a flock penned on a stubble field left manure that improved the next crop. Herders also filled gaps the settled economy could not fill on its own, working as harvest labourers and hiring themselves out as soldiers.
There was genuine friction, and the chapter does not hide it. A shepherd taking his flock across a sown field towards water could ruin it, mobile herdsmen could raid a village’s stored grain, and settled communities could stop herders from reaching canal water along a particular route.
What Mari shows, though, is that a well-run town managed this instead of fighting it. Tribes were allowed to move through the kingdom while officers kept them under watch, and letters mention fire signals passing between camps at night as a warning of possible raids. The openness went further still: Mari’s own kings were Amorites, whose people had come in from the western desert. They dressed differently from the original inhabitants, honoured the traditional Mesopotamian gods, and also built a temple at Mari for Dagan, the god of the steppe. Newcomers of this kind, the Akkadians, Amorites, Assyrians and Aramaeans among them, repeatedly rose to found ruling dynasties, and the chapter treats this readiness to absorb different peoples as one source of the civilisation’s vitality.

Q. Why would the early temple have been much like a house?

Answer: Because that is precisely what it was believed to be. A temple was the residence of a god, the Moon God of Ur, say, or Inanna, the Goddess of Love and War, and a house is what one builds for someone to live in. The earliest known temple, of about 5000 BCE, was therefore a small shrine made of unbaked brick, put up in the same materials and on the same plan as the homes around it, with rooms set about an open courtyard.
Only one feature marked it out from the beginning: its outer wall went in and out at regular intervals, which no ordinary house wall did. Everything else that later made temples imposing came with time. They were rebuilt on the same spot again and again, larger each time and in fired brick, and they took on functions no household had: the god was treated as the owner of the local fields, fisheries and herds, produce was processed there, oil pressed, grain ground, wool spun and woven, and the community’s written records were kept there. The temple that began as a house for a god ended as the central institution of the city.

Q. Of the new institutions that came into being once city life had begun, which would have depended on the initiative of the king?

Answer:
Institutions that needed a king
1. Compulsory labour paid in rations. War captives and local people were set to work directly for the temple or the ruler. This was not an agricultural tax but forced service, and hundreds of ration lists survive recording the grain, cloth and oil each worker received. Only someone with military power could compel it, and nothing else explains how one temple could absorb an estimated 1,500 men working ten hours a day for five years.
2. Organised long-distance trade. The Sumerian poem about Enmerkar states plainly that this early ruler of Uruk organised the first trade of Sumer, sending his messenger across seven mountain ranges to Aratta for lapis lazuli and precious metals. Expeditions on that scale needed authority, escorts and resources beyond any single household or workshop.
3. City defences and monumental building. Uruk raised a defensive wall very early, and Gilgamesh is remembered for the city wall with foundations of fired brick that he built. Walls, temples and palaces are works of coordinated labour, which brings us back to point one.
4. Writing, as the Mesopotamians themselves explained it. In their own tradition it was Enmerkar who first wrote words on clay, when his messenger grew weary of mouth. Whatever the historical truth, this tells us they understood record keeping as something kingship had brought into existence.
Institutions that did not depend on him
5. The temple. It is older than kingship. A small shrine of unbaked brick stood in the south from about 5000 BCE, long before there were kings, and it became the city’s main institution through its own growth. Successful war leaders offered booty to the gods and beautified it, which is how they gained authority, so the temple made kings rather than the other way round.
6. The division of labour and the use of seals. These arose from the working of the urban economy itself. Specialists needed each other, and seals were needed wherever strangers exchanged goods and letters.
Conclusion
7. The institutions that depended on the king are those requiring force or large-scale coordination, that is compulsory labour, organised trade and monumental building. The temple and the specialised crafts arose from community life, and kings then took them over and enlarged them.

Q. What do ancient stories tell us about the civilisation of Mesopotamia?

Answer:
1. That the city was a Mesopotamian’s true legacy. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written on twelve tablets, closes with its hero back at Uruk after failing to find the secret of immortality. He crossed the waters believed to surround the world and came home with nothing, and his consolation is to walk along the wall of his city, looking at its foundations of fired brick. A hero of a tribal society would have comforted himself with the thought of sons outliving him. Gilgamesh takes pride instead in what his people had built together.
2. That kingship was seen as the source of trade and of writing. The poem about Enmerkar has him organise the first trade of Sumer and then form a clay tablet in his hand and write, because his messenger could no longer carry long spoken messages accurately. The story is not literal history, but it records what Mesopotamians believed about their own beginnings.
3. That they thought their urban culture superior. In the same poem, writing is treated as a mark of Mesopotamian distinction over the land of Aratta, which tells us how they placed themselves among their neighbours.
4. That stories preserved the memory of real events. Mesopotamian tradition tells of a great flood survived by a hero named Ziusudra or Utnapishtim, closely parallel to the Bible’s account of Noah. So strong was the resemblance that in 1873 a British newspaper funded a British Museum expedition to find the tablet. By the 1960s scholars had concluded that such narratives were not literally true but were ways of remembering historical change.
5. That city life itself was valued. 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 lament for fallen cities is a theme of their literature.
6. That the past was worth preserving. Copies of texts like the Gilgamesh epic recorded the name of the copier and the date, and Assurbanipal sent his scribes south to hunt out old tablets for his library at Nineveh, all of which shows a civilisation conscious of its own antiquity.
Conclusion
7. The account tablets tell us what Mesopotamians owned and traded. The stories tell us what they thought and valued: their idea of kingship, their pride in their cities, their explanation of writing, and their memory of catastrophe.