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 in one letter an officer reports frequent fire signals at night, sent from one camp to another, which he suspected meant a raid or an attack was being planned. 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 bricks, and the chapter suggests that some of the early temples were possibly not unlike the ordinary house.
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 built and rebuilt at the same selected spots, becoming larger over time, 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.

Q. A question to think about is whether the many activities that went on in cities would have been possible if writing had not developed.

Answer: Most of them would not have been possible on the scale Mesopotamian cities reached. Writing began, about 3200 BCE, because city transactions took place at different times and involved many people and many goods: the first 5,000 tablets of Uruk are lists of oxen, fish and bread loaves going into or out of the temples. The temple kept written records of the grain, plough animals, bread, beer and fish it distributed, and hundreds of ration lists record the grain, cloth or oil given to each person put to work. Writing also gave legal validity to land transfers, carried letters between kings and officials (the officers of Mari reported on the herders’ camps by letter), recorded the deeds of kings and the changes they made to customary law, and made possible the mathematics and astronomy that later scholars built on. Stories can be passed on by word of mouth, but accounts, contracts, letters and science need written texts.

Q. Choose one date from each of the six columns and discuss the possible significance of the process/event for men and women living in the region.

Answer: One possible choice, one entry from each column:
Africa, 3000-2000 BCE: plough agriculture, first kingdoms, cities, pyramids, calendar, hieroglyphic script, writing on papyrus (Egypt). The plough let a family till more land with animal power, and kingdoms and cities brought taxes, temple and palace work and new jobs such as scribe; a calendar helped people plan sowing and festivals.
Europe, 6000-5000 BCE: cultivation of wheat and barley (Greece). Growing grain meant staying in one place till the harvest, building more permanent houses and storing food, so daily work for both men and women shifted from gathering and hunting to field work, storage and food processing.
Asia, 4000-3000 BCE: use of the potter’s wheel, the wheel for transport (3600 BCE), writing (3200 BCE, Mesopotamia), use of bronze. Pots could now be made quickly in large numbers, carts carried heavier loads, and writing created the new job of the scribe, so more people lived by crafts and trade rather than farming alone.
South Asia, 7000-6000 BCE: early agricultural settlements (Baluchistan). Villages of farmers who kept animals meant a settled life, permanent homes and stored grain, and the beginning of the long process that led to the Harappan cities.
Americas, 3000-2000 BCE: domestication of the guinea pig and turkey, cultivation of maize. A dependable grain crop and domestic animals gave families a steadier food supply and less dependence on hunting.
Australia/Pacific Islands, 1200-1100 BCE: settlements in Polynesia and Micronesia. Men and women had to sail long distances over the ocean and set up new communities on islands, carrying plants, animals and skills with them.
This is an open discussion question, so any six entries are acceptable as long as one is taken from each column and its effect on everyday life is explained.

Q. Many societies have myths about floods. These are often ways of preserving and expressing memories about important changes in history. Find out more about these, noting how life before and after the flood is represented.

Answer: The chapter itself gives two such stories. In the Bible, the Flood was meant to destroy all life on earth, but God chose Noah to ensure that life could continue: Noah built a huge boat, an ark, and took on board a pair of each known species of animals and birds, and the ark survived the Flood. Mesopotamian tradition has a strikingly similar story whose hero is called Ziusudra or Utnapishtim. In 1873 a British newspaper funded a British Museum expedition to find the tablet narrating it. Other cultures tell comparable stories, for example the Indian story of Manu, who was saved from a great flood by a fish (the Matsya story). Such stories usually show life before the flood as a world that had gone wrong and was swept away, and life after it as a fresh beginning made by a few survivors who restart human society. As the chapter explains, by the 1960s historians understood that such stories are not literally true but may be ways of remembering important changes in history, such as real floods in river valleys like that of the Euphrates, whose channels could flood crops or shift course altogether.

Q. Discuss whether city life would have been possible without the use of metals.

Answer: City life as it developed in Mesopotamia would hardly have been possible without metals. The earliest cities date to the bronze age, about 3000 BCE, and the chapter explains that metal tools were necessary for accurate carpentry, drilling beads, carving stone seals and cutting shell for inlaid furniture, while weapons such as spear tips were also of bronze. The seal cutter needed bronze tools he could not make himself, so specialisation, the mark of urban life, rested on metal. Getting copper and tin also forced organised long-distance trade, which needed storage, records and leaders who could equip expeditions. So metals were not just useful to cities; the need to obtain them helped bring about the organisation that city life depended on. A large village might exist without metal, but not the specialised, trading economy of a Mesopotamian city.

Q. Beginning with the procurement of stone, list all the specialists who would be involved in the production of such a piece of sculpture.

Answer: The Warka Head was sculpted in white marble at Uruk before 3000 BCE, in a hard stone imported from a distance, with inlays of lapis lazuli, shell and bitumen. The specialists would include: the quarry workers who cut the marble; traders and the organisers of the expedition who brought the stone, lapis lazuli and shell from distant lands; boatmen or pack-animal drivers who carried them; metal workers who made the bronze tools; charcoal makers who supplied fuel for the smiths; the sculptor who carved the face; craftsmen who cut and fitted the lapis lazuli, shell and bitumen inlays for the eyes and eyebrows; and the scribes or temple officials who kept account of the materials and the workers’ rations.

Q. Describe what you see in each of the impressions. Is the cuneiform script shown on them?

Answer: Looking at the five impressions in the book’s photograph: the first (top left) shows figures struggling with animals among plants, a contest scene; the second (top right) shows animals such as goats leaping among plants; the third (middle) shows human figures with cattle; the fourth (bottom left) shows animals between two tall building fronts, with a wavy line of water below; the fifth (bottom right) shows a long procession of cattle in rows, with reed-built structures between them. Each picture runs continuously, because the seal was rolled over the wet clay. None of these five impressions shows a clear line of cuneiform writing; they are picture scenes. The chapter notes that seals only sometimes carried writing, such as the name of the owner, his god or his official position.

Q. Can you locate, besides the winding streets, two or three blind alleys?

Answer: Yes. The plan of the residential area at Ur (c. 2000 BCE) has a few through streets: one runs north-south along the eastern edge, one curves up from the south-west to meet it, and another crosses the middle diagonally. Besides these, short narrow lanes branch off into the blocks of houses, for example off the curving street in the lower part of the plan and off the eastern street in the upper part, and stop against house walls without coming out on any other street. These dead ends are the blind alleys; each gave access only to the few houses that opened onto it. They fit what the chapter says about Ur: the narrow winding streets and irregular house plots show an absence of town planning, and wheeled carts could not have reached many of the houses, so grain and firewood came on donkey-back.

Q. Trace the route from the entrance to the inner court. What do you think would have been kept in the storerooms? How has the kitchen been identified?

Answer: The palace of Zimrilim at Mari had only one entrance, on the north. From the entrance gate a visitor came into the large open, beautifully paved outer court (131), next to the audience hall (132) with its wall paintings, where the king received foreign dignitaries and his own people; from there a passage led on to the inner court (106), paved white, near the throne room, where the king probably ate in the company of many others. The storerooms would have held the huge quantities of food presented each day for the king’s table, flour, bread, meat, fish, fruit, beer and wine, along with grain, oil and wine jars, and the raw materials and finished goods of the palace workshops, especially precious metal ornaments. The kitchen is identified in the drawing by its row of hearths or ovens with openings for fire, set on a raised platform, the kind of fixture used only for cooking.

Q. Why do you think Assurbanipal and Nabonidus cherished early Mesopotamian traditions?

Answer: Both rulers linked their own authority to an ancient and respected past. The Assyrian kings had been immigrants, and they acknowledged the southern region, Babylonia, as the centre of high culture; Assurbanipal collected tablets on history, epics, omens, astrology, hymns and poems at Nineveh and placed them in the temple library of his god Nabu, as he wrote, “for my life and the well-being of my soul, and to sustain the foundations of my royal throne”. Nabonidus, the last ruler of independent Babylon, revived the forgotten office of the High Priestess of Ur after a dream, using an ancient stele to learn how she should be dressed, and repaired the broken statue of Sargon of Akkad “because of my reverence for the gods and respect for kingship”. Cherishing old traditions showed their piety, connected them with great kings of remote times, and made their rule appear rightful and rooted in the land’s long history.