I concentrate in this book on these later sites for two important reasons. First, these urban agglomerations at the mouth of the Euphrates—for example, Eridu, Ur, Umma, and Uruk—go on to become, much later, the very first “statelets” in the world. Second, while other ancient societies such as Egypt, the Levant, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley, and Maya in the New World have their own variants of the Neolithic revolution, southern Mesopotamia not only was the site of the first state system, but it also directly influenced later state making elsewhere in the Middle East as well as in
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