A Neolithic excavation in the Near East partakes of a hybrid character. . . . Taking account of the dual parameters of time/resources faced by any archaeologist, one cannot claim, from top to bottom of a tell, to both excavate an area sufficient to demonstrate the structures of a “village zone” (not limited to a single house), while at the same time imposing everywhere micro-stratigraphic rigour and the integral harvesting of transient details. . . . These two requirements seem never to have been truly reconciled in Near Eastern archaeology (Cauvin 1985: 123–4).

The remains of the world’s earliest cities lie in ancient Mesopotamia, the land “between the two rivers” (modern Iraq and eastern Syria). This chapter describes their antecedents and examines how such urban entities may have developed. As Cauvin’s comment indicates, however, owing to the fact that in this semi-arid region desirable locations tend to be occupied over long periods, often for many millennia thus creating the great “tell” sites, we remain largely ignorant of the true nature of their earliest antecedents. Archaeologists wishing to investigate the Neolithic, for example, sensibly choose small sites that lack the overburden of later millennia, recognising, however, that these are unlikely to be fully representative of contemporary social and economic development.

The earliest agricultural villages in Mesopotamia developed in the rain-fed lowlands that constitute the “Fertile Crescent”, adjacent to the arc of mountains that runs from the Levant through southeastern Anatolia, northern Iraq and western Iran. To the south lie the arid steppe and desert areas of modern Iraq and Syria. The most important features within this landscape are two of the world’s greatest rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, which rise in Anatolia and flow southwards to the Arabian Gulf, in later millennia providing the water for irrigation that was to play a significant role in the emergence of the great Sumerian cities.