This volume, now available in English, explores how Mesopotamia-s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium BC shaped a new mentality, leading to new forms of social interaction, and the development of the state, its laws and its religion to consolidate new managerial hierarchies in the region.
How is it that the phenomenon of the state, a society structured along lines of power that frame individuals in a new supra-organism, suddenly came into being during the fourth millennium BC? In this book, Buccellati explores the emergence of statehood and power structures in ancient Mesopotamia against the background of the long prehistoric period. It was the arena in which the earliest cities and states were born and which offers us the first and richest documentation of the development of political life in antiquity. This book provides rich documentation of the causes that led to the formation of the territorial state, tracing its evolution from city-st
