How Mesopotamia’s Urban and Industrial Revolution Started Politics as We Know It Today

Archaeologist and scholar Giorgio Buccellati’s book At the Origins of Politics describes how Mesopotamia’s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium BC shaped a new mentality. The segmentation and specialization of industrial production required written recordkeeping, standardization of weights and measures, and surveying and allocation of land planning. This inherent logic of handicraft production and its related [...]