River Valley Inventors: Mesopotamia and Ancient China

Two river valleys in Asia

Find Asia on a globe. Two of the world's earliest societies grew there, both beside great rivers:

• Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, mostly in what is now Iraq. Some of the world's first cities, like Ur and Uruk, were built there about 5000 years ago.
• Ancient China, along the Yellow River (Huang He) and later the Yangtze River.

Mesopotamia: taming the rivers

Mesopotamia gets little rain, so farmers needed the rivers. But the Tigris and Euphrates flooded at unpredictable times, sometimes violently.

So Mesopotamians:

• dug canals to carry water to their fields (irrigation),
• built banks of earth to hold back floods,
• worked together in large groups to keep the canals clean. This needed organization and leaders.

They grew barley and wheat, dates and vegetables, and raised sheep and goats.

Government

Mesopotamia was made of city-states. Each was ruled by a king, who said the gods chose him. Each city had a huge stepped temple called a ziggurat.

About 3750 years ago, King Hammurabi of Babylon had his code of laws carved on a tall stone pillar so people could see the rules. It had about 280 laws. The punishment often depended on your social class: harming a noble was punished more harshly than harming a poor person or an enslaved person.

Ancient China: the Yellow River

The Yellow River gets its name from the yellow soil it carries. When it floods, it leaves that rich soil on the land, which is good for farming. But its floods could be terrible, so it was also called "China's Sorrow". People built dikes (walls of earth) and canals to control it.

In the north, farmers grew millet and wheat. In the warm, wet south, along the Yangtze, they grew rice in flooded fields.

Government

China was ruled by emperors from powerful families called dynasties.

• Chinese people believed the emperor ruled with the Mandate of Heaven: permission from heaven to rule. If an emperor ruled badly, and there were floods, famines or rebellions, people might say he had lost the Mandate, and a new dynasty could take over.
• For many centuries, many government officials were chosen by passing difficult exams about laws, history and writing, not only by being born into a rich family.

The Silk Road: cooperation through trade

About 2000 years ago, traders began travelling along a long network of routes between China and Central Asia, the Middle East, and on to Europe and Africa. Much later, people named it the Silk Road, after China's famous silk.

• Goods travelled: silk, paper and tea from China; horses, glass, gold, spices and wool from other places.
• Ideas travelled too: religions, music, foods, and inventions like paper-making.
• Traders often used camels to cross deserts, and rested at cities along the way.

Trade gave societies a reason to cooperate and stay peaceful. But there was conflict too: bandits attacked caravans, and empires fought for control of the rich trade cities.

Chinese dynasties also built long walls over many centuries to protect their northern lands from attacks. Today we call them the Great Wall.