round 6300-4500 BCE in what we call the Ubaid period, Mesopotamian society was characterized by mostly egalitarian (because people still hunted) and communally oriented small villages, who did farming as well, with no centralized leadership. Here we see little evidence of social stratification, although a possible architectural differentiation, in which few houses/temples were elevated from ground and used as storage units, had emerged toward the end of period. At this time, certain aspects of material culture, pottery for example, were widely shared across Mesopotamia with migration, marriages and trades.
Next we have the Uruk period which lasted around 4000-3100 BCE, characterized by the world’s first walled city-state with an extensive canal system and several monumental temples (ziggurats). Farmers contributed their crops to public storehouses out of which workers or city dwellers would be paid uniform wages in grain.
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Here we see multiple city-states operating in economic system called oikos where super householders took on the role of corporations and was in charge of controlling irrigations, owning large lands, employed work forces. Due to natural causes of the environments, many farmers become indebted to these corporations (because they didn’t supply enough grains or domestic animals), moved to cities to work under them and eventually labor exploited. These super householders developed a writing form called cuneiform (made up of different collections of triangular shapes) to keep track of their resources, income and outcome, taxes and work laws. These houses were not the only institution that operated. Many temples also provided labor and people got paid in grains, sheeps and goats, clothing and so on. As these city-states gain power, they went on conquest for more land, trade and labor forces. People traded on a much bigger scale on dry lands and along the