The First Cities, States, and Empires
Teacher Resources
Lesson Guide
This guide is your first stop for timing, sample answers, and everything else needed to teach this lesson.
PD: Primary-Source Power
This lesson features students’ first encounter with sourcing. The 26-minute video features sourcing tips from historian Bridgette O’Connor’s PD event.
Blog: You Can Thank the Ancients
It’s a struggle to make students care about stuff that is literally ancient history. This blog post can help you make it feel more relevant.
Driving Question: How did ancient communities grow larger and more complex?
As agriculture spread and intensified, human communities grew. Villages expanded into large cities. For the first time, human communities grew beyond tens of thousands. As cities linked together, they formed powerful states and complex networks that still shape our world today.
Learning Objectives:
- Analyze the causes and consequences of urbanization and expanding networks of exchange.
- Investigate the characteristics of the first states and the qualities that united people living there.
- Use causal reasoning to evaluate demographic changes that were the result of farming.
Vocab Terms:
Networks? Production and distribution? Communities? Make a guess about which one is most important for our understanding of early states.
This is the first sourcing activity in the course, and if you’re looking for a few additions to your typical classroom routine, we’ve got you covered.. Check out OER Project supports like the Sourcing Tool and related Feedback Form, and find some quick tips and tricks for teaching this skill—all in a quick one-pager.
Reading a text without context can be frustrating. Who wrote it? Why was it written? That’s where sourcing comes in.
Be sure to review the Lesson Guide as you prep for this activity. It includes sample answers that will make post-activity debrief easier!
Examine the possible causes and consequences of population growth from 10,000 BCE to 500 CE, as humans transitioned to agriculture and began forming agrarian societies.
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Guiding Questions
Some quick definitions from these two articles, pulled out here to make your life slightly easier:
- A state is a political organization that controls a specific territory, has a government, and has the power to make and enforce laws over its population.
- An empire is a complex political organization where a dominant central state controls weaker peripheral (outer) states.
If you’d like to go deeper into the history of the first states and agriculture, check out James C. Scott’s classic, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
What’s a state? What’s an empire? Historians frequently debate these questions. Explore these articles to find answers, and then apply what you’ve learned in the activity.
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Guiding Questions
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Guiding Questions
Use this map to help students understand how the rise of agriculture was connected to the rise of empires. Have students use the deep zoom feature (the + button in the top-right corner) to zoom in on the various places where agriculture emerged independently. Have them take note of the dates. Then, ask them what they notice about when agriculture first emerged and where they see the greatest concentration of early empires.
The first empires appeared in Mesopotamia. The Akkadians and Assyrians conquered the region, expanding their power and offering a new model of governance.
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Guiding Questions
Think about what you know to be true—and false—about the first cities, states, and empires. Can you tell what’s real and what’s not?
When and where did states begin? Two historians explain the who, what, where, and how of state creation.
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Guiding Questions
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Guiding Questions
