This chapter looks at hierarchical urban societies in Asia and Africa from the world's earliest urban states in Mesopotamia to historically known polities at Angkor and Zimbabwe. In considering some of the most important polities to arise in diverse areas of Asia and Africa over 6 millennia, we focus on some of the differences that were present in leadership organization, patterns of behavior, and technologies.

The world’s first states evolved in Mesopotamia, where the temple became a key institution. The temple had an economic role that was not seen in Mesoamerican temples. We begin our discussion with Eridu, the site with perhaps the earliest Mesopotamian temple, established by the end of the sixth millennium BC. We then examine the early Mesopotamian urban center of Uruk, situated amid a network of canals not far from the Euphrates River. Large-scale canal irrigation was a key feature of early Mesopotamian civilization. The earliest known written documents come from Uruk.

Slightly later, during the third millennium BC, major centers arose along the Indus River and its tributaries in what is now Pakistan and India. Here we focus on the two best-known sites of the Indus civilization, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Although these South Asian sites have not yielded rich tombs, as in Mesopotamia, they are known for highly developed craft industries. Indus centers were not as large as those in Mesopotamia, but they were more systematically planned, with centralized drainage networks.

To a degree, the rise of civilization in Egypt was inspired by political and economic ties with Southwest Asia. Yet large-scale political centralization was much more evident in Egypt, where power was more focused on the principal rulers who built monumental pyramid tombs. We begin with Hierakonpolis, a major center along the Nile whose occupation predates the unification of northern and southern Egypt. We then discuss the later funerary complex at Giza, located near the ancient capital at Memphis. Powerful pharaohs constructed some of the world’s largest pyramids at Giza.

By early in the second millennium BC, states developed in North China. An-yang was the last capital of the Shang dynasty. Although early Chinese centers were less urban than those in early Mesopotamia, they became some of the largest in the world by AD 1. During the last centuries BC, during the Qin dynasty, a magnificent tomb built near the capital of Xianyang illustrates the extreme stratification in ancient China.

After the rise of early Asian civilizations, waves of communication and exchange between the Indus region, China, and Southeast Asia helped fuel political expansion in Thailand and neighboring lands. The Angkor state that arose in Cambodia just after AD 800 was one of the largest and most centralized of these Southeast Asian polities.

Finally, we discuss sub-Saharan state development in western Africa at the early urban center of Jenné-Jeno and in southern Africa at Great Zimbabwe. Jenné-Jeno was an important node in long-distance trade between the Sahara and gold-producing areas to the south during the first millennium AD. Although not the earliest state in southern Africa, Great Zimbabwe is a spectacular site with large stone structures erected early in the second millennium AD.

As part of this investigation of early states and cities across Asia and Africa, we consider a range of topics in specific blocks and site sections, including a discussion of the role of the temple institution in Mesopotamia, the evolution of what is thought to be the world's first writing system in Southwest Asia, means of detecting economic specialization through archaeological research, differences in pyramids and their construction around the world, and the roots of the Chinese culinary tradition.