3300-2000 BC Early Bronze Age

The Early Bronze Age in Western Asia was a time of great technological and economic change that in turn changed and created social and political organisation. Although bronze was known, copper was more often used for tools and weapons. At the start of the period writing developed in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). It was first used to record the Sumerian language, and then spread east into Iran and north into Syria. Throughout most of Western Asia this period saw the rise of city-states, often associated with walled cities, palaces and images of kings.

By 2500 BC there was trading and possibly diplomatic contact across the region as far as urban centres in the Aegean to the Indus Valley civilisation. However, much of what we know of the cultures beyond the written evidence from Mesopotamia is due to archaeology. Around 2300 BC Mesopotamia was united under the Akkadian empire when the Sumerian city-states were consolidated by conquest. Two centuries later, some cities in the Eastern Mediterranean and northern Mesopotamia were abandoned, perhaps because of prolonged drought. In southern Mesopotamia the city of Ur came to dominate a region that saw an increasing influx of Amorites from the region of Syria.