Human societies may adopt very different social structures, but their first priority is always to ensure that the community has enough food to eat, since this is essential to the survival of the species. Thus, if any group of humans wants to increase and diversify its activities, it is obliged to invent and intensify agricultural practices; it can no longer rely on hunting and gathering food resources from the immediate environment.

Syria was the place where humans first experimented with cultivating cereal plants and raising animals, two activities that are fundamental to the emergence of a civilization. The yields thus obtained grew so rapidly that surpluses resulted.

 

Even though these surpluses were at first intended to ensure the reproduction of plants and animals from one year to the next regardless of seasonal constraints, they led to the possibility of redistribution, so that some people were free to specialize in tasks that were unrelated to farming and thus produce non-agricultural goods. In every period, even those marked by the establishment of sophisticated political systems, agricultural production remained the foundation of the whole economy.

The Syrian territory was naturally suited to farming and herding, but it also offered raw materials, such as flint, clay and gypsum. These could be used to make tools, instruments and utensils that simplified certain tasks, especially those linked to the community’s food needs. But the first village-dwellers of Syria were not interested only in utilitarian objects. They soon began to produce luxury items, fashioned at first from local materials and later from imported materials. Over the centuries craftsmen learned to fully exploit the potential of these exotic commodities.

Such luxury materials could be acquired by trading local goods such as agricultural produce. Thus, farming became further intensified in order to create agricultural surpluses for use in commerce. In addition, long-distance trade routes in the Near East almost inevitably passed through Syrian territory, given its geographical position and the waterway provided by the Euphrates.

The great increase and diversification of trade-related activities soon made it necessary to establish means of controlling and managing commerce. Simple methods, such as marking traded goods with a seal, continued to be applied even as new, more sophisticated, tools were developed. At first, small clay tokens were used to reckon the quantity of various goods. Then the system was improved so that the type of product, rather than just the quantity, could be identified. The symbols employed represented the first steps towards writing. The trading cities of Syria have provided a vast quantity of cuneiform tablets, giving not only lists of products but also information on administrative, political and legal activities. Eventually, cuneiform writing was simplified and made more efficient through the adoption of an alphabetic system developed in a Syrian port city.