First city states are collected around the river systems that offer more supply and the specific conditions of areas that people gathered around determined their solutions. In Mesopotamia they built massive towers on top of their collective grain deposits as a first step of Ziggurats. In Egypt they focused on building religious structures because of the stability of supply around the Nile. In Harappan cities they built massive walls and created brick-lined sewers to overcome the damages of the floods instead of building religious structures.
In Southwest Asia, as cities grew, they needed architects’ expertise to create a new type of urban order differently from the nature and also to produce standard dwellings.
In the Bronze Age city-states of Mesopotamia, their fabric of streets, canals and dwellings comprised an immense collective work similar to cells seen through a microscope. Also they created stairways to heaven as a symbol of accessing to their gods and the Ziggurat appeared as a sacred center of the world. Then they started to consider the irrigation system and they produced dikes and canals near by the delta area. To benefit from the sources around water, they built structures near watery areas and Ur was the largest city of Bronze Age city-states of Mesopotamia and it was the first symbol that indicates the city’s quality.
In Egypt, they built ‘pyramids’ to show their worship of their pharaoh because of the belief that is about eternal afterlife. Pyramids were abstracted shelters for the spirits of their pharaohs and they had proportional system and precise geometry that was calculated by architects; Saqqara is the first pyramid and it can be distinguished from the Ziggurats in Mesopotamia (stepped structure and religious building) as being more abstracted version of funeral.
In contrast, in Harappan cities, they keep away from building monuments or religious structures. Because they had to struggle with natural disasters, they focused on durability, permanence and strength to protect themselves from natural calamities. Due to the force of the nature about focusing on hydrological projects, they built extraordinary underground drains, brick-lined sewers and formidable walls around their cities to overcome the damages of flooding rivers and periodic droughts.
So, the areas that people gathered around affected their behaviors to their building systems, material usages etc. Each community found different solutions to different issues that were caused by the specific area that they lived.
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