The ancient Near East was the birthplace of the world’s first complex societies. Between 10,000 BCE and 2,000 BCE, Near Eastern societies shifted away from mobile lifestyles to form sedentary villages and eventually cities, developing agriculture, writing systems and bureaucracies, and commercial and political networks. This course explores the archaeological evidence for these transformations, asking what it would have been like for people in the ancient Near East as their world underwent the profound changes wrought by domestication, farming, urbanism, and state formation.