From villages to the first cities

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Farming began about 10,000 years ago. People stopped moving in search of food and began to grow it in one place.
Crops differed by region:
West Asia — wheat, barley, peas and pulses.
East and Southeast Asia — millet and rice.
Africa — millet also grown here.
Animals were tamed (domesticated): sheep, goat, cattle, pig, donkey. Tame animals gave meat, milk, wool and, later, pulling power.
Britannica notes the same starting kit: farming and animal taming began where easily tamed animals (sheep, goat, cattle, pig) and the wild ancestors of grains and pulses (wheat, barley, bitter vetch, pea, lentil) already grew naturally — in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land between Mesopotamia and Egypt [5].
Cloth appeared. Two sources of thread:
From plants — cotton and flax.
From animals — wool.
About 5,000 years ago, cattle and donkeys were tied to ploughs and carts. This is a turning point:
A plough turns soil deeper than a hoe, so one family could farm more land.
A cart moves heavy loads, so grain and stone could travel further.

Farming did not come alone. It arrived as a bundle of changes:
Permanent houses — you stay where your field is.
Earthen pots — to store grain and cook food. Storing surplus is what lets a village survive a bad year.
Ground (polished) stone tools — mortars and pestles to grind grain, axes to clear forest, hoes to break soil and sow seed.
First tapping of copper and tin ores — the first step towards metal.
Long-distance movement of goods began: wood, precious and semi-precious stones, metals, shell, and obsidian (hardened volcanic lava, which breaks into a very sharp edge).
Small states replaced small communities. More people, more surplus, more disputes — so rulers, officials and rules appeared.
Some scholars call this whole change a revolution. The term comes from V. Gordon Childe, historian, linguist and archaeologist, who named the shift from hunting-gathering to farming the Neolithic (agricultural) revolution [5].

Note: Britannica stresses this "revolution" in fact took thousands of years — slow, not sudden. Settled life lowered infant deaths, population rose, and settlement spread out from the hilly flanks into the plains [5]. Keep the NCERT word revolution; understand it as a deep change, not a quick one.

Bronze = copper + tin mixed together (an alloy). Neither metal alone is hard enough; mixed, they are.
Britannica gives the working ratio: roughly 10 parts copper to 1 part tin, and says alloying was probably discovered by smelting mixed metallic ores [3].
Tin and copper came from far away. This is the key point for the exam:
River plains have rich soil but no metal ore and no good stone.
Britannica states plainly that metals were scarce in the alluvial river valleys where civilisation grew, so they had to be imported — which created complicated trade links and mining far from home [3].
So city + long-distance trade are born together. A city cannot be a bronze-age city on its own.
Why metal tools mattered — what stone could not do:
Accurate carpentry (straight joints, doors, boats).
Drilling beads (a fine hole through hard stone).
Carving stone seals (used to mark ownership of goods).
Cutting shell for inlaid furniture (shell pieces set into wood for decoration).
Weapons — Mesopotamian spear-tips were bronze.
The earliest Mesopotamian cities date to the bronze age, c. 3000 BCE.
Britannica dates the wider spread: by 3000 BCE copper use was well known in the Middle East, had spread west into the Mediterranean, and was entering Neolithic Europe [4]. In some regions the Bronze Age grew out of a Copper Age; in others straight out of late Neolithic cultures [4].

By about 3200 BCE, the largest settlement in southern Mesopotamia — perhaps in the world — was Uruk [2].
Uruk was a true city, with:
Monumental mud-brick buildings (mud brick, because the plain has clay but no stone).
Walls decorated with mosaics of painted clay cones pushed into the plaster [2].
The earliest southern Mesopotamian cities whose names we know: Eridu, Uruk, Bad-tibira, Nippur, Kish [2].

Independently is the exam word. They were not copies of one another. Similar problems — flood, silt, surplus grain — gave similar answers: cities, writing, rulers, long-distance trade.
Why river plains? Break it down:
Floods lay down fresh silt each year, so the soil stays fertile without manure.
Flat land plus water makes boat transport cheap — grain moves to the city.
But the plain lacks stone, metal and timber — so trade is forced, not optional.

Settled farming began about 10,000 years ago; crops of West Asia were wheat, barley, peas and pulses.
Cattle and donkeys were harnessed to ploughs and carts about 5,000 years ago.
Obsidian = hardened volcanic lava, traded over long distances in early village societies.
Bronze = copper + tin; Britannica gives the common ratio as about 10 : 1 (copper : tin) [3].
Earliest Mesopotamian cities date to c. 3000 BCE.
Uruk, c. 3200 BCE, was the largest settlement in southern Mesopotamia — known for mud-brick monumental buildings and painted clay-cone mosaics [2].
Earliest named south Mesopotamian cities: Eridu, Uruk, Bad-tibira, Nippur, Kish [2].
The term Neolithic (agricultural) revolution was coined by V. Gordon Childe [5].
The four early river-plain civilisations: Harappan (Sindhu–Sarasvatī), Mesopotamian (Euphrates–Tigris), Egyptian (Nile), Chinese (Huang He).
Domesticated animals of the first farming package: sheep, goat, cattle, pig, donkey.

Trade was not a luxury of cities — it was their condition. River plains gave grain but no ore, stone or timber. Bronze therefore forced long-distance exchange, and exchange forced record-keeping, seals and officials. So the city, the trade route and writing grow from one root [3].
"Revolution" is a debated word. NCERT and Childe use it for the scale of the change; but the change unrolled over thousands of years, with population growth and spread into the plains happening slowly [5]. A good GS-I answer keeps the term and qualifies the tempo.
Independent origin is the strongest argument against diffusion. Four civilisations on four separate river plains reached cities, metal and writing without copying one another. Similar geography, similar solution — useful when comparing Harappa with Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Metal reorganised society, not just toolkits. Bronze needed ore sources, smiths, and rulers who could command distant supply. Craft specialists (bead-drillers, seal-carvers, shell-cutters) could only exist because farmers produced a surplus to feed them.