It’s how they urbanised, not why.
Maybe. That’s definitely what I would have assumed, but it seems like the ingredients for creating permanent settlement really stemmed from specific religious practices - periodic visits to the same site to sacrifice or engage in a ritual, flooding of areas to venerate the water god(/s) - but maybe the veneration of water deities in that was a ruse to allow land-management to happen because the priest class didn’t trust non-priests to carry out their projects without a religious story behind it.
And it wasn’t religion the way we see it today.
No, i would say it’s very similar. Pilgrimages, a priest class, specific buildings to worship in and “sunday school” of some form or another. If you disapprove of modern religions but like the old ones then it’s really the content of the religion you have irks with.
Uruanna@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Early “shrines” in Mesopotamia were about making a landmark to find and return to and rebuild each time they came by (which isn’t necessarily a “pilgrimage”, just knowing where to return), and then building large storage rooms for all the grain that could be redistributed to the people. We don’t have any particular trace related to sacrifice or teaching worship, or even any mark of distinction between priest and non-priest class, as this was before writing. Source is “the invention of the city” by Gwendolyn Leick.