The Evolution of Civilization in Mesopotamia

From early times, Mesopotamia was surrounded by a fringe of desert people who lived much like those described in genesis and spoke the same semitic languages. Former nomads appear to have been willing to adapt to urban life in any number of other ways, why not that one? And it's very much a local explanation and does nothing really to explain the broader pattern. Feminist scholarship has instead tended to emphasize the growing scale and social importance of war and the increasing centralization of the state that accompanied it.