This is an 8th grade informational text about the first civilizations in an area called Mesopotamia, which is a historical region of Western Asia, now considered to be part of the Middle East. While reading, students should cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. Students should also determine a central idea of the text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas; provide an objective summary of the text, and analyze how the text makes connections among and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events (License: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License).