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Humans are social animals and millions of us the world over live and work together in huge cities.

Week three of A History of the World in 100 Objects takes us back about 6-5,000 years to find out what happened when such large communities first developed.

After a process that took several thousand years, small villages in the river valleys of North Africa and Asia (modern Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India) grew into the world's first great cities and states.

JD Hill, A History of the World's lead curator, explained how this growth presented early urbanites with new questions:

We are having to find new ways of organising on a much larger scale than before. This is both the shift to cities and also the creation of political entities.

The question is how do you run a big city? How do you rule? How do you hold together these large societies and what are the consequences of that? In a way you need politics in the modern sense.

So, how do you do it? How do you organise a mass of people so large that most of them couldn't hope to get to know each other?

In our five objects this week we can see how some found answers to these questions.

In Egypt, King Den's sandal label shows an early ruler using the old 'them and us' trick; uniting a body of people by setting himself up as all-powerful in opposition to a common enemy. In Iraq, the Standard of Ur is an idealised image of a new, larger society, clearly divided into haves and have-nots, rulers and ruled, both at war and at peace.

Yet it wasn't just war that brought cities and states into contact with each other. The Indus seal is a tiny, but tantalising, glimpse of a whole civilisation and the mechanics of trade that linked early civilisations to the world around them.

And in another small object, we find a method of keeping track of what's going on. It might be surprising, but it was inevitable that some of the world's earliest writing should be invented by accountants.

So, in the drive for progress, cities grow, populations expand and life gets more complex. This week's objects offer proof, if ever it were needed, that humans like to come together and are pretty good at finding ways to work with each other when we do.

But there are always exceptions. Ours is a Jade axe - a highly-polished descendant of the revolutionary tool that helped shape the first million years of human evolution.

Quarried in the Alps, this stone found its way to southeast England. The people who made it were every bit as skilled, intelligent and developed as those who made the other four objects. But they didn't live in cities or large-scale states. In fact, most communities at this time, the majority of the world's population, did not need cities or states.

Perhaps it's better to end this week's view of the world 6,000 years ago by noting that we can look for patterns in history, but (to borrow again from my dictionary of cliché), there's always more than one way to skin a cat.