The metal ages: Eneolithic, Bronze and Iron

At the end of the Neolithic people began to make tools from copper. The time when copper and stone tools were used together is the Eneolithic, the Copper–Stone Age; the textbook places it from the 4th to the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE. In this period the first cities and states appeared in the Ancient East, and in southern Central Asia farming based on artificial irrigation arose. Copper melted with tin gave bronze, a harder metal, which became the main material from about the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE. Bronze ploughs and tools widened farming, and herding began to separate from it. As the work of men grew more important in farming, herding and crafts, their standing in the family rose and the patriarchy, with kinship counted through the father, took shape. Bronze Age sites include Zamonbobo (Bukhara region), Sopollitepa (Surkhandarya, Muzrabod district) and Jarqo‘ton (near Sherobod), which shows early signs of a city. In this period the potter’s wheel and the wheel were invented and the first carts appeared.