I find it very interesting how long it took us to assemble the constituent ingredients of sedentary cities into what we recognize today. Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time.
If anything, population was simply not dense enough (or could be maintained in the climate) for there to be incentive sufficient to focus on even staying sedentary with areas devoted to growth of crops. Why build a city to protect food stores when wetlands still produced enough in the natural economy to support you through the average year?
Perhaps the earliest reference to icehouses comes from Shulgi, who held sway in the Sumerian city of Ur at the tail end of the third millennium bc. . . . Year 13, for Shulgi, was dubbed “Building of the royal icehouse/cold-house.” Jackson suggested such buildings might have been “timber-lined holes in the ground” designed to keep ice brought down from the mountains “cool and secure.” [1]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l
1. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-you-want-buil...
Sumerian civilization is just endlessly fascinating.
To the extent that nomadic hunters had a choice about whether to become sedentary (vs being enslaved by the larger sedentary populations), the reduction of autonomy (for both individuals and groups) for sedentary lifestyle behind fortifications has to be worth the benefits.
That said, sedentarism vs nomadism is a spectrum, and it's not clear that the nomads would have seen themselves as fundamentally different than sedentarists. It was probably much later that terms related to being "civilized" vs "wild" came into existence - probably courtesy of agriculturalists' organized religion. Even as late as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, it wasn't necessarily inimical as king Gilgamesh's best friend was the wild man Enkidu.
I would guess that nomads/hunters thought of sedentarists just as people who just had bigger and more permanent settlements than they did.
Sedentary hunter gatherer societies exist where the environment can support them.