Uruk: Origins and Legends of History's Earliest City

It's a city as old as time itself, continuously inhabited from its founding millennia ago until the 4th century AD, when it was abandoned by its people. It lay alone and buried, until its walls were explored by a Victorian traveller. Those were the walls that had once protected the realm of the legendary hero and king Gilgamesh, the pillars once blessed by the almighty goddess Nanna, known as Ishtar. Those bricks, covered in sand and dust, were the relics of a city as old as the idea of a city itself. I'm talking about the remains of Uruk, the first city in the history of civilization. Throughout its history, Uruk produced a number of firsts, for which every civilization should be grateful. For example, it produced what is most likely the first epic poem ever, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which narrates the adventures of its great king. Uruk is also considered the birthplace of writing, or, at the very least, where writing really took off. The city-state featured the first examples of large architectural stoneworks, such as the ziggurats, a pyramid-like temple characteristic of Mesopotamia. The authorities in Uruk also have the dubious honour of having introduced the joys of bureaucracy to mankind. They were the first to develop the cylinder seal, which was later used throughout Mesopotamia to designate personal property or to apply one's signature on documents. This may appear as a small innovation, but these seals represented their owners' identity and reputation. In a symbolic way, by inventing the cylinder seal, Uruk authorities were the first to recognize the importance of the individual in the collective community. But all of these inventions and innovations pale in comparison to the fact that Uruk is widely recognized as the first city. Uruk was the epitome of social revolution that ferried our ancestors from small groups of loosely organized farmers and hunter-gatherers to a complex society built on macro-society and task specialization. But let's start by exploring the location and climate of this city, two features which are inextricably linked to its development. Uruk, which is modern-day Warkwa, was located roughly 300 km south of Baghdad and 15 km east of the city of Samawah. The region was once known as Mesopotamia, the swath of land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates which became the cradle of several civilizations thanks to its great fertility. Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians all thrived here at different stages of history. Uruk thrived in the southern Mesopotamian plains, crossed by rivers and canals where water collects into depressions and marshes. This area is also known as the Alluvial Plain or Alluvium and is one of the hottest in the world with highs exceeding 50 degrees Celsius. All is unpredictable and unreliable, meaning the first inhabitants of the Alluvium had to devise irrigation methods that were able to take advantage of the nearby rivers. Towards the end of the 5th millennium BC, during the Abide Period, the first villagers appeared in the area, later coalescing into a single, larger settlement which would eventually become Uruk. We don't have the precise details of how this happened, but we can rely on the studies of Mario Leverani, professor of Ancient Near East History at Sapienza University of Rome. In his book called Uruk, the First City, Professor Leverani describes how the choice of local crop and the agricultural techniques eventually led to an urbanistic revolution. I'll try to oversimplify the chain of events now. The region of Sumer was first inhabited during the Ubaid Period, approximately 5000-4100 BC. During this period, dwellings did not exceed 150 square meters in surface and were inhabited by one extended family. Their main occupation and means of subsistence was agriculture and the most widespread method of watering their fields was the so-called Basin Irrigation. It consists of submerging a small square field under a thin layer of water. These patches were perfectly horizontal and delimited by small embankments. A single family could arrange a field by itself and there was little need for coordination, planning or centralization between adjacent fields. These agricultural practices gradually shifted to new, evolved methods between 4000 and 3500 BC. Around that time, the sea level of the Persian Gulf rose, changing the landscape of the deltas where the Tigris and Euphrates meet the sea. The area became more prone to floods and the countryside was crisscrossed by several rivers and canals, flowing on disparate levels. This type of landscape favored the cultivation of a specific cereal crop above others, barley. It was a particularly sturdy plant which could withstand floods as well as the constant presence of locusts. Early Mesopotamians found that the Basin Irrigation was not the most efficient way to grow barley. They also found that the new landscape of their region favored the novel method of furrow irrigation. To simplify this, you have to imagine a fish skeleton. The backbone of the fish is a river or canal. The fish bones are long and narrow fields which decline over a gentle gradient towards a marsh or drainage basin. As the water flows on the backbone, it seeps into the fish bones, evenly irrigating these long and narrow fields. Furrow agriculture incentivized the development of tools and the use of animal traction. Archaeologists have found remnants and artistic depictions of clay sickles, cedar plows and threshing sledges. Perhaps more importantly, the new method required the emergence of a centralized administration in order to function. These administrative agencies are identified by Leverani as the palace or the temple. The coordination of agencies and the use of advanced tools eventually increased productivity by 500% or more, generating a huge surplus of food and labor. The presence of a surplus was not exclusive to Southern Mesopotamia or Uruk. Other less evolved societies and settlements, the highlands north of Mesopotamia, for example, could rely on a surplus of food and labor. But in those cases, the surplus was seized by a chief, which used it for conspicuous consumption to increase his own personal prestige or that of his clan. In the case of Southern Mesopotamia, the surplus was reinvested by the palace or temple into society. This allowed the community to expand its agricultural infrastructure, build defenses or trade. Most importantly, it helped differentiate human activity. If more and more people were freed of the burden of producing their own food, they could develop into a new class of specialists and administrators. With time, this system grew more complex. As the administrative class provided services to the community, for example, defense or construction work, the palace was able to collect taxes. So society was changing, and with it the urban landscape. The increase in food reserves required storage space, and the increasing availability of human labor allowed them to build it. Thus, the size of the administrative centers, be it a temple or a palace, grew with time. The architectural styles and materials also became more complex and more durable, until the once-small Neolithic temples expanded into the Iana precinct, which we'll explore later. After this slow urban revolution throughout the 4th millennium BC, Uruk developed much of its infrastructure and administrative systems. We're talking about urban planning, a division of labor and broader political influence over the larger region. It all came to be in a period of seven centuries, aptly named the Uruk Period. In 3300 BC, the citizens of Uruk developed the art of writing, and perfected the mass production of ceramic artifacts, two achievements which are strongly linked. The most common and most popular ceramic products were basic, disposable bowls made from a mold. These bowls were used as standard containers for barley, awarded as wages to farmers, laborers and other personnel employed by the temples. Administrators needed to develop a system to keep track of these payments, as well as the revenues collected by the temple. They did so by recording simple signs and drawings on clay tablets, which later evolved into the earliest system of writing, cuneiform. This consisted of using a reed or stick to carve signs onto a clay tablet. These signs were wedge-shaped, hence the name of the writing system, cuneiform, from the Latin word for wedge, cuneus. An example of such tablets, excavated from Uruk, depicts a human head eating from a bowl. This most likely indicates the concept of a ration. Next to it was the drawing of a conical vessel, interpreted as meaning beer. Archaeologists believe that this tablet recorded the amount of beer which a particular worker had been paid. In other words, this is the oldest pay stub in recorded history. I should now clarify that proto-cuneiform writing may have existed in Syria and Turkey as early as the mid-4th millennium BC, so it's incorrect to say that writing was invented in Uruk, but we could say that Uruk administrators were the first to utilize writing as a routine practice for their accounting and record-keeping needs. And surely they had quite a bit to keep track of. At the start of the 3rd millennium BC, in the Early Dynastic Period, Uruk was the largest center in the region of Southern Mesopotamia, or Sumer. By now a powerful city-state, Uruk played a crucial political and military role in the Alluvium. This is attested by its might and scale, which would be surpassed only by Babylon in the 6th century BC. In the Early Dynastic, Uruk had a surface area of 5.5 square kilometers, and its mighty fortifications were 9 kilometers long. According to legend, these walls had been erected by the legendary hero-king Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a cycle of poems and legends belonging to ancient oral Sumerian tradition. They were for sure sung at the court of the Uruk kings of the 3rd Dynasty, around the 22nd and 21st centuries BC, but they may be much older. The protagonist is hailed as one of the first kings of Uruk. It is not clear if he is completely fictional, or a semi-mythical version of an existing ruler. But before we look at the big man himself, let's talk about the stories of his ancestors. Grandfather En-Makar and his dad Lugul Bandar In these tales, the city of Uruk is at war with the eastern land of Aratta, or modern-day Iran. Uruk is described as blessed with bountiful harvests, while Aratta is rich in stone and metals. Grandfather En-Makar is sent to Aratta by the city goddess Inanna to procure gems and metals to adorn her temple. En-Makar then enters a battle of wits with the lord of Aratta. As they exchange oral messages via envoys, En-Makar is frustrated by his messenger's inability to remember a lengthy speech. In a stroke of divine-inspired genius, En-Makar invents cuneiform writing on the spot. As a result, he is able to establish trade ties with Aratta. By the time his son Lugul Bandar comes of age, Uruk and Aratta are at war. With the help of Inanna, Lugul Bandar is victorious and brings back to Uruk not only raw materials, but also stonecutters and metalsmiths previously absent from Sumer. And then we get to Gilgamesh. Amongst his many adventures, the hero travels to the West, to Lebanon, where he and his sidekick En-Kidu defeat the demon Huwawa, guarding up wood of cedars. He then returns to Uruk with another rare commodity, high-quality timber. Gilgamesh then crosses the steppe and travels east to the edge of the world. Here he meets Atrahasis, or the Extremely Wise One. He is the eldest survivor of a flood that has wiped out humanity generations earlier. Atrahasis instructs Gilgamesh on how to become a proper king. This, the institution of kingship, will be his lasting contribution to Uruk. The tales codified in these poems reflected the evolution of Uruk in history, from early settlement to city-state, from society founded in oral traditions to a culture steeped in the written word. What is interesting is that they capture the process by which Uruk formed trade ties with near and faraway lands as a means to compensate its lack of strategic resources. Archaeological evidence has confirmed Uruk's ties with the mountainous regions of northern Mesopotamia, Persia, and Anatolia. These societies may have been less sophisticated than Uruk, perhaps, but they had access to raw materials and other commodities that were mostly absent from the Fertile Crescent. By establishing these trade networks, Uruk was able to influence the development of societies in other areas outside of Mesopotamia. This is apparent in the Susana Plain in modern-day Iran, where archaeologists have found artifacts from the mid-to-late Uruk period, mainly tablets and tokens used for accounting practices. Besides artifacts, researchers have found entire Uruk enclaves in the Syro-Mesopotamian Plains on the border between modern-day Syria and Turkey. These enclaves commanded a juncture where overland trade routes intersected a river and included a large urban settlement surrounded by smaller villages. Enclaves included Samsat, Karshamish, Tel Kwaras, and even Nineveh, the eventual capital of the Assyrian Empire. In addition to these enclaves, Uruk established several smaller stations, founded on the overland routes linking the enclaves with the Uruk area. Finally, the intepatical people of southern Mesopotamia found small outposts deep in the northern highlands, for example, Godin Tepe and Tepe Salak on the Zagros Mountains of modern-day Iran. This complex system of trade nodes allowed Uruk to import a broad range of goods, which we can group into two categories. First, the essentials, unprocessed resources necessary for the day-to-day operation of a complex society. For example, timber, like the cedarwood imported by Gilgamesh, or copper, bitumen, and even slaves. Maybe those craftsmen brought by Logolbando were not willing migrants, after all. The second category were prestige goods necessary to consolidate and maintain social and political relationships with elite groups. These included the rare metals and precious stones, like the ones Emakar brought back to Inanna to adorn her temple in the Inanna precinct. So now it's time to enter the precinct and meet the Lady of Uruk. Archaeologists over time have identified two main sections within ancient Uruk. The district of Ianna, dedicated to Goddess Inanna, and the older district of Anu, God of Heaven, sometimes described as Inanna's father. The historian Samuel Noah Kramer suggests that Anu presided over the early city until the rise in popularity of Inanna. She was then given her own ziggurat, the typical Mesopotamian terrace temple. The ziggurat was surrounded by the Ianna district, structured as a series of courtyards. Each courtyard housed a number of small rooms, which served mainly ceremonial purposes, but could be used as administrative offices, shops, or even schools. The Ianna district was enclosed in a high wall, which may have had a ceremonial meaning, or the more practical goal of keeping Anu's male priests away from Inanna's ziggurat. Eventually, the change in attitude towards the two deities was reflected in the city's mythology. According to legend, the temple of Ianna was brought to Uruk by Inanna herself, who stole it from Anu. Inanna was not content with simply stealing a temple, though. She also stole the sacred mare from the god Enki at the sacred city of Eridu, and brought them to Uruk. The mare can be described as cultural concepts, or divine decrees, on which Sumerian culture is built upon. And because Eridu was associated with rural life in Sumerian myths, this narrative suggested that Inanna transferred the seat of culture from a rural settlement to an urban one. Given Inanna's prominent place at the center of such important allegories, you can guess how important this goddess is to the citizens and society of Uruk. Inanna, who was also known as Ishtar in other Mesopotamian cities, was, in fact, the primary tutelary goddess of Uruk. Her name can be translated as Mistress of Heaven, and is frequently described as a ruling figure of innumerable divine powers. She was celebrated as such in a hymn composed by High Priestess Enheduanna, daughter of Emperor Sargon of Akkad in the 23rd century BC. Fun fact, Enheduanna is probably the world's first author identifiable by name, by the way. If we want to be more detailed about her powers, Inanna held sway over a particular sphere of existence, fertility and human sexuality. Among the mare relics which she stole, we can find sexual encounters, kissing, and prostitution. Strangely for a goddess of fertility, her myths only attribute two children to her, the gods Shara and Lalal. One interpretation is that Inanna is never in a maternal state, because she is always in a state of fertility. Another legend, in which she is called Ishtar, explains the extent of her fertility and sexual powers. In this story, it is said that 120 young men can satisfy themselves with Ishtar, and at the end, the young men have grown tired, Ishtar will not grow tired. Inanna is also described as a fierce warrior, depicted as riding a lion into battle. This warlike aspect is closely linked to the amorous one. The rulers and kings of Uruk were traditionally bound to Inanna in the sacred ritual of the sacred marriage. In this ceremony, the rulers became the embodiment of the god Dumuzi, Inanna's partner in Mesopotamian mythology. The goddess was traditionally embodied by a high priestess, or by the queen herself. After the ritual, the rulers became Inanna's darlings, or children. And if enemies of the city-state were to harm or endanger these children, Inanna would unleash her fearsome powers on them, devouring their corpses like a beast of prey. Not even the wondrous powers of Inanna herself could help Uruk against Sargon of Akkad, the first emperor to unify all of Mesopotamia. During the Akkadian period, from 2340 BC onward, Uruk and the rest of Sumer fell under the yoke of Sargon's empire. Sumerians did not particularly enjoy the rule of this outsider, rebelling several times against Sargon. But the emperor quashed these rebellions every time, eventually placing Uruk under the supervision of his daughter, Enhedwana, the priestess and poet we already encountered. Eventually, the Akkadian empire crumbled, and the region of Sumer was once again divided into city-states. In the second half of the 18th century BC, Uruk had to face a worse threat than the Akkadian armies, a period of extreme aridity. The drought depopulated the area, and for 300 years, the inhabitants of Uruk relocated to the city of Kish. The south was ravaged by three further centuries of drought, from 1200 to 900 BC. And yet, Uruk still stood. When this second dry period ended, the city was repopulated and rebuilt, flourishing once more. Despite sitting inland from major bodies of water, Uruk benefited from the sea trade which linked the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and India. Thanks to its beefed-up economic power, the city became the chief mediator between the Babylonian kings and the city-states of the south. New settlers continued to migrate to Uruk, attracted by the opportunities it offered. Up until the Sassanian period in the 3rd century AD, the city was an economic powerhouse. During this period, the learned elites of Uruk maintained regular contact with the Greek schools of philosophy, allowing for a lively dialogue between Mesopotamian knowledge and Western philosophy. Alas, all the philosophy in the world could not prevent Uruk from heading toward another slow-moving catastrophe. Over the last decades and centuries, the Euphrates River had gradually shifted to the west. All the while, Uruk had failed to properly maintain and extend the irrigation canals that had been connected to it, by this point, for thousands of years. As a result, these canals eventually ran dry and agricultural production plummeted. Urban civilization in the area had sprung and thrived as a direct consequence of irrigation, and now poorly-maintained canals marked its doom. In the 4th century AD, the population could not be sustained any longer. German archaeologist Marguerite van Eyrs offers another interpretation. According to her, Uruk's prosperity came to an end when the Sassanian Empire shifted trade to inland routes farther to the north. Perhaps both factors contributed to Uruk's sunset period. The city was almost completely abandoned and, since then, almost never mentioned in local chronicles. One of the last mentions of note is the battle for Al-Wahha, the Arabic name for Uruk. Here, in 634 AD, Arab general Al-Muthana led his cavalry in a victorious charge against the Sassanian army. For centuries, the ruins of the city of Inanna and Gilgamesh suffered erosion and weathering, its foundations slowly sinking into the Mesopotamian silt. Above the ground, much of what was Sumer became sparsely settled, with its extensive lands used as pasture grounds by nomadic shepherds. And this, archaeologically speaking, was great news, as no new cities were built over the remains of Uruk. The foundations and buried artifacts of Uruk survived in good condition, eagerly waiting for that soft touch of the archaeologist's brush. The first researcher to show up for the appointment with history was William K. Loftus. He was a member of an Anglo-Russian commission charged with settling a Turco-Persian border dispute. In 1853, he led a dig around Uruk, finding objects from the Seleucid and Parthian periods which he entrusted to the British Museum. More formal excavations took place in 1912 and 1913, led by Julius Jordan and Conrad Prusser and financed by the German-Orient Society. The expedition charted a topographical plan of the city, explored the ziggurat of Inanna, and located a sanctuary dedicated to Goddess Bit-Resh, wife of Anu. Inside the sanctuary, they found a colossal temple, protected by walls seven meters high and twelve meters thick. Unfortunately, more pressing matters put an end to the work of the German-Orient Society as World War I. Excavations resumed only in 1928, when the newly created country of Iraq was under British control. The new excavations focused on the Iana precinct of the ziggurat of Inanna, stretching well into the 1970s, with obvious interruptions due to other interim conflicts. Archaeologists dug through the surface of the courtyards of the district, finding pre-existing levels dating back more than 5,000 years. The findings proved that the site had been used for worship since as early as 3,500 BC, and that successive temples and shrines had been built over their predecessors. Some of the earliest buildings they found appeared incredibly sophisticated for the time, as their facades were decorated in the geometrical and elegant patterns of clay cone mosaics. More recently, from 2001 to 2019, the site was explored again by a team that included archaeologist Van Ess and geophysicists Jörg Fassbinder and Helmut Becker of Ludwig Maximilian's University of Munich. The team used a magnetometer to produce a map of the city's buried foundations and structures. Their map revealed several surprising features. For example, that the center of Iraq stands on top of 35 layers of building, lying on top of one another to a depth of 25 meters. The oldest layer can be dated back to 4,500 years ago. Other findings matched descriptions of the city from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Iraq was graced by the presence of extensive, presumably luxurious gardens, and maintained thanks to a network of waterways which crossed the city from north to south. The larger canals were also used for transport, as attested to by the presence of harbors, water gates, and landing places which gave access to different city quarters. A Venice in the alluvium. In their recently published reports, the Munich team highlight how just a tiny fraction of ancient Uruk has been properly explored, perhaps less than 1%. It may take years before we get to admire any of the remaining structures, as excavating at depth could endanger the city's structures, or its artifacts. Six millennia of history wait to be discovered in the depths of Iraq. What is buried down there is anyone's guess, but as proved by the recent findings, one thing is for sure. The most ancient city in the history of the world could still be hiding plenty of surprises for us in the future.