The Sumerian Temple Record That Names the First City on Earth — And the Civilization Buried Beneath

In the desert of southern Iraq, twelve kilometers from the ancient ruins of Ur, there is an unremarkable mound that locals call Tell Abu Shahrain. In 1855, a British official named John George Taylor was the first to dig here. He looked over the heap of sand, found almost nothing worth recording, and left disappointed. He did not know he was standing on top of the oldest city in human history. Nearly a century later, after the Second World War, an Iraqi expedition led by Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd began cutting down into that mound, and they could not stop. Beneath the foundation of a ziggurat they found a temple. Beneath that temple, another. And beneath that, another still. In total, eighteen layers of settlement, six temples built one on top of the other on the exact same spot, and the lowest turned out to be older than the Sumerians themselves, reaching back to a people who lived here fifteen hundred years before the first wedge of cuneiform was ever pressed into clay. The Sumerians called this city Eridu, and in their own records they insisted that this was where everything began. The Sumerian King List opens with a single line: "After kingship descended from heaven, kingship was in Eridu." Not Ur, not Uruk — Eridu. The first city....
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