The Age of Uruk (3800–3100 BC)

Five thousand years ago, a single city on the mud of southern Iraq swelled into the largest settlement the world had ever seen. Uruk drew in tens of thousands of people, raised brick temples that shone white across the fields, and learned to seal and count everything that moved through it. In the span of a few centuries, the surge spread far beyond it: planned colonies a thousand kilometers up the Euphrates, a mudbrick palace in the Anatolian hills, and walled cities on the rain-fed northern plains, one of them falling in the earliest battle yet found. Most of these bright new centers guttered out. But on the southern plain the lights stayed on, and there, in lists of barley and workers, writing began.

This episode follows the 4th-millennium surge across Mesopotamia, northern Syria, eastern Anatolia, and lowland Iran, from c.3800 to 3100 BC, the few centuries when settled life tipped over into the city. It covers Uruk and its cone-mosaic temples, the ox-plow and wool economy that fed it, and the mass-produced ration bowls that mark its reach; the Uruk expansion up the Euphrates to the planned colonies of Habuba Kabira and Jebel Aruda and the trading enclave at Hacınebi; the northern cities that grew on their own, Tell Brak with its Eye Temple, the mass graves of Tell Majnuna, the far-carried wealth of Tepe Gawra, and the burned walls and sling-bullets of Hamoukar, the earliest large battle known; the highland palace of Arslantepe with its wall paintings and the oldest swords ever found; the trading post at Godin Tepe; and the eastern centers of Chogha Mish and Susa, where the undeciphered Proto-Elamite script appears. It ends at the birth of writing on the southern plain, from clay tokens to the first tablets and the name Kushim. Using maps, archaeology, radiocarbon dating, and the excavated seals and tablets themselves, it follows why the surge ran across the whole region but lasted only in the south, where cities and writing took hold.

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