Eridu: Mesopotamia's Earliest Settlement and Temple Sequence

Eridu, today the mound of Tell Abu Shahrain in southern Iraq, was one of the earliest settlements on the Mesopotamian plain, founded around 5400 BC during the Ubaid period. Sumerian tradition remembered it as the first city on Earth, the place where kingship first descended from heaven, and as the home of the god Enki. Its long series of temples, built one on top of another, offers a unique record of how Mesopotamian religious architecture developed.

Location and setting

Eridu lies about 12 kilometres south-west of Ur, in the Dhi Qar Governorate of southern Iraq. Today the site is surrounded by desert, but in antiquity it stood at the edge of a freshwater lagoon and marshland fed by the Euphrates, close to the head of the Gulf, which then lay further inland than it does now.

This setting mattered. Eridu sat where several environments met: irrigated farmland, marshes rich in fish and reeds, and desert grazing land. Some archaeologists suggest that the town drew together farmers, fishers and herders, each with their own way of life.

Some scholars have connected these groups with the later religious life of the city. The reed and mud architecture of the marsh dwellers, the irrigation of the farmers and the fish offerings at the temple all fit the image of Enki as a god of fresh water and skills. Such links are attractive but remain interpretations rather than proven facts.

Founding and the Ubaid period

The earliest settlers arrived during the Ubaid period, the first farming culture of southern Mesopotamia. Their arrival is usually dated to around 5400 BC, although some chronologies place the oldest levels several centuries earlier. The early phase of Ubaid pottery, known as Ubaid 1, is still often called “Eridu ware” after the site.

The settlement grew into one of the largest of its time on the southern plain. Its people lived in houses of mud brick and reeds, farmed with irrigation and fished in the lagoon. Estimates suggest that by the late Ubaid, around 4500 BC, it may have had a few thousand inhabitants, but such figures are uncertain.

The temple sequence

Eridu is best known for the remains discovered beneath its later ziggurat. In excavations from 1946 to 1949, the Iraqi archaeologist Fuad Safar and the British archaeologist Seton Lloyd, working for the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities, cut down through the mound and found around 18 superimposed building levels, numbered from XVIII at the bottom to I at the top.

The lowest levels contained only traces of small structures. Level XVI held a tiny room of mud brick, about 3 metres across, with a niche and what appears to be an offering table. In later levels the building was rebuilt again and again on the same spot, each time a little larger and more elaborate.

By levels VII and VI, in the late Ubaid period, the sanctuary had become a substantial tripartite temple: a long central hall flanked by side rooms, set on a raised platform, with walls decorated by regular buttresses and recesses. This plan became the standard form of Mesopotamian temples for thousands of years.

In several levels, excavators found large quantities of fish bones, some on what seemed to be an offering table. Many scholars link these to Enki, the god of fresh water, although the connection between the prehistoric shrine and the later cult cannot be proved for the earliest phases.

The Ubaid cemetery

Near the temple area, Safar and Lloyd excavated around 200 graves belonging to a large Ubaid-period cemetery. Most burials were in rectangular brick-lined graves, with the dead laid on their backs, often accompanied by pottery and occasionally by a dog or food offerings.

The graves show relatively modest differences in wealth. This suggests that, despite the impressive temple, Ubaid society at Eridu was not yet sharply divided between rich and poor.

Clay figurines with slender bodies and elongated heads, sometimes called “lizard-headed” figures, have been found at Eridu and at nearby Ur in late Ubaid contexts. Their meaning is unknown, but they are among the most distinctive objects of the period.

Eridu in Sumerian tradition

For the Sumerians, Eridu held a special place. The Sumerian King List opens by stating that kingship first descended from heaven to Eridu, where Alulim became the first king and ruled for a fabulous 28,800 years. These long reigns are mythical, but they show that Eridu was remembered as the oldest of cities.

Eridu was the city of Enki, known to the Akkadians as Ea, the god of fresh water, wisdom, magic and crafts. His temple was called the E-abzu, “house of the Abzu”, the freshwater ocean believed to lie beneath the earth. In the myth known as “Inanna and Enki”, the goddess Inanna visits Eridu and carries off the “me”, the divine powers of civilisation, to her own city of Uruk.

A fragmentary Sumerian text, which modern scholars call the Eridu Genesis, tells of the creation of humans, the founding of the first cities and a great flood. It belongs to the same tradition as other Mesopotamian flood stories.

Later history

Eridu remained a religious centre long after the Ubaid period. In the Uruk period, after about 4000 BC, new temples rose on top of the old ones. Around the 21st century BC, kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur, beginning with Ur-Nammu and continued by Amar-Sin, built a stepped temple tower, or ziggurat, on the site, similar to the Ziggurat of Ur. Bricks stamped with royal names have been recovered there.

The town itself declined during the second millennium BC, as the course of rivers changed and political power shifted to other centres. Eridu’s prestige as the city of Enki and the oldest of cities survived in religious literature long after the settlement had faded.

Archaeological interest began in 1855, when John George Taylor, the British vice-consul at Basra, made soundings at Abu Shahrain. Reginald Campbell Thompson in 1918 and Harry Hall in 1919 carried out further work before the major excavations of Safar and Lloyd.

Myths and facts

Myth: Eridu was the world’s first city. Fact: This was a Sumerian belief, not an archaeological finding. Ubaid Eridu was an important early settlement, but true cities with tens of thousands of people first appeared later, in the Uruk period. Older permanent settlements, such as Jericho and Çatalhöyük, also existed outside Mesopotamia.

Myth: Eridu’s temples were ziggurats from the start. Fact: The ziggurat that dominates the site today was built more than 3,000 years after the first shrine. The earliest buildings were small mud-brick rooms.

Timeline

• c. 5400 BC: First settlement at Eridu, according to commonly cited estimates.
• c. 5400-4500 BC: Temple levels XVIII to VIII built one above another.
• c. 4500-4000 BC: Late Ubaid tripartite temples on platforms (levels VII-VI).
• c. 4000-3100 BC: Uruk-period temples built on the same site.
• c. 21st century BC: Ur III kings, Ur-Nammu and Amar-Sin, build a ziggurat at Eridu.
• 1855: John George Taylor makes the first soundings at Abu Shahrain.
• 1946-1949: Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd excavate the temple sequence and cemetery.
• 2016: Eridu included in a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southern Iraq.

Why it matters

Eridu provides the clearest archaeological record of how a modest village shrine grew, over more than a thousand years, into a monumental temple. That continuity links the prehistoric Ubaid farmers to the religion of Sumer, and helps explain why later Mesopotamians looked back on Eridu as the place where civilisation began.