Uruk: The World's First Great City in Ancient Mesopotamia

Uruk was a city in southern Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq, that around 3200 BC became the largest settlement in the world and is widely regarded as the first true city. At its height in the Late Uruk period it covered some 250 hectares, with grand temple precincts, workshops, a powerful administration and the earliest known writing. Remembered later as the home of King Gilgamesh, Uruk gave its name to a whole era of early civilisation.

Location and origins

Uruk lay beside a branch of the Euphrates in the flat alluvial plain of Sumer, the far south of Mesopotamia. The river has since moved away, and the ruins, known in Arabic as Warka, now stand in desert in the Muthanna Governorate, roughly 30 kilometres east of Samawah.

People settled there in the Ubaid period, before 5000 BC, when farming villages with irrigation canals spread across the plain. Two early settlements later merged: one around the temple of the sky god An, called Kullaba, and one around the shrine of Inanna, goddess of love and war, called Eanna.

The years from about 4000 to 3100 BC are known to archaeologists as the Uruk period, named after the site because its layers were the first to be studied in detail. During this time Uruk grew far faster than its neighbours.

Growth into a city

By the Late Uruk period, around 3300-3100 BC, Uruk covered an estimated 230-250 hectares. Population figures are only educated guesses based on the size of the site, but scholars commonly suggest 20,000 to 50,000 people. No other settlement of the time came close.

Uruk’s wealth rested on irrigated barley, date palms, sheep and goats, and fish from the marshes. Canals and river channels carried boats through the city, and magnetic surveys carried out by German researchers in 2001-2002 revealed traces of waterways, gardens and fields inside the later walls.

A striking sign of organised life is the bevelled-rim bowl: crude, mould-made clay bowls found in their hundreds of thousands. Many archaeologists think they were used to hand out standard rations of grain to workers, although this interpretation is debated. Either way, they point to large-scale production and distribution managed by central institutions.

Temples of Eanna and Anu

The heart of the city was the Eanna precinct of Inanna. Over a few centuries builders raised a sequence of huge buildings there, including the so-called Limestone Temple, a hall with columns covered in mosaics of coloured clay cones, and Temple D, which measured roughly 80 by 50 metres. Archaeologists still argue whether all these buildings were temples or some were palaces, meeting halls or storehouses.

In the Anu district stood the White Temple, a whitewashed shrine on a high terrace built around 3500-3000 BC, one of the forerunners of the later stepped temple towers called ziggurats. A ziggurat was later built in Eanna by Ur-Nammu of Ur around 2100 BC; its eroded remains still rise above the plain today.

These precincts were not only religious centres. They organised land, herds, craft workshops and labour, and needed ways to keep track of it all.

The buildings followed a distinctive tripartite plan: a long central hall flanked by rows of smaller rooms, a design inherited from earlier temples at Eridu. Their walls were decorated with buttresses and recesses and, in places, with millions of baked clay cones, their heads dipped in red, black or white and pressed into mud plaster to form zigzag and diamond patterns. Some of these cone mosaics were taken to Berlin and are displayed in the Pergamon Museum.

The Eanna buildings were repeatedly levelled and rebuilt on new plans, so archaeologists have recovered a complex sequence of layers rather than one single moment. Much of what is known comes from excavation of these foundations and from objects buried in them when the old buildings were cleared away.

Writing, art and inventions

In the Eanna rubbish layers German excavators found about 5,000 tablets and fragments of proto-cuneiform, the earliest stage of the invention of cuneiform writing. Dating to roughly 3350-3000 BC, they record rations, livestock, fields and workers, along with word lists used for training scribes.

Uruk also produced remarkable art. The alabaster Warka Vase shows a procession of offerings to Inanna, and the marble Mask of Warka, a life-size woman’s face carved around 3100 BC, is one of the earliest naturalistic sculptures of a human face. Cylinder seals, rolled across clay to mark ownership or approval, became widespread in this period.

Other developments associated with the Uruk world include the fast potter’s wheel, mass-produced pottery, large-scale wool textile production and the use of copper. Not all were invented at Uruk itself, but the city was the centre of the culture in which they spread.

Later Sumerian poems remembered Uruk’s early greatness. In one, the goddess Inanna travels to Eridu and brings back to Uruk the me, the divine powers and arts of civilisation, from the god Enki. In others, King Enmerkar of Uruk competes with the distant city of Aratta for precious stone and metal, and is said to have invented writing on clay to send his messages. These are myths, but they show that Sumerians themselves saw Uruk as a source of culture.

The Uruk expansion

Between about 3600 and 3100 BC, settlements with typical Uruk pottery, architecture and administrative tools appeared far from southern Mesopotamia. Habuba Kabira and Jebel Aruda on the Euphrates in Syria look like planned outposts of southern settlers, and Uruk-style material also reached Susa in Iran and sites in south-eastern Anatolia.

Scholars call this the Uruk expansion. One influential view, put forward by Guillermo Algaze, sees it as a trading network that secured timber, metals and stone for the resource-poor south. Others stress local initiative, migration or political rivalry. Around 3100 BC the network collapsed and the outposts were abandoned, for reasons still unclear.

Gilgamesh and the walls of Uruk

In the Early Dynastic period, around 2900-2700 BC, Uruk was surrounded by a wall about 9 kilometres long, enclosing some 5.5 square kilometres. Later tradition credited it to King Gilgamesh, whom the Sumerian King List places in the first dynasty of Uruk after the legendary rulers Enmerkar and Lugalbanda.

The Epic of Gilgamesh opens and closes by inviting the reader to walk on the walls of “Uruk the sheepfold” and admire its brickwork, fields and temple. Gilgamesh may have been a real king who ruled around 2700 BC, but no inscription of his own survives.

Later history, excavation and today

Uruk remained an important city for about 3,000 more years. Its ruler Lugalzagesi briefly dominated Sumer around 2350 BC before being defeated by Sargon of Akkad, and Utu-hegal of Uruk is credited with driving out the Gutian rulers around 2100 BC. The city later lived in the shadow of Ur and Babylon but kept its religious prestige.

In the Seleucid period, after Alexander the Great, Uruk saw a revival, with huge new temples to An and Inanna and a community of scholars who were among the last people to write in cuneiform. The city declined in the Parthian and Sasanian periods and was abandoned around the time of the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD. The Bible remembers it as Erech, and some scholars have suggested that the Arabic name Iraq ultimately derives from Uruk, though this is uncertain.

The British geologist William Kennett Loftus explored and dug at Warka in the early 1850s. Systematic excavation was carried out by the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft) and later the German Archaeological Institute, starting with a season in 1912-1913 and continuing, with interruptions, from 1928 to 1939 under Julius Jordan and others, and from 1954 to 1989.

The site was damaged by looting in the years around the 2003 Iraq War, though less than many other Sumerian sites. The Mask of Warka, stolen from the Iraq Museum in April 2003, was recovered in September 2003, buried on a farm north of Baghdad. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed Uruk, with Ur and Eridu and the marshes of southern Iraq, as a World Heritage Site.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 5000 BC: Farming settlements are established at Uruk in the Ubaid period.
• c. 4000-3100 BC: The Uruk period; the settlement grows into the largest in the world.
• c. 3350-3200 BC: The earliest proto-cuneiform tablets are written in the Eanna precinct.
• c. 3100 BC: The Uruk expansion network collapses; the Mask of Warka is carved around this time.
• c. 2900-2700 BC: The great city wall, later attributed to Gilgamesh, is built.
• c. 2350 BC: Lugalzagesi of Uruk dominates Sumer before his defeat by Sargon of Akkad.
• c. 2100 BC: Ur-Nammu of Ur builds a ziggurat in the Eanna precinct.
• 1850s: William Kennett Loftus makes the first explorations at Warka.
• 1928: Long-running German excavations begin under Julius Jordan.
• 2016: Uruk becomes part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Uruk was where many features of urban civilisation first came together: dense population, monumental architecture, specialised labour, bureaucracy and writing. Every later city of the ancient Near East followed the path it opened, and its story still survives in the oldest epic poem of humankind.