Water first
Southern Mesopotamia is a flat plain of river silt between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The soil is rich and the rain is not, so farming depends on water taken from the rivers. Communities dug canals, raised banks and learned to move water where it was needed. With regular irrigation, harvests of barley became large and predictable.
A surplus raises new questions. Where do you keep the grain? Who decides how much goes to whom, and when the canal must be cleared? Canal work needs crews, and stored harvests need trust. The more people depended on one another, the more they relied on institutions that could organise them, and the buildings of that work appear in the record: storerooms, courtyards, quays for loading boats.
The temple as warehouse
In the early cities the biggest of those institutions was the temple. It was the house of a god, and it was also a centre of storage, craft and distribution: offerings came in, rations, tools and seed went out. Priests and stewards turned the ritual calendar into a work calendar.
The commonest object on Uruk-period sites shows the system at work. Bevelled-rim bowls are rough clay bowls made in huge numbers, probably in moulds, and they make up about three quarters of all the pottery found. They have long been read as ration bowls for measured portions of grain, and recent residue studies at the University of Glasgow suggest they also held stews. Cheap, identical and thrown away by the thousand, they are a little like the disposable containers of a works canteen, and they point to food handed out on a large scale.
From counting to writing
A city of strangers needs records. One influential theory, developed by the archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, holds that administrators first used small clay tokens to stand for goods, sealed inside hollow clay balls called bullae, and that pressing the tokens’ shapes into the surface of clay eventually replaced the tokens themselves. Whether or not it happened exactly that way, by about 3350 BCE scribes at Uruk were writing on clay tablets.
About 5,000 of these early tablets, in the script called proto-cuneiform, were excavated in the Eanna precinct between 1928 and 1976. Almost all are administrative: rations, livestock, fields, workers. A small group are word lists used to train scribes. Cylinder seals appeared in the same period, small stone rollers that left an image on wet clay like a signature. With tablets and seals, a city could keep track of people who never met.
Uruk, the giant
Around 3100 BCE Uruk covered more than 250 hectares, about the area of 350 football pitches, and was home to tens of thousands of people, although estimates vary widely. It was the largest settlement in southern Mesopotamia and perhaps in the world. In the early third millennium BCE it was enclosed by a wall about 9 km long, which later tradition credited to the hero-king Gilgamesh.
Its centre was the Eanna, Inanna’s precinct, where monumental buildings went up, came down and were rebuilt on new plans again and again, their walls covered with mosaics of painted clay cones. Nearby, the White Temple stood on a terrace about 12 m high by around 3500 BCE, visible across the plain. The true ziggurat, a solid stepped tower with a shrine on top, came much later, around 2100 BCE, but it grew out of platforms like this one. The same institutions that counted grain also commissioned images of the gods, among them the Warka Vase and the Mask of Warka.
Older roots: Eridu
Uruk was big, but the story starts earlier. At Eridu, further south, excavators found eighteen temples built one on top of another. The earliest, from around 5400 BCE, was a single mudbrick room of about 3 by 4 m with a niche in one wall; the later ones grew into large buildings on a raised platform. The Sumerians remembered the place too. The Sumerian King List opens by saying that when kingship came down from heaven, it was first at Eridu.
More than one road to the city
For a long time the story of the first cities was told from the south alone. Work at Tell Brak, in north-eastern Syria, changed that. Between about 4200 and 3800 BCE the central mound at Brak was surrounded by clusters of settlement covering about 55 hectares, a town growing as people moved in. Brak lies in a zone of rain-fed farming, where crops grow without irrigation, so cities could also rise without canals.
The southern plain has no stone, metal or good timber, so Uruk’s people reached out for them. Uruk-style settlements appeared far up the Euphrates and in western Iran, a phenomenon archaeologists call the Uruk expansion. The clearest example is Habuba Kabira in Syria, a planned town with a wall, regular streets and southern-style houses, lived in for about 120 years. It was excavated between 1969 and 1975, just before the Tabqa Dam flooded the valley, and today it lies under the waters of Lake Assad.
Where to see them
Uruk and Eridu are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq” (2016), together with Ur. Finds from the Eanna, including tablets and cone mosaics, are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, whose Pergamonmuseum galleries are partly closed for renovation. Check current travel advice and museum openings before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Uruk: The First City” and “The Origins of Writing” (Heilbrunn Timeline essays).
- J. Oates, A. McMahon, P. Karsgaard, S. Al Quntar and J. Ur, “Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new view from the north”, Antiquity 81 (2007).
- D. Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing (University of Texas Press, 1992).
- G. Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization (2008).
- F. Safar, M. A. Mustafa and S. Lloyd, Eridu (1981).
- E. Strommenger, Habuba Kabira: eine Stadt vor 5000 Jahren (1980).
- University of Glasgow, “Let them eat stew” (news release on bevelled-rim bowl residues, 2022).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq” (2016).
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