History
The cities of Sumer, and one that is ours
7 places, each marked for what it actually is: a real city, a real city carrying something we added, or an invention of ours wearing a Sumerian name.
Most of these are real places you can visit, or at least stand on. They have patron gods, kings, excavation reports and mounds with modern names. One of them we made up. This page tells you which is which, per place, because a retelling that blurs that line is worth less than one that draws it.
How to read the marks
- Historical
- A real place. What we say about it follows the attested record, and the fiction stays out of the facts.
- Historical, retold
- A real place carrying an authored layer. The history stays accurate; what we added is stated openly on its page.
- Ours, not history
- Ours. Not a real place, or a real name deliberately reused for an invented thing. Never history, and never taught as history.
- Historical, retold
Uruk
- In Sumerian:
- Unug
- Patron:
- Inanna, in the Eanna; and An, the older claimant to the precinct
- Today:
- Warka, Al-Muthanna, Iraq
- Period:
- Uruk period, southern Mesopotamia (~4000 to 3100 BCE)
- Historical
Nippur
- In Sumerian:
- Nibru
- Patron:
- Enlil, in the Ekur
- Today:
- Nuffar, Al-Qadisiyyah, Iraq
- Period:
- Southern Mesopotamia; occupied from the Ubaid period and continuously important through the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE, with the excavated record running into the Islamic era
Full page coming - Historical
Ur
- In Sumerian:
- Urim
- Patron:
- Nanna, the moon, with his consort Ningal
- Today:
- Tell el-Muqayyar, Dhi Qar, Iraq
- Period:
- Southern Mesopotamia; royal tombs mid-3rd millennium BCE, the Third Dynasty of Ur ~2112 to 2004 BCE
Full page coming - Historical
Eridug
- In Sumerian:
- Eridug, commonly Eridu
- Patron:
- Enki, in the E-abzu over the Abzu
- Today:
- Tell Abu Shahrain, Dhi Qar, Iraq
- Period:
- Southern Mesopotamia; settled from the Ubaid period ~5400 BCE, and remembered by the Sumerians as the first city of all
Full page coming - Historical
Nineveh
- Patron:
- Ishtar of Nineveh; Assyrian, and far later than Sumer
- Today:
- Mosul, Nineveh Governorate, Iraq
- Period:
- Library of Ashurbanipal buried ~612 BCE; rediscovered 1850s CE; first read 1872 CE
- Historical
The Eanna
- In Sumerian:
- E-anna, house of heaven
- Patron:
- Inanna
- Today:
- the precinct at Warka
- Period:
- Uruk period, southern Mesopotamia (~4000 to 3100 BCE)
Full page coming - Ours, not history
The Gate of Uruk
- Today:
- no site; this place is ours
Full page coming
About the one that is ours
The Gate of Uruk is an invention. There is no stone ring on the plain west of Warka, no excavation report, nothing to visit. It exists because the story needed a threshold and we would rather build one openly than quietly attach our fiction to something real.
This matters more than it looks. The moment an invented place is filed among real ones without a mark, everything around it becomes slightly less trustworthy, including the parts that are true. So it carries a mark, and it sits last in this list on purpose.
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