Uruk, the first great city

For most of human history people lived in villages and small towns. Then, in the fourth millennium BCE, Uruk grew past anything that had come before. At its peak it may have held tens of thousands of residents inside a wall many kilometres long, a scale so far beyond its neighbours that historians name the whole era the Uruk period.

Two great districts stood at its heart. Eanna was the precinct of Inanna, the goddess of love and war the later world would know as Ishtar. Nearby rose the district of the sky-god Anu, crowned by a high whitewashed temple on a platform, an ancestor of the stepped towers we call ziggurats. Around them spread workshops, storehouses, and the crowded homes of a true city.

Uruk was not just big. It was a new kind of place, where strangers lived side by side, labour was organised on a vast scale, and a temple economy fed and counted a population no village could support.

Uruk's greatest gift to the world was writing itself. Around 3300 BCE, the administrators of its temples needed to track herds, grain, rations, and land. They began pressing marks into wet clay tablets: first simple pictures and counting signs, then, over generations, a system flexible enough to record language.

Those marks were the ancestors of cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script that would carry Mesopotamian thought for three thousand years. It is the oldest writing we can still read, and it started here, in the account-books of a Sumerian city.

Writing was not invented to tell stories or record laws. It was invented to keep track of things. Only later did people realise that the same tool could hold a hymn, a letter, a king's boast, or the oldest tale humanity ever wrote down.

Uruk is also remembered as the city of Gilgamesh, a king who may really have ruled here around 2700 BCE and who became the hero of the world's oldest surviving epic. In that poem his greatest monument is the wall of Uruk itself, which the story invites the reader to walk and admire.

The city lived on for thousands of years, through Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and later rulers, before the rivers shifted, the fields dried, and the people drifted away. Its great mounds were slowly buried by sand.

Today the ruins are called Warka, and archaeologists have been uncovering them for over a century. The walls, the temples, and the first tablets are real, and you can still stand where the first city stood.