The first Sumerian cities

The story

A plain without stones or forests

Imagine a flat, mud-coloured stretch of land crossed by two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. In summer it is terribly hot, rain is very scarce and there are almost no stones or big trees. Yet it was right here, in the south of what is now Iraq, in a region the ancients called Sumer, that the first cities in history were born. Scholars place them between about 4000 and 3100 BC, a period archaeologists call the “Uruk period”, after its most important city. For such a distant age the dates are approximate and may change by a few centuries.

The Sumerians did not call themselves that. They described themselves as “the black-headed people” and called their land Kiengi, a word usually translated as “land of the civilised lords”. The name “Sumerians” was used by neighbouring peoples, and it is the one we use today. They spoke a language unlike any other known language, so scholars are not sure where their ancestors came from, or whether they came from anywhere at all.

Water that could be guided

The secret of this success was water. In spring the rivers swelled with melting snow from far away, but the flood often came at the wrong moment: too late for the fields, and sometimes with sudden force. To make use of it, even the oldest villages, those of the so-called Ubaid culture (about 6500 to 3800 BC), began to dig canals. These were earth ditches, dug with stone hoes and with reed baskets to carry the soil away, which led water from the river to the fields and took it back again when needed. A canal could not be dug alone. Building it, and clearing the mud out of it every year, took the work of many families together, and someone had to decide where it would run and whose turn it was to get the water first.

With irrigation, barley grew so well that a field produced much more than the people who farmed it needed. The inhabitants also kept sheep, goats and cattle, grew date palms and fished in the marshes of the south. For the first time there was food to spare, and this changed everything.

A city is known by what it does not grow

If farmers produce more than they eat, some people can stop being farmers. So, beside the fields, there appeared potters, weavers, copper smiths, stonecutters, boatmen and merchants. Priests appeared too and, later, scribes. Houses were no longer scattered among the fields but packed close together behind a wall. At this point we are no longer talking about villages: these are cities, with thousands of inhabitants, and in some, like Uruk, tens of thousands.

At the centre of every city stood the temple of its protecting god: Enki at Eridu, Inanna at Uruk, Nanna at Ur. The Sumerians believed that the city belonged to the god and that people worked to serve him. For this reason the temple was not only a place of prayer. It was also a great storehouse and workshop: it received part of the harvest, shared it out as rations to the workers and kept the accounts of the flocks. Remembering all this later made it necessary to invent writing (see the card on cuneiform writing).

Eridu, the oldest city?

Sumerian tradition says that the first city was Eridu. In a list of kings written many generations later we read that “kingship came down from heaven” at Eridu. Excavations have shown that a small shrine was built here around 5500 BC, then rebuilt eighteen times, each time on top of the one before and always bigger, until it became an imposing temple. Other cities, such as Uruk, Ur, Kish, Nippur and Lagash, were growing in the same period. They were not united in a single state. Each city had its own governor or king, its own walls, canals and god; for this reason historians speak of “city-states”. They often quarrelled over a canal or a boundary.

What we do not know

It is not easy to say how and why the change from village to city happened. Some scholars think it was driven by a drier climate, which led people to gather along the rivers, and by the need to organise the canals. Others stress the role of temples and trade. Probably several causes worked together. Another thing is uncertain: the relationship between the Sumerians and neighbouring Semitic peoples, such as the Akkadians, who already lived beside them and whom we will discuss in another card. Sumerian cities were, from the start, a place where different languages and peoples met.

The first cities in the world were therefore born from an idea that is both simple and difficult: to use the water all together, and to share out the jobs.