Uruk, the great city

The story

The city with walls nine kilometres long

If you had arrived in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC, after days of travel through green fields and canals, you would have seen a dark smudge on the horizon: the walls of Uruk. Those walls, made of mud brick, ran for about nine kilometres, with hundreds of towers, and enclosed an area of more than five square kilometres, although not all of it was filled with houses. No city in the world was so big. Scholars estimate that tens of thousands of people lived inside; the exact numbers are not known and vary greatly from one estimate to another.

Uruk, which the Arabs today call Warka, stood near the ancient course of the Euphrates, in the south of present-day Iraq. In the Bible it appears as Erech. Sumerian tradition said that its walls had been ordered by King Gilgamesh, the fifth king of the city after the flood. Archaeologists say the surviving walls are a little later than the age of greatest splendour, perhaps about 2900 BC, but the idea that a king had protected the city with such a long wall was already clear to the ancients.

Two districts, two gods

In the centre of Uruk there were two great sacred areas. The first was the Eanna, “the house of heaven”, dedicated to the goddess Inanna, lady of love and war. Here stood enormous buildings, with walls decorated with thousands of little clay cones painted red, black and white and pushed into the plaster, forming geometric patterns like a mosaic. The second was the terrace of Anu, the sky god, where a temple with white walls stood on an artificial hill about twelve metres high: archaeologists call it the White Temple. It is one of the ancestors of the ziggurats, the stepped towers we will talk about.

From the Eanna district also comes the Warka Vase, a large alabaster vase about a metre tall, carved in bands. From bottom to top we see plants, animals, naked men carrying offerings, and finally the goddess with her priest-king. It is like a summary of the society of the time: nature, work and power. It was found in 1933–1934, stolen in 2003 during the war in Iraq and recovered after a couple of months, but in pieces, and then restored.

A city full of trades

Uruk was not only big. It was also complicated. Specialised craftsmen worked there: potters, weavers, smiths, stonecutters, jewellers who worked rare stone brought from far away, such as lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The temple worked as a great storehouse and received barley, wool, oil and animals. Its employees received food rations in return. To hand them out, mass-produced clay bowls with flared rims were used: thousands have been found, and they are a sign of mass production. Some people joke that they are the “lunch bowls” of antiquity.

Uruk also used the cylinder seal: a small stone cylinder with a carved design, rolled over soft clay to leave one's signature on a container or a tablet. And it is here, as we have seen, that the first written tablets appeared, to keep accounts. The priest-king, called en in Sumerian, governed the city and the temple together.

A network of colonies

Uruk was not isolated. In the same period, and in places hundreds of kilometres away, in Syria and Iran, archaeologists have found villages and small towns with pottery, seals and architecture typical of Uruk, such as Habuba Kabira on the Euphrates or Godin Tepe in the mountains of Iran. Some scholars regard them as trading colonies, set up to obtain metals, wood and stones. Others think of looser relations between communities that shared the same style. The debate is open.

After the peak

Around 3100 BC the Uruk period ended, perhaps because of changes in the climate or the rivers, or because of wars. The city went on living for thousands of years, but other cities became more important, such as Ur and then Babylon. Uruk had King Gilgamesh, who became the hero of a poem; in its temple of Inanna the gods were still worshipped a thousand years later. It was inhabited until the first centuries AD and abandoned completely around AD 700, perhaps because the Euphrates changed course and left the city without water.

The German excavations began in 1912 and have continued on and off until today: they are among the longest in the history of archaeology. Yet only a small part of the city has been dug.