Uruk

Uruk was, around 3200 BC, plausibly the largest settlement on earth, and it is where several things that define urban life appear together for the first time: monumental public architecture, mass-produced pottery, administrative sealing, and the earliest known writing, clay tablets of proto-cuneiform recording quantities of grain and livestock. The city gave its name to a whole archaeological period. Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic, is presented as its king and is credited in the poem with building its walls. What stands now is a spread of mounds in flat desert with the ziggurat of the Eanna precinct, temple platforms and traces of the city wall, excavated by German teams over more than a century. It is a component of the Ahwar World Heritage property.

History

The Sumerian King List names Enmerkar as Uruk's founder, and in the Epic of Gilgamesh it is Gilgamesh who builds the city wall. Uruk grew through the Early and Late Uruk periods, from 4000 to 3100 BC, as two Ubaid settlements became the cities of Unug and Kullaba and merged, their temple quarters becoming the Eanna district of Inanna and the Anu district, and a canal system threaded the city, which has been called Venice in the desert. At its peak around 3100 BC it may have had up to 50,000 people, with 80,000 to 90,000 more around it, the largest urban area in the world at the time, and it reached 600 hectares by about 2800 BC. It lost its prime importance with the rise of the Akkadian Empire, and a shift of the Euphrates together with salt from irrigation may have contributed to its decline. Fraser and Ross noted the site in 1835, William Loftus dug here in 1850 and 1854, and German excavations began in 1912 under Julius Jordan (Wikipedia, Uruk).

What's there

• The Eanna ziggurat - the eroded temple platform at the city's core.
• City mounds - the spread of the ancient settlement across the desert.
• Wall traces - the line of the circuit Gilgamesh is credited with.
• Excavation areas - the German trenches worked over a century.

When to go

November to March; the southern desert is punishing from April to October and there is no shade at all. Early morning is the only comfortable time even in winter.

Before you go

Everything is eroded mudbrick and requires imagination and reading. There is no visitor centre and almost no interpretation. Permission and a driver who knows the route are needed. The tablets and finds are in Berlin, Baghdad and elsewhere.

Nearby

Eridu lies southeast; Samawah is the nearest town.

Key facts