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.

What you actually see

• 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.

Honest expectations

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.