Eridu

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The water table is close beneath this part of the southern desert, and in spring the hollows between the dunes still fill and shine. Stand on the low mound of Tell Abu Shahrain, west of the Euphrates in Iraq’s Dhi Qar Governorate, and the land reads as nothing — a scatter of potsherds, the eroded stump of a brick platform, a horizon of salt-crust and sand. Seven thousand years ago this was the edge of the world: a spit of higher ground where a branch of the river slowed into a lagoon, and the lagoon gave onto the marshes, and the marshes gave onto the gulf. People built here at the join of fresh water and salt, sweet and bitter, the river and the sea. They called the place Eridu, and they remembered it, ever after, as the first city.

The settlement at the edge of the waters

The lowest occupation at Eridu belongs to about 5400 BCE, in the earliest phase of what archaeologists call the Ubaid period — a span so early that the term “Sumerian” cannot yet be applied to the people who lived there, since the Sumerians as a linguistic and cultural identity emerge only later, recovered in modern times from the cuneiform record rather than continuously remembered. What can be said is that a village stood here at the southern limit of settled life, where the alluvial plain dissolved into reed and standing water, and that it did not move. Generation after generation rebuilt on the same spot.

The site sits at roughly 30.82° north, 46.00° east. In the fifth millennium BCE the head of the Persian Gulf lay far nearer than it does now; the shoreline has since retreated some ninety miles south as the rivers laid down silt and built new land out of the marsh. Eridu in its first centuries was a lagoon town, and its god was a god of the lagoon. He was Enki — later known by his Akkadian name Ea — the lord of the abzu or apsu, the body of sweet water that the Mesopotamian frame held to lie beneath the earth, the cosmic aquifer from which springs rise and into which the marsh seems to open. Enki was wisdom, fresh water, the cunning that orders the world; and Eridu was his house.

The settlement grew and shrank with the water. Its economy was the economy of the southern marsh and the irrigated field: fish in great quantity (one early shrine was found heaped with the bones of offered fish), grain raised on the levees, reed and date palm. It was never a large city in the way Uruk to the north would become, and for much of its history it was modest. Its importance was never chiefly a matter of size or power. It was a matter of priority — of being first.

The ruined ziggurat of Eridu at Tell Abu Shahrain, southern Iraq — the unfinished Ur III tower beneath which the earliest temples lie buried. Photograph, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

When kingship came down from heaven

The Sumerian King List, a scribal composition that arranges the rulers of the land into a single descending line stretching back before the Flood, opens with a sentence that fixes Eridu’s place in the order of the world. “After the kingship descended from heaven,” it begins, “the kingship was in Eridu.” In Eridu, the first king named is Alulim, to whom the list assigns a reign of 28,800 years — the swollen, impossible spans the scribes gave to the antediluvian rulers, marking them off from the human time that follows. Eridu held the kingship, then passed it on, and the list moves through a handful of cities before the great Flood washes everything away and kingship must descend a second time.

This is the register of tradition-internal claim — what the Mesopotamian frame held about its own beginnings, not a chronicle that historians can underwrite. No king named Alulim can be located in the documentary record, and the dynastic priority of Eridu is theology before it is history. But the theology is consistent and old. Eridu is the source-point. It is where order enters the world from above, where the institution of rule first touches the earth, and the city carries that primacy as a permanent attribute, the way a later age would let the name of Rome stand for empire. To say “Eridu” in the literary tradition was to say first, holy, the beginning. The scribes who copied the King List across the centuries did not adjust this opening; whatever city held the kingship in their own day, the descent began at Eridu, and the line ran down from there.

The same priority shapes the Sumerian flood story that the Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen named the Eridu Genesis in 1981, reconstructing it from a damaged tablet about two-thirds of which is lost. It tells of the creation of humankind, the founding of the first cities, and the gift of kingship; and when it names the cities, Eridu comes first, placed under Enki, before Bad-tibira, Larak, Sippar, and Shuruppak. Then the gods resolve to destroy humanity by flood, and Enki — against the decree — warns one man, Ziusudra, to build a boat and so preserve “the seed of mankind.” The motif is the one that runs through the whole Mesopotamian flood literature and reaches its most famous form in the eleventh tablet of the epic of Gilgamesh; its resemblance to the flood of Genesis is real and much discussed, a contested matter of literary relation rather than settled descent. What belongs to Eridu specifically is the position at the head of the list — the city that was there before the waters came, and to which, in the logic of the myth, the world’s order traces back.

The house of the abzu, and the longest devotion

The distinctive thing about Eridu is not written on a tablet. It is in the ground.

When the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities excavated the central mound between 1946 and 1949, under the direction of Fuad Safar with the British archaeologist Seton Lloyd — following earlier soundings by H. R. Hall and R. Campbell Thompson around 1918–19 — they cut down through the platform of the ruined ziggurat and into what lay beneath. What lay beneath was a temple. Beneath that temple was another temple. Beneath that, another. In all they traced a sequence of some eighteen superimposed sanctuaries, each raised on the leveled and packed rubble of the one before, on the same axis, on the same patch of consecrated ground, from the Ubaid village of the later sixth millennium BCE down through the Uruk period — close to two thousand years of continuous rebuilding on a single spot.

This is the foundational fact of Mesopotamian religious archaeology, and it can be read with precision. The earliest levels (the excavators numbered them down into the high teens) are small one-room shrines of mudbrick, a few meters square, with an offering table and a niche for the god. As the centuries pass the shrines grow: a long central hall appears, then flanking chambers, then the buttressed and recessed outer walls that would become the signature of the Mesopotamian temple, then a raised platform lifting the sanctuary above the plain. The architectural vocabulary of the ziggurat — the temple set on a high terrace, the terrace rebuilt ever higher on the ruins of its predecessor — is here caught in the act of being invented. The Eridu sequence is, in the most literal sense available to archaeology, the prehistory of the temple-tower: not a theory about how ziggurats arose but the thing itself, stacked in the soil.

The principle that governs the stack is the principle of the consecrated spot. A Mesopotamian sanctuary was not relocated when it decayed or burned; it was leveled and the next was raised directly upon it, so that the holiness accumulated downward, the present shrine standing on the bodies of all its predecessors. At Eridu this habit is visible in its purest form because nothing ever disturbed the alignment. The excavators could lower themselves from the Ur III platform through the Uruk-period temples (their Levels V through I) into the Ubaid sanctuaries below (Levels VI down into the high teens), and at every stage find the altar and the offering-niche in the same relation, on the same orientation, as though a single act of worship had simply gone on being performed for eighty generations. It is the longest continuous devotion preserved anywhere in the early record — not a tradition recovered and revived, but one that, on the evidence of the brick, never paused.

The Adda Seal (c. 2300 BCE): the god Ea, Sumerian Enki, lord of Eridu, with streams of water and fish flowing from his shoulders — the abzu made visible. British Museum; image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The temple at the summit of this stack was the E-abzu, the “House of the Abzu,” sometimes also called the E-engur, the “House of the Subterranean Waters” — Enki’s great house, named for the freshwater deep he ruled. To the Mesopotamian mind the abzu was not metaphor. It was the actual reservoir of sweet water beneath the ground, source of springs and rivers and of life itself, and Eridu sat directly upon it, the one point where the god’s element broke the surface in the surrounding marsh. The city was therefore not merely a holy city but the holy city of the apsu, the cosmic freshwater, and through it the whole architecture of southern Mesopotamian religion was felt to be anchored: the source-spring of the Sumerian sacred order. Later temples elsewhere would build their own subterranean basins and call them abzu, in memory of the original at Eridu.

From Eridu, too, the tradition derived its sages. The apkallu, the seven antediluvian wise men who gave humanity the arts of civilization, were said to have come up out of the waters at Eridu; the first of them, Adapa — counsellor to the primeval king Alulim, fisherman and priest of Enki’s house — is the figure later Greek-language Babylonian tradition reshaped into Oannes, the fish-bodied teacher who rose from the gulf each morning to instruct mankind and sank back each night. The story that the apkallu brought knowledge from the sea is, at root, a story about Eridu: wisdom enters the world at the place where the fresh water meets the salt, and the tradition’s memory of the city as the divine birthplace of order keeps that join at its center.

The me, and the boat to Uruk

There is a Sumerian poem, usually titled Inanna and Enki, in which the goddess Inanna — queen of Uruk, who wants her city to become the center of the world — sails south to Eridu and drinks with Enki in the E-abzu. As the beer takes hold, the god, expansive and boastful, makes her gift after gift of the me: the divine decrees, the more-than-a-hundred ordinances on which civilized life rests. The poem names them as it goes, and the list is a portrait of a civilization seeing itself — kingship and the priestly offices, law and judgment, the crafts of the scribe and the metalworker and the weaver, music, the rites of the temple, truth, descent into the underworld and the return, even the arts of strife. Each is a me, a thing decreed, a power that makes the human world the human world.

When Enki wakes and remembers what he has given away, he sends his minister and a train of monsters to seize the boat at each of the seven stages of its journey; but Inanna eludes them all, and the me arrive at Uruk to feasting and jubilation. In the frame of the myth, this is the moment the decrees of civilization pass from the god’s keeping into a city of men — and they pass out of Eridu. The holy city is where the me were held; the story of their transfer is the story of how the gifts of culture entered human hands. Eridu is the reservoir not only of the cosmic waters but of the cultural order, the place the decrees come from. That they leave it for Uruk is, in a sense, the founding pattern of the whole tradition: the south of marsh and sanctuary feeding the cities of the plain.

The waters drew back

Cities of mudbrick on a shifting river live and die by the water, and the water did not stay. The Euphrates changed its course repeatedly across the southern plain, its channel migrating eastward over the millennia; the branch that fed Eridu silted and failed, the lagoon dried, and the marsh that had made the place holy withdrew. Two thousand years of irrigation left the soil ever saltier, until the fields that fed the city would no longer bear. By the later second and the first millennium BCE Eridu was largely a ruin, its population gone, the E-abzu a monument visited rather than a living cult — though kings of Ur and beyond, Ur-Nammu and Amar-Sin among them, still raised brick on the old terrace, and it is Amar-Sin’s unfinished ziggurat, late in the third millennium, that crowns the buried stack of temples to this day. The last meaningful occupation is reckoned to about 600 BCE, near the very end of Babylonian independence, when Nabonidus and his successors looked back to the deep past; thereafter the mound was left to the salt and the wind.

A stone lion from Eridu, c. mid-third millennium BCE, now in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

But a city can outlive its streets. Long after Eridu was empty its name went on working in the literature, an adjective of holiness more than a place — invoked in hymns and incantations as the seat of Enki and the home of pure waters, a byword for sanctity that scribes in Babylon and Nineveh reached for when they wanted to say ancient and sacred in one word. Marduk’s great temple-tower at Babylon, the Etemenanki, and the cult of Marduk himself drew on the older theology of the apsu that Eridu had carried; in one strand of the tradition Marduk is reckoned a son of Ea, and his city is given Eridu’s ancient honor as a kind of inheritance. The holy city had become a holy idea, portable, available to any age that needed a beginning to point back to.

The recovery of the physical Eridu belongs to the twentieth century. The Greek-language history of Mesopotamia written by the priest Berossus had preserved the memory of a primeval sage from the sea and a flood before the kings, but the city’s identification with Tell Abu Shahrain, and the reading of its buried temples, waited on the spade. When Safar and Lloyd cut their trench in the 1940s, what they exposed was not a single shrine but a vertical biography of devotion — eighteen sanctuaries in a column, the whole development of the Sumerian temple legible in cross-section, the longest unbroken record of a single sacred place anywhere in the early record. Recent satellite and ground survey has gone on tracing the lost canals and the ancient shoreline around the mound, reconstructing the marsh-and-lagoon landscape in which the first city stood.

What the tradition had always asserted — that here was the beginning — the ground turned out to bear out in its own idiom. Not that kingship literally descended here from the sky, but that here, on a sandbar between sweet water and salt, people raised a shrine and kept raising it on the same square of earth for as long as any community has ever kept faith with a single spot. The first city was first in this: it never let its god move house.

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