Uruk

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When the Epic of Gilgamesh has finished with its hero — when the king has crossed the waters of death, brought up the plant of rejuvenation from the deep, and lost it to a snake on the road home — it grants him the one immortality it recognizes. “O Ur-shanabi, climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth! Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!” Gilgamesh commands the boatman who ferried him back (Tablet XI, in Andrew George’s Penguin translation), and with that the poem ends where its prologue began: at the wall, and at the measure of the city it encloses — one part town, one part date-grove, one part clay-pit, together with the temple of Ishtar. The man who could not keep eternal life points instead at brick.

The brick is still there. A city wall roughly nine kilometers in circuit, raised around 3000 BCE and ringing some five and a half square kilometers of mounds, encircles the site of Warka in Muthanna Governorate, southern Iraq — Sumerian Unug, Akkadian Uruk, the Erech of Genesis — set on a dried channel of the Euphrates at the edge of marshes that have since withdrawn. Tradition assigns the wall to Gilgamesh himself, king of Uruk’s first dynasty, whom the Sumerian King List places in the twenty-seventh century BCE; the Standard Babylonian epic that bears his name was ascribed in antiquity to a scholar of this city, Sîn-lēqi-unninni, whose descendants were still serving in Uruk’s temples when Greek kings ruled the land.

Before the wall there was already the city — the first one. Uruk grew from two villages on the marsh edge, Unug and Kullaba, settled by about 5000 BCE, whose shrines became its two sacred districts. Across the fourth millennium BCE — the Uruk period, c. 4000–3100, named for the site because the site defines it — it became the engine of the world’s earliest urbanization: by the period’s end its settled area had passed anything the world had yet seen, with population estimates running from forty thousand within the city toward fifty thousand, the largest gathering of human beings then alive, and the head of the cities of Sumer.

The eastern district, Eanna — the “House of Heaven” — belonged to Inanna, the goddess the Akkadians called Ishtar, and remained hers for three thousand years. In the city’s oldest tablets she is already worshipped under distinct aspects — the morning star, the evening star, the Inanna of the netherworld — and her precinct of the late fourth millennium was built on a scale without parallel in its age: the Limestone Temple and the Stone-Cone Temple, the Riemchen Building, pillared halls and great courts whose walls were sheathed in mosaics of colored clay cones. These sanctuaries were raised, razed, and raised again, each generation burying its predecessors’ temples whole beneath the next terrace, so that the mound of Eanna is itself a stack of consecrations.

To this city the sacred marriage belonged. The Sumerian royal hymns — that of Iddin-Dagan above all — sing the king into the person of Dumuzi, Inanna’s shepherd-bridegroom, and lay him beside the goddess so that the land’s abundance is renewed from her bed. Samuel Noah Kramer drew those texts together in 1969 as the record of a great fertility rite; Pirjo Lapinkivi’s 2004 reassessment reads them as liturgy and figure rather than performance, and what a king of flesh actually did remains an open question. What the hymns fix beyond argument is the theology and its address: the bridegroom is the king, the bride is the Queen of Heaven, and the marriage is celebrated in her city.

Southwest of Eanna, the older mound of Kullaba carried the high terrace of Anu, the sky-god and fountainhead of kingship. On its summit in the late fourth millennium stood the White Temple — a tripartite mud-brick hall of some 380 square meters, whitewashed so that it shone across the flat land — the canonical ancestor of every temple tower in Mesopotamia. Later ages kept faith with both districts. Ur-Namma of Ur raised the great ziggurat of Inanna in Eanna around 2110 BCE; the Kassite king Karaindash built her a temple in the mid-fifteenth century BCE fronted with molded-brick deities pouring streams of living water. Political supremacy left Uruk early — after the Early Dynastic period the kingship resided elsewhere — but the sanctity never lapsed, and builders returned under every power that held the south, from the kings of Ur to the Parthians.

The last great chapter opened under foreign empires. From about 480 BCE, with the city under Achaemenid and then Seleucid rule, Anu rose to displace Ishtar’s ancient precedence and become patron of Uruk, and the revival culminated in the enormous Bīt Rēš, the “Head Temple” of Anu and his consort Antu, with a new Anu ziggurat — the largest ever raised in Mesopotamia — alongside the Irigal of Ishtar added around 200 BCE and a Bīt Akītu, a New Year house, outside the wall. Each year a nocturnal fire ceremony at the Rēš renewed the seasons with an exorcistic edge and confirmed the Anu priesthood at the city’s head. Two dedicatory inscriptions name the men who rebuilt the complex, city notables carrying double names from two worlds: Anu-uballiṭ called Nikarchos, in 244 BCE under Seleucus II, his Greek name conferred on him by Antiochus; and Anu-uballiṭ called Kephalon, in 201 BCE under Antiochus III, whose inscription names Adapa, first of the antediluvian sages, as the temple’s founder — priests of the Hellenistic age writing their house back before the flood.

In a room by the southeast gate of the Rēš the temple kept its library: astronomical and astrological tablets of the late third and early second centuries BCE, written by a small network of scholars from two ancestral houses — the lamentation-priests descended from Sîn-lēqi-unninni, the very scholar credited with the Gilgamesh epic, and the exorcists descended from Ekur-zākir. They produced mathematical astronomy of the exact System A type, horoscopes, astral medicine, and hemerologies of the zodiac, and their lineage holds the script’s final word: almanac W22340a, computing the heavens for the year 79/80 CE, was written at Uruk and is the latest datable cuneiform tablet known. A fired-brick temple to the Hellenized local god Gareus, built around 100 CE, was the last sanctuary; by about 300 CE the city stood mostly empty, a small late community leaving incantation bowls in Mandaic — the language of Mandaeism — before the final abandonment around 700 CE.

Loftus’s trenches, Jordan’s campaigns, van Ess’s drones

Travelers noted the mounds of Warka in 1835, and it was William Kennett Loftus who identified them with the Erech of Genesis, scouted the site in 1849, and opened the first trenches in 1850 and 1854; his Travels and Researches in Chaldæa and Susiana (1857) is candid about how little two short seasons could do against ruins of that size. After Walter Andrae’s reconnaissance of 1902, the German Oriental Society under Julius Jordan ran the first systematic campaign from November 1912 to May 1913 — Eanna’s architecture opened, the wall traced, the whole site contour-mapped — and the German excavations resumed from 1928 to 1939 under Jordan, then Arnold Nöldeke, Ernst Heinrich, and Heinrich Lenzen: the seasons that yielded the archaic tablets, the Warka Vase, and the Warka Mask (vase and mask were both looted from the Iraq Museum in April 2003 and recovered later that year). The German Archaeological Institute carried the work forward from 1954 — Lenzen to 1967, Jürgen Schmidt from 1968, Rainer Michael Boehmer from 1978 — thirty-nine German seasons in all, published across the ADFU and AUWE series. What the spade recovered, the editions made legible: Andrew George’s two-volume critical edition of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic (Oxford, 2003) assembled 184 first-millennium manuscripts of the poem ascribed to Sîn-lēqi-unninni; Julia Krul’s The Revival of the Anu Cult and the Nocturnal Fire Ceremony at Late Babylonian Uruk (Brill, 2018) reconstructed the theology of the Bīt Rēš and its yearly fire rite; Hermann Hunger and Teije de Jong published almanac W22340a, the latest datable cuneiform tablet, in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie in 2014; and Hans Nissen, director of the renewed edition of the archaic texts, gave the standing account of the city’s earliest tablets in World Archaeology in 1986. Since 1989 the excavation has been directed by Margarete van Ess: magnetometer survey in 2001–02, fieldwork resumed at the city wall in 2016, sediment cores to thirteen meters in 2024–25, and an end-to-end digital twin of the archaeological landscape built from some 32,000 drone images (Haibt, 2024). The centenary of the German campaigns was marked by the Pergamon Museum’s 2013–14 exhibition, whose catalog became Uruk: First City of the Ancient World (Getty, 2019), the fullest single volume on the site. UNESCO inscribed Uruk Archaeological City in 2016 within the Ahwar of Southern Iraq; by the excavators’ own accounting, only a small fraction of the five and a half square kilometers has ever been dug.

The first tablets

In rubbish and fill of the levels called Eanna IVa, the German seasons between 1928 and 1976 recovered nearly five thousand clay tablets and fragments bearing the earliest known writing: proto-cuneiform, in the script phase named Uruk IV, c. 3350–3200 BCE, continuing in the Uruk III phase to about 3000. Whether the earliest signs of Egypt are older remains unsettled; what is settled is that cuneiform — the script that would carry Mesopotamia’s laws, omens, prayers, and epics for three thousand years — begins here, in Inanna’s precinct. The tablets are not literature and were not even kept: discarded paperwork, reused as building rubble, accounting for barley and beer, textiles and herds, labor and its overseers — the bookkeeping of the goddess’s storehouses — with a substantial minority of lexical lists, the first exercises of the scribal school. The wall that the dying epic told its boatman to survey holds Gilgamesh’s name for as long as brick can. The city’s deeper foundation deposit is this receipt-clay from the House of Heaven, out of which grew the script that wrote the King List and the epic, the liturgy of the fire ceremony, and the almanac of 79/80 CE — the first city teaching the world to write by counting beer.

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