SOCIETY
Uruk, the First City
~3500 BCE
Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian
Uruk, in southern Iraq, gave its name to the period of about 3800 to 3300 BCE in which cities and the state took shape in Mesopotamia; it is the settlement conventionally called the first city. Algaze asks why there, and answers by the ground. The alluvial lowlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates gave their societies advantages in agricultural yield and in the resilience of subsistence resources that the polities on their periphery lacked, while the same geography gave lasting advantages in transport. From that imbalance he derives an incentive: elites could use trade to legitimise and widen an unequal hold on resources and power. He presents the whole as a model still hypothetical but testable. Cuneiform writing was invented in the same period, and Selz ties the growth of Uruk to population increase bound up with technical, agricultural and administrative change.
Why it matters
What a city was to those who lived in one is a separate question from why cities appeared. Ur argues that the usual account, in which kinship gives way to bureaucracy and society reorganises itself, reads the evidence backwards. In his model urbanism grew as a metaphorical extension of the household, a familiar structure creatively transformed, and the first cities were an unintended consequence of that move, revolutionary to archaeologists but not to the people living in them. Terms such as urbanism and the state then fit early Mesopotamia less well than they seem to.
Dating & uncertainty
The date kept here, about 3500 BCE, falls inside the Uruk period as Selz bounds it, 3800 to 3300 BCE, and the bracket runs from 6,000 to 5,100 years before present. What is contested is not the date but the title. Oates and colleagues report monumentality, industrial production and prestige goods at Tell Brak, in northeastern Syria, by the late fifth millennium BCE, and conclude that the earliest cities lay as likely in the north as in the south. Should that reading prevail, Uruk keeps its period and its writing but loses its primacy.
Sources
- Algaze (2001), Current Anthropology · Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia: The Mesopotamian Advantagedoi:10.1086/320005
- Ur (2014), Cambridge Archaeological Journal · Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamiadoi:10.1017/S095977431400047X
- Selz (2020), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East · The Uruk Phenomenondoi:10.1093/oso/9780190687854.003.0004
- Oates et al. (2007), Antiquity · Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new view from the northdoi:10.1017/s0003598x00095600
Our species’ history as one day
23:34:5125 min 9 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day