Uruk Period

The marshland city of Uruk grew, in the late fourth millennium, into the largest concentration of people the world had ever seen. Perhaps forty thousand souls lived within its walls — though for most of them the walls were a long walk away. The centre of the city was its temple precinct: the Eanna ("house of heaven"), sacred to Inanna, goddess of love, war, and the morning star. Around it lay the houses of priests, the workshops of weavers and metalworkers, the offices of administrators counting sheep, grain, and oil for the temple economy.

That accounting is where writing comes from. The temple owned land, herds, granaries; it received tribute and made distributions; it could not keep track of all of this by memory. Around 3300 BCE — the precise date is debated — scribes began pressing pictograms into wet clay tablets: an ox here, three measures of barley there, the seal-mark of the official who delivered them. These early tablets are called proto-cuneiform. The signs are pictures: a fish for fish, a head for human, a sheaf for grain. There are about seven hundred of them, and we can read perhaps half with confidence.

Uruk did not invent the cuneiform writing system that would carry epic poetry — that comes later, with phonetic syllabic signs in the Early Dynastic period. What Uruk invented was the technology of memory: the idea that one could fix language onto clay and retrieve it years later, after the scribe was dead.

By the end of the period, around 3100 BCE, Uruk had spread its culture — its bullae, its cylinder seals, its temple architecture — across a vast trading network reaching Anatolia and the Iranian plateau. Scholars call this the Uruk Expansion (Algaze, The Uruk World System). It is the first time the world has seen anything that looks like cultural imperialism, though we do not know if there was an emperor or only an idea.

Then the network collapses. Settlements outside southern Mesopotamia revert to local cultures. Inside Mesopotamia, the southern city-states begin to compete more openly with one another. The Early Dynastic period is about to begin.

The tablets that survive from Uruk are administrative. They are, in a sense, the receipts of a civilization being born. They are the first writing.