Mesopotamia: the first cities

Your clock still counts in sixties because scribes in southern Iraq did so more than 4,000 years ago.

The land between the rivers

Mesopotamia is a Greek word meaning "between the rivers". The two rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. Both rise in the mountains of eastern Turkey and join before they reach the Persian Gulf. The southern plain gets very little rain. What it does have is flat land, river water and fine silt, and once farmers learned to dig canals that carried water out to their fields, the plain could feed far more people than a village that waited for rain. Most of this unit takes place in the far south, in the region called Sumer.

Farming did not begin on this plain. The first farming villages appeared earlier in the hills to the north and west, in the arc that archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent. What happened in the south was something new: villages grew into towns, and towns into cities with temples, officials, workshops and walls.

Uruk, the first city

The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls Uruk "the first city" in world history. In the late fourth millennium BCE it was the largest settlement in southern Mesopotamia. Its temple estates collected barley, wool and livestock and handed out rations to workers, and keeping track of all that led scribes to the first writing on clay tablets, around 3300 BCE. Uruk also produced the first large carved statues and some of the earliest metal casting by the lost-wax method.

City-states and the first empire

Sumer was not one country in its early centuries. Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Umma and other cities each had their own ruler and their own patron god, and they often fought over water and fields. Around 2350 BCE Sargon of Akkad conquered the Sumerian cities and the lands to the north, creating what many historians call the first empire. The Met dates the Akkadian period to about 2350 to 2150 BCE. Many books give 2334 BCE for the start of Sargon’s reign, but that figure depends on which chronology you follow, and scholars still disagree by several decades.

Ur and its ziggurat

In the 1920s the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated Ur for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. In the Royal Cemetery, from about 2600 BCE, he found gold headdresses, lyres and the decorated wooden box now called the Standard of Ur. Several centuries later, around 2100 BCE, King Ur-Nammu built the great ziggurat of Ur, a stepped tower of mud brick with a temple on top. Its lower stages still stand in the desert of southern Iraq.

Counting in sixties

Sumerian scribes counted in a system based on 60. You still use it every day: an hour has 60 minutes, a minute has 60 seconds, and a circle has 360 degrees. Sixty is a handy base because it divides evenly by many numbers (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30), which makes sharing out grain or silver simple.

How we know

Most of what we know comes from three kinds of evidence: buildings and graves found by archaeologists, hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, and objects now in museums such as the British Museum, the Louvre and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Clay survives fire better than papyrus or wood, so Mesopotamia has left more everyday documents (receipts, letters, school exercises) than many later civilizations. Dates before about 1500 BCE are written with "c." (circa, about) because they are rebuilt from king lists and astronomical records, and more than one system, the high, middle and low chronologies, is in use.