Iraqi History · Chronicle I of XII
Ancient Mesopotamia
The world's first cities, the first writing, and the rival kingdoms of Sumer.
Ubaid PeriodCultural
Farming communities spread across the marshy south, digging the first irrigation canals and raising the earliest temples at Eridu.
The Ubaid culture, named after a mound near Ur, mastered the flat, dry plain by channelling the rivers onto their fields. At Eridu — which the Sumerians remembered as the first city, home of the god Enki — a small shrine was rebuilt again and again on the same spot, the seed of the monumental temples to come.
Uruk PeriodCultural
Uruk swells into the largest settlement the world has yet seen, its people gathering behind walls around great temple precincts.
By around 3200 BCE Uruk covered some 250 hectares and may have held forty thousand people — an unprecedented concentration of humanity. Its temple districts of Eanna and Kullaba, dedicated to the sky god An and the goddess Inanna, drew in labour, tribute, and trade from across the plain, and the 'Uruk expansion' carried its culture up the rivers to Syria and Anatolia.
Uruk PeriodCultural
Scribes in Uruk press reed styluses into clay to keep temple accounts, and cuneiform — the first writing — is born.
The earliest tablets are dry records — measures of grain, heads of cattle, jars of beer — but from these accounting marks grew a script that could write law, poetry, prayer, and history. Cuneiform would be used for three thousand years, across a dozen languages, the longest-lived writing system the world has known.
Early DynasticPolitical
The plain fragments into rival city-states — Ur, Uruk, Kish, Lagash, Nippur — each ruled by a king under its patron god.
Each Sumerian city was the estate of a deity, governed on the god's behalf by a lugal (king) or ensi (governor) from a palace beside the temple. Nippur, sacred to the storm god Enlil, was the spiritual centre where kingship was blessed, while the cities warred endlessly over land and water — the pattern of Mesopotamian politics for a thousand years.
Early DynasticCultural
Legend and history meet in Gilgamesh, the warrior-king of Uruk whose deeds become the world's first great epic.
The Sumerian King List names Gilgamesh among the early rulers of Uruk, credited with its mighty walls. Centuries of storytelling turned him into the hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose search for immortality and its tale of a world-flood echo down into Genesis. He remains humanity's oldest named literary hero.
Early DynasticCultural
The great death-pits of Ur are filled with gold, lyres, and attendants, revealing the wealth and rituals of Sumer's kings.
Excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, the tombs of Queen Puabi and others held golden helmets and headdresses, the Standard of Ur, and lyres inlaid with lapis lazuli — and, chillingly, rows of sacrificed servants. The lapis came from Afghanistan and the gold from Anatolia, proof of a trading world that reached far beyond the plain.
Early DynasticMilitary
King Eannatum of Lagash defeats neighbouring Umma and commemorates it on the Stele of the Vultures, history's earliest war monument.
The long feud between Lagash and Umma over the fertile Gu'edena field is the earliest border dispute known in detail. Eannatum's victory stele shows his phalanx of spearmen locked behind shields and vultures carrying off the enemy dead — the first depiction of an organized army, and of a treaty sworn before the gods.
Early DynasticPolitical
The reformer-king Urukagina of Lagash issues what is remembered as the first code of social justice.
Urukagina's inscriptions boast of curbing rapacious officials, protecting widows and orphans, and cancelling debts — the earliest known use of the word 'freedom' (ama-gi). Whether genuine reform or royal propaganda, it set a pattern of Mesopotamian kings claiming to right wrongs that would run through Hammurabi's laws seven centuries later.
Early DynasticPolitical
Lugalzagesi of Umma conquers the Sumerian cities and claims dominion 'from the Lower to the Upper Sea' — on the eve of Akkad.
For a moment Lugalzagesi held all Sumer under one hand, ruling from Uruk and reaching, he claimed, to the Mediterranean. But his triumph opened the way for a greater conqueror: a Semitic cupbearer from the north named Sargon, who would overthrow him and build the world's first empire.
1 more entry, to 2334 BC
