Uruk: the Eanna Precinct

For a stretch of the later fourth millennium BCE, Uruk was the largest concentration of people anywhere. Its growth is the event that archaeologists name the period after, and what happened at Uruk then set the pattern for Mesopotamian cities afterward: a walled settlement of tens of thousands, a monumental religious precinct at its centre, an administrative class that fed on the surrounding countryside, and mass-produced ration bowls turned out in numbers that imply organised labour paid in grain.

Out of that administration came writing. The oldest substantial body of written material known was found in the Eanna precinct, and it is not literature, law or prayer. It is bookkeeping: counts of animals, of grain, of textiles, of workers, tallied with numerical signs and pictographic word signs impressed on clay. The script that later carried the Gilgamesh epic, Babylonian astronomy and the correspondence of empires began as a way of not being cheated by a granary official.

The city keeps its place in memory long after its power passed. The Sumerian King List brings kingship to Uruk after the flood. Gilgamesh, its most famous king, is a figure of epic before he is anything else, and the poem opens and closes on the walls of Uruk, inviting the listener to inspect the brickwork and judge the man by it. The walls are there. They are among the first things a visitor to the ruin field sees, and they are attributed in the poem to the king whose search for immortality the epic then reports as a failure.

Eanna means the house of heaven, and by the historical period it is unambiguously the sanctuary of Inanna at Uruk, the goddess of sexual love, of war and of the morning and evening star. Her temple there is the fixed point of a good deal of Sumerian literature. In the poem of her descent to the underworld she abandons her temples one by one, Eanna among them, to go down. In the great hymn attributed to Enheduanna, the priestess who served at Ur, Inanna is praised in terms that pull the whole pantheon into her orbit, and the political weight of her cult at Uruk stands behind it. Anu, the sky god, is also housed at Uruk, and the relationship between the two cults on the same site changed over the millennia, with Anu prominent again in the Seleucid period.

What cannot be settled is the beginning. The monumental buildings of the earliest levels are enormous, elaborately decorated with cone mosaics, and repeatedly demolished and rebuilt, and no readable text from those levels says who they were for. Reading Inanna back into them is an inference from later certainty, not a reading of evidence, and the atlas records it as an open question with the study that could not close it attached.

The ruin field is protected as part of a World Heritage property inscribed in 2016, which groups Uruk with Ur and Eridu and with the marshes of the southern plain. Nothing is worshipped there now.