Mesopotamia's First Cities: Uruk, Writing, and Law

The World's First City Had 40,000 Residents in 3400 BCE

Uruk, located in what is now southern Iraq near the modern town of Warka, reached an estimated population of 40,000 people — some scholars suggest up to 80,000 at its peak — by the late 4th millennium BCE. Nothing comparable existed anywhere on earth at that time. The city was surrounded by a mudbrick wall, traditionally attributed to the legendary king Gilgamesh, stretching approximately 9.5 kilometers in circumference. Uruk was not just large; it was the model. Its architectural forms, its administrative technologies, and its cultural practices spread across a region from modern Turkey to Pakistan through what archaeologists call the Uruk expansion — a network of colonies, trading outposts, and influenced settlements that represents the world's first documented case of cultural globalization.

Cuneiform: Accounting Before Literature

Writing was not invented for poetry, history, or religion. It was invented for grain receipts. The earliest cuneiform tablets, dating to approximately 3200 BCE from the Eanna precinct at Uruk, record quantities of barley, numbers of sheep, and administrative allocations — the inventory needs of a large temple institution managing hundreds of workers and thousands of animals.

Archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat demonstrated through decades of research that cuneiform emerged from a pre-existing system of clay tokens — small geometric objects (spheres, cones, discs, cylinders) that had been used across the Near East since at least 8000 BCE to represent specific commodities. As the volume of transactions increased, tokens were enclosed in hollow clay spheres (bullae) sealed with cylinder seals. Eventually, scribes began pressing the tokens onto the outside of the bulla before enclosing them — making the container unnecessary. The impressions became signs; the signs became a writing system.

• By 3000 BCE, cuneiform had expanded from purely numerical accounting to include phonetic signs representing sounds of the Sumerian language
• By 2600 BCE, cuneiform was being used to record literature, including the earliest versions of what would become the Epic of Gilgamesh
• Cuneiform was adapted to write Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, and at least a dozen other languages over its 3,000-year history
• The last known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 CE — the script had persisted for over 3,000 years

Sumerian Urban Organization

The Sumerian city-state was organized around the temple (ziggurat complex) and the palace, which competed for economic and political authority throughout the 3rd millennium BCE. Early city-states were likely theocratic — the temple institution functioning as the primary economic actor, employing workers, managing agricultural land, and redistributing rations.

The Ziggurat: Function and Form

The ziggurat was not a tomb (unlike the Egyptian pyramid), not a temple where worshippers gathered, and not a monument to royal vanity — though it served aspects of all three purposes. It was the house of the city god. Mesopotamian religion held that each city was the property of a particular deity, and the ziggurat was where that deity resided when visiting the earthly realm. Only priests could access the top shrine; the ziggurat was not a place of public worship.

Architecturally, ziggurats were massive mudbrick platforms built in stepped tiers — typically three to seven levels — with ramps or staircases leading to the summit shrine. The most celebrated example, the Great Ziggurat of Ur (built by Ur-Nammu around 2100 BCE), measured 64 × 46 meters at its base and stood approximately 30 meters tall. It was excavated and partially reconstructed in the 1930s under Leonard Woolley and again in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein's government. The biblical Tower of Babel is almost certainly a reference to the ziggurat of Babylon, the Etemenanki ("house of the foundation of heaven and earth"), which according to Herodotus was 90 meters tall.

The Code of Hammurabi

Hammurabi, king of Babylon from approximately 1792 to 1750 BCE, issued his famous law code — 282 laws inscribed on a 2.25-meter black diorite stele — near the end of his reign. The stele was discovered in Susa (in modern Iran) in 1901 by French archaeologist Gustave Jéquier, apparently taken there as war booty by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte around 1158 BCE. It is now in the Louvre.

The Code covers civil, commercial, criminal, and family law:

• Wages: A physician who performs a successful major operation on a freeman receives 10 shekels of silver; on a slave, 2 shekels
• Liability: A builder whose house collapses and kills the owner shall be put to death; if it kills the owner's son, the builder's son shall be put to death
• Commerce: Merchants who lend grain at interest are regulated; the maximum rate is fixed by law
• Marriage and divorce: Women could initiate divorce proceedings; widows retained inheritance rights

The Code was not Hammurabi's invention from nothing — earlier Sumerian and Akkadian law codes existed, including the Laws of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BCE), the oldest known written legal code. But Hammurabi's version was the most comprehensive, the best preserved, and the most widely copied: scribal training tablets reproducing portions of the Code have been found across Mesopotamia for centuries after Hammurabi's death.