Uruk becomes the world's first city

Date

c. 4000–3100 BCE

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Southern Mesopotamia (Iraq)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

During the Uruk period, the settlement of Uruk (biblical Erech, modern Warka) in southern Mesopotamia grew into what is widely regarded as the world's first true city.

At its peak in the late fourth millennium BCE it covered roughly 2.5 square kilometres and may have housed tens of thousands of inhabitants, dwarfing every earlier settlement. This unprecedented concentration of people supported full-time craft specialists, monumental temple precincts such as Eanna and Anu, and a complex administrative bureaucracy. Uruk's influence spread far beyond its walls through the so-called 'Uruk expansion,' as its material culture, architectural forms and administrative technologies appeared at sites across Mesopotamia, Syria and Iran. The city is associated with a cluster of foundational innovations including monumental architecture, the cylinder seal and the earliest writing. As the prototype of dense, hierarchically organised urban life, Uruk marks the emergence of the city as a durable form of human social organisation.

Related social & demographic events

• Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megaliths
  c. 4000 BCE
• The Cucuteni–Trypillia mega-settlements of Eastern Europe
  c. 4100 – 3600 BCE
• Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralism
  c. 3300 BCE
• The Varna necropolis and the oldest worked gold
  c. 4600 – 4200 BCE
• Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africa
  c. 300,000 years ago
• The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherers
  c. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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