Lessons from Uruk: What The First City Teaches Us About Building Communities Today
Our inaugural city persisted for thousands of years—they must have got something right
Nothing seems so modern as the city. Glittering bastions of glass and progress, cities in the contemporary imagination seem tailor-made to represent the bold vision of the future. They’re places where the past fears to tread, where the old day is forgotten and a new dawn brings new possibilities. While cities may also venerate any still-standing relics of their own past as a kind of civic holy site cum tourist trap, their gaze turned resolutely forward. But even the most ancient architectural survival reaches only a couple thousand years into the past, a view too shallow to take in the true scope of the city’s endurance, first bursting into existence over 6,000 years ago in the flood plains of the Fertile Crescent.
It’s no surprise, then, that nothing about the city is truly new. So in a time when our contemporary cities face the unprecedented struggles of climate change, partisan politics, and rising income inequality, it can help us to return to the rudiments and study how the earliest cities came to be and endure. What makes thousands of strangers conspire in the collaborative fiction of shared identity that makes a metropolis possible? What was it about the idea of cities that made them stick?
It’s in the earliest cities that we find the most profound and fundamental answer to these questions, answers that can help chart a new course that today’s cities might take to flourish. And none is earlier than mighty Uruk, the first city. This metropolis, founded in 5th century BCE Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), grew to become one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world at its height, and a seat of power in Mesopotamian empire for thousands of years. Uruk’s genesis and dominance over its contemporary landscape provides crucial lessons in how cities come together, thrive, and collapse, and its millennial endurance speaks to our ancestor’s wisdom: surely these early city planners must have got something right.
For its time, Uruk was sprawling. Boasting as many as 50,000 residents at its zenith with 30–40,000 more in outlying areas, Uruk represents the earliest successful attempt at humans permanently living together in large numbers. A modern city dweller walking its streets would find much to recognize, despite finding their familiar skyscrapers replaced with angular adobe homes and workshops. Citizens hustle too and fro, the sounds of work and voices blend together in the distance, merchants ply their trade and laborers labor under the indomitable Middle Eastern sun.
But over it all would have loomed one unfamiliar feature, something even our most robust modern cities lack: a massive ziggurat, or stepped tower, a 40-foot tall monument of baked and fired brick cresting above the unbroken floodplain and topped with a shining temple faced in blisteringly white stone. It was an intentionally majestic structure, built to replicate the mountaintops to which the gods have always been closest.
In a world of one-story buildings held together with reeds, the ziggurat’s scale awakened the deep, primal awe that a cathedral might draw from visitors today. The ziggurat was the core of the Mesopotamian city, and the source of the lessons we can derive from the earliest attempts at human density.
These ziggurats were truly gargantuan undertakings. Archeologists estimate their construction would have taken hundreds of laborers years. That might seem an odd extravagance for the first city, when basic urban infrastructure like the legal system is still being sorted out. But in its own way, the ziggurat was a type of psychological infrastructure, a key component of the mental superstructure that humans developed to make city dwelling possible.
After all, cities are hardly in our blood. Even sedentary living has only existed for the last ten thousand years or so, and cities are only roughly half as ancient. Before that, humans spent our existence living in tribes where we knew everyone by name and face, hunting and gathering to sustain ourselves. Living harmoniously with strangers was unnatural to us, and early attempts would have surely provoked intertribal competition and violence. But all that must be put to bed when we seek to live in cities. So how do we overcome this innate suspicion of the Other, of the one outside the tribe? We construct a new idea of the tribe, a new kind of identity, atop the old: the identity of the city.
The ziggurat was at the heart of Uruk’s identity construction. It was the center of Uruk’s religious and political life, its temples believed to be the home of the gods on the Earth. Their massive scale was intentional: the ziggurat said that the city was a special place, an important place, a literal home of the gods atop a tower so tall one would eventually inspire the Tower of Babel. This was the fulcrum about which Mesopotamian civic identity rotated, an overwhelming statement of divergence from the surrounding countryside. It’s what made the city what it was, and gave it the ideological power to endure the patient ablation of millennia. This core is the source of the city’s permanence as an endeavor. Without it, there would be little to give the city identity or value in the eyes of the populous. These works gave citizens a reason to be proud of their city, reasserting their ever-tenuous dominion over the surrounding countryside and the forces of nature at large.
Today, we do not build ziggurats. This is our loss. While one might assume our modern high-rise architecture would be the ziggurat’s natural extension, appearances mislead. Skyscrapers are large, but they are not monumental: they are largely mute as symbols of civic identity. A better fit for the ziggurat’s descendent is the infrastructure project. These systems are often the most unique features of any city, and they quickly become a touchstone for urban dwellers.
But we have fallen well short of the goal set by Uruk. Thanks to decades of neglect, many of our cities’ legacy infrastructure projects are gradually crumbling beneath the weight of use and time. Subways reek of urine, highways grow unnavigable, trains are perpetually late, ports clog with container ships. It seems no one cares enough to fix the problems, and it gives the clear impression that if there’s something to be proud of in your city, it isn’t the public works.
Thanks to the theocratic style of Mesopotamian governance, the ziggurat was also the source of political power within the city. While governance varied with time, throughout much of Uruk’s history the city was ruled by a priest-king entirely responsible for both the religious and secular welfare of the city. It was a tall order, but many sought the title. As the Sumerian King List dryly describes one particularly contentious period of history: “Who was king? Who was not king!”
These ancient priest-kings, being kings, held divinely ordained — and unchecked — power over the lands they ruled. Twinned with the gods (and often purportedly descended from them) Mesopotamian rulers were free to shape their city in the way they believed best. This independence of action was critical to the early development and evolution of the city into the places that the majority of humans call home today. Even in times of empire, when once-independent cities were collected together into a single overarching body politic, individual cities still retained much of their ancient rights to self governance. This self-determination led to greater individuation, which in turn reinforced the sense of the civic identity the city relies on.
Whether the city was ruled by a king independently or by a local governor, city leaders held enormous power. With a sweep of a hand, new public works could be elevated, laborers hired, thousands of mud bricks stacked in the baking sun. Contemporary city councils might weep to see how their power has been so dramatically curtailed. Today, it’s difficult for many cities to have their own liquor laws, let alone develop public works independently for the good of their own citizens. As a result, we’ve lost a crucial tool for solidifying urban life.
In the end, Uruk persisted for one reason: a legible, attractive civic identity. This was perhaps the most valuable, if ethereal, commodity in the early days of the city. It’s this sense of shared belonging that makes a city function at all, permitting cooperation between strangers that might rarely exist in another context. It’s the brotherhood that springs up between two residents of the same city that mean in a distant place, the psychological anchor that roots a person to a place. It’s what allows us to call a city home, and it’s the most important quality any urban settlement can have. Since Uruk, we have known how to build it. The question is whether we’ve stopped.
The end for Uruk came sadly, the way so many great things do. After reaching its height during the 3rd millennium BCE, Uruk gradually declined into a dim shadow of itself, perhaps due to the Euphrates River changing course unfavorably: flood plains cannot be relied upon. Despite a period of revival, the proud city finally met its end when it was conquered and destroyed by 4,000 Arab horsemen in 654 BCE. By then, most of the city would have been uninhabited. You could say they conquered a ghost.
One hopes better for our cities. To ensure their future, our cities may well look to build their own modern-day ziggurats, their own sources of civic pride and identity that draw human capital to the city. With the independence to take risks, underwritten by the social capital that a cohesive civic identity provides, cities could become newly capable of conquering challenges that would once have stymied their progress. And with governments capable of responding independently to the unique challenges that face cities in the coming decades, urban dwellers could rest assured of their city’s prosperous future.
If we want the reign of our modern cities to rival that of Uruk, we could do worse than attend its lessons. Otherwise, we may face its end.
