Transcript of 519. The World's First City

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory. Com and join the club. That is therestishistory. Com. Three massive piles rose prominent before our view from an extensive and confused series of mounds at once showing the importance of the ruins which we, their first European visitors, now rapidly approached. The hole was surrounded by a lofty and strong line of earthen ramparts, concealing from view all but the principal objects. Beyond the walls were several conical mounds, one of which equalled in altitude the highest structure within the circumscribed area. Each step that we took after crossing the walls convinced me that Waka was a much more important place than had been hitherto supposed, and that its vast mounds, abounding in objects of the highest interest, deserved a thorough exploration. I determined, therefore, on using every effort to make researches at Waka, which, of all the ruins in Chaldea, is alone worthy to rank with those of Babel, Ceylon and Nineveh. Tom, that was Sir William Loftus, and he's writing in Travels and Researches in Chaldea or Caldea, and the Susiana, which is in 1857.

He's a British geologist, isn't he? He's been working as part of an international commission drawing up the border between the empires of the Ottomans and the Persians. Tell us what the place he's talking about here, because we love a mystery story, and this is one of history's greatest mysteries.

It's a very mysterious place. As he said in his book, it's called Waka, and it's in Southern Mesopotamia. It had been a frontier post of the Persian Empire back in the age of Muhammad. But when the Arabs had conquered the Persian Empire, it had effectively been abandoned. It's a site like Ozymandias, nothing beside remains. You have the lown and level sands stretching far away. Loftas actually says that it's the most desolate spot that he had ever visited. But he does sense that there's something important about it, something strange about it. There absolutely is. People who are watching this on YouTube will realize that we're not recording this at home. We are, in fact, in Manhattan. We're in New York City, I guess, in lots of ways, the archetype of a great modern international metropolis. There is a link joining New York, London, Tokyo, Beijing, all the great cities of the world to this desolate spot. But it's not immediately obvious just how significant a place this is. It takes a process of archeology stretching right the way up to the present day. Loftus himself, he does come back. He does some desultry excavations, and then he leaves Waka.

Then Germans come in. They're excavating here just before the First World War. They continue after that. Obviously, there have been interruptions for the various Iraq wars over recent years. But the process of archeology has revealed that Loftus's initial sense that this was a really key spot was absolutely true. As you say, it is a place so full of mystery that you might say that this is one of the great mysteries in the entire story of human history.

Well, Tom, is it not fair to say that this story that we're going to be telling today is arguably one of the most consequential, significant stories we've ever told on the rest of history? Because this this mysterious ruined city, you could argue, is the single most important place in the history of humankind.

Yeah, because it's the site for one of the, if not the, greatest turning points in the whole history of human civilization. What is it about Waka that makes it so significant? There are two dimensions to it. The first is it is incredibly old. I said that it gets abandoned in the age of Muhammad, so around a few generations after the Arab conquest, so about-So 700? 700, yeah, about that. But we now know that the origins of this place stretch all the way back to 5,000 BC. It's been continuously inhabited for almost 6,000 years. We now know that it was a place originally called Uruk, but you can see that Waka Uruk, it's clearly the same place. But the other thing about it, it's not just that it's old, but that it is by the standards of every other settlement, say around 4,000 or 3,000 BC, it is enormous. Imagine you are approaching this place, Uruk, in 3000 BC. What do you see? As you approach it, you are surrounded by canals, by irrigation systems, by fields. The fields are full of crops. They're also full of livestock. As you draw nearer to it, you then see something that you would see nowhere else on the face of the planet at this time.

It is a thing of wonder. And there are writers later from Uruk who will praise it in these terms. This fastness thrusting high above the Asia Plane around, this city sprouting tall from Earth to sea, this Uruk, whose very name gleans like the rainbow. Everything about it is hyperbole. It is the wonder of the world. There are vast city walls. So these are the walls that Lofter sees. They're about 23, 24 feet tall, 6 miles in circumference. Within the walls, as you approach it, you can see that there are two towering temples. The first of these is called the Aiana, which literally means the house of heaven. And it is sacred to the goddess who, in the opinion of the people of Uruk, founded the city. And this is a goddess called Nana, who the Babylonians subsequently would call Ishtar, great, powerful, civilization-bringing goddess. The other temple is a temple to the great sky God Anu, and this is sheathed in gleaming white It's radiant, it catches the lights of the sun. So that's what the meaning of the phrase, gleaming like the rainbow. Again, a stupifying sight if you've never seen anything like this.

You then go in through the gates, you're surrounded by market gardens, so dates and various things like that. There are industrial zones, so brickmaking factories, potteries, all this stuff. Then you go into the actual city itself, and it is, again, this is a place that is It has no comparison anywhere. It's cramped, it's labyrinthine. The houses have no windows so that it keeps the heat out, so it remains cool even in the heat of summer. These are carefully zoned districts, so a lot of thought has gone into the urban planning. The population may be as high as 80,000. I mean, 80,000 people concentrated in a single space. And the total area of the city within the city walls is about three square miles. And just for a point of comparison, the walls of Imperial Rome in its heyday, so around AD 200, contained an area only twice that size. Right.

So we've got a huge place, temples, tens of thousands of people. We have the factories, we have the canals, we have all that stuff. I guess it's the combination of the two things, isn't it? The fact that it's so vast and the fact that it's so old, that means that historians, archeologists have seen this as the world's first city, as the first place where human beings live together, what we would now call the ancestor of New York or Chicago or London or wherever.

Yeah, this is where urbanism begins. This is where the story that culminates in the city we're in now, New York. This is where it starts. In the fourth millennium, to quote Gwendoline like, who wrote a book called Mesopotamia, tellingly, the subtitle is The Invention of the City. She describes it as being the only really large urban center in the fourth millennium. The question then is, how did Uruk begin and why was it Uruk? Why was it this particular place? The arguments around it and the fascination of this puzzle actually remind me of the arguments that people have about why industrialization began in Britain. There are lots of places that you might think of where industrialization could have happened and they don't. Why does it specifically happen in Britain? And likewise, why does urbanization happen in Uruk? Then there is a further question, a further mystery, which is, how does this process of urbanization change humanity? Because if this is the first experience experience in history of people living together in a city, does it change what it is to be human? Does it rewire the brain? Does it set up patterns of behavior and social intercourse that have no precedent when Uruk is built, but which we now take for granted?

It's just such an amazing story, I think.

Well, let's try to put this in a bigger context, Tom. The great shift in human history, the first great shift, or the agricultural revolution, that happens at the end of the last Ice Age, which is almost 12,000 years ago. That's the point at which hunter-gatherers start domesticating crops. Obviously, Mesopotamia, Iraq, as we would now call it, that zone, because it's the fertile Crescent, and it's the most obvious place for agriculture to start. Tell us something about that to give us a bit of context for this.

Mesopotamia is part of the Fertile Crescent, but the Fertile Crescent consists of more than Mesopotamia. You've also got the uplands of Anatolia, what's now Turkey. You've got Syria going down into Israel, Palestine. The thing about the Fertile Crescent is that it has an incredible array of soil types, of variations of climate, of altitude. So that means that there are lots of different crops, lots of different plants growing And this is the home of lots of different varieties of wheat. You get barley, you get lentils, pees, you get flax, which, of course, is quite useful for making clothing. But also, as well as plant life, You also have fauna. And you remember, we talked about this in the context of the Aztecs as why the Americas do not develop in the way that Eurasia does.

They don't have draft animals.

And also, they don't have animals that they can domesticate. The ancestors of sheep, of goats, of cows, of pigs, all of which are part of human agriculture today. I mean, this, again, this is where it begins. If you're a hunter-gatherer, if you're roaming around, and then you find a spot where there's wild wheat growing, and also you have herds of animals, then why would you continue roaming? You might as well settle down and enjoy the fruits of nature. That is what people do start to do very, very early on, and these camps then start to become settled communities. Probably the oldest, certainly the most famous of these hunter-gatherer camps that become a permanent settlement is Jericho in what's now on the West bank.

People always say Jericho is the oldest inhabited place on the planet, don't they? It's about 11,000 years old.

It's the oldest continuously inhabited because it's a city to this day. It's not initially what we would call a city. It shows there are developments that will become features of urbanism. Jericho, people first settled there about 11,000 years ago. And by about 9,000 BC, you've got reliable winter rains, you've got productive harvests, and abundant wild game. So this is the words of Stephen Mithin in his book, After the Ice. And he says, The Jericho people had no need to leave. And they start to build walls, and they even build a tower. And Mithin says that such architecture was completely unprecedented in human history. So there are foreshadowings of urbanism there, but it doesn't become a city. There's no urban lift off. It's just a large village. I mean, in due course, it will become a city, but not for many, many thousands of years in the future. And this is true of other settlements as well across the a fertile Crescent that are starting to sprout up in a similar way to Jericho. There's a very famous one called Chattel Hayuk in Turkey, maybe about 5,000 inhabitants there. This is in the seventh millennium. It seems to be quite an oppressive place.

They love a skull. They do. I think you get the sense that the people living there, they're menaced all the time by a sense of the supernatural around them. So not, I think, a particularly pleasant place to live.

Yeah, like New York.

Yeah, but that doesn't take off. And there is also down in Mesopotamia, you're also starting to get these proto cities, large villages developing both in the north and the south of Mesopotamia. An example of a city in the north is a place called Telbrak, in what's now Syria, merges about the same time as Chattel Hayek. So the seventh millennium. And by the fourth millennium, it seems to be ready for lift off, rather like, you might say, the Netherlands is ready to industrialize in the 17th century, but it doesn't. It remains basically a large village. And then by the end of the millennium, it goes into remission. It's contracting, it's disintegrating, it's collapsing. But this is the very time down in Southern Mesopotamia, the Uruk is starting to enjoy take-off. So to quote Guillermo Algeace, and I hope I've pronounced his name right. Might be Algez, but I'll call him Algez, who's written a book, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization. He puts it in this way, A decisive shift in favor of Southern Mesopotamia, of the balance of urbanization, socio-political complexity, and economic differentiation that had existed across the ancient East until the onset of the fourth millennium.

So something is happening in Southern Mesopotamia, the place where Uruk will emerge that is happening nowhere else. Hadn't happened in Syria, hadn't happened in Palestine, hadn't happened in Palestine, it hadn't happened in Anatolia, it hadn't happened in Northern Mesopotamia. So why? This is obviously a fascinating, very, very pressing question. And so there have been lots of very broad brush theories about it. The The earliest theories were that Uruk, where it emerges, that it's the result of conquest by outsiders. And these outsiders have been called the Sumerians. And the analogy that is often pursued is with the emergence of where we are today, Manhattan, over the course of the 17th into the 18th century because there had to be no sign of urbanization here. Then with the coming of European colonists, you start to get the city that we're now sitting in. Is this proof that the Sumerians had come and they had found founded, planted this great city in the middle of nowhere? Yes. But that's not really an answer because it's just kicking the problem down the can down the road because where did the Sumerians get the idea for urbanism from? It doesn't really answer the puzzle.

Also, recent archeology, so over recent decades, has demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that there were no newcomers, that the people we call the Samarians were very, very anciently rooted there. The parallels of the culture of Uruk are easily traceable to the archeological remains that preceded the emergence of Uruk. So that theory is no longer accepted. Then there's another theory, which I think is probably on the popular level, it's one that lots of people, I think, would probably assume is the explanation. And that is that although Mesopotamia is very fertile It's also quite difficult to channel that fertility. You've got these two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. If you're going to irrigate the mudflats beyond them, you need great workforces to dig the irrigation canals. The only way that this could have been organized would be by having a powerful elite who could organize the masses to do it for them. This, in turn, once it's been done, would generate surpluses, and these surpluses could then start to be spent on massive walls and temples.

Towers and stuff, yeah.

And of course, also keeping the elites in the comfort to which they're becoming used. For the elites of Uruk, this would be brilliant. It would be a virtuous circle because they get richer and richer and the oppressed masses get more and more enslaved to them, more and more obliged to labor to keep them in the style that they're accustomed to. Now, this theory also has fallen by the wayside, and that's because today there is a recognition that what is happening in the fourth millennium BC, and it's only really recently been conclusively proved, is a process of climate change. You have rising sea levels. The Persian Gulf, back in the fifth millennium, going into the fourth millennium, it reaches inland about 200 miles higher than it does today, so much higher up into the flatlands of what is now Iraq. The spread northwards of sea water means that you have an unbelievably rich variety of potential food stuffs. You have seafish, you have mollusks, you have marshlands, and in them you have water fowel, you have the flood plain, of course, where you can grow wheat, and then you have more arid, almost semi desert regions where you can keep livestock.

So essentially, it's potentially a massive great larder. And so it's understandable that as the sea water spread northwards into what's now Iraq, so people start to congregate along its shores and to go out into the marshes and to build settlements there. And the result of this, the fact that you have this whole range of ecosystems, is it seems in the fifth and then into the fourth millennium, you are starting to get a greater concentration of people than anywhere else on the planet.

I remember reading something about this in a book a few years ago by Ben Wilson called Metropolis.

It's a brilliant book.

He was talking about people building these settlements on these marshy islands. There's one in particular isn't there? Where they build a shrine, and he points to that as a key moment in the emergence of this proto-urban culture, if you like. Tell us a bit about that, Tom.

I'll actually quote Ben Wilson. I've got to lift it a passage from his wonderful book, Metropolis on this. This is a shrine that's It was built around 5,400 BC. Wilson says of it, On a sandbank beside a lagoon where the desert met the Mesopotamian marshes, perhaps at first people saw this place as sacred because the lagoon was a life-giving force. The earlier signs of human life here in the sandy island that would be called Eridu, were the bones of fish and wild animals as well as muscle shells, suggesting this holy spot was a place of ritual feast. In time, a small shrine was built to worship the God of fresh water. Then the centuries pass and Eridu is built and rebuilt and rebuilt, and it becomes larger and larger and larger. It comes to be seen by the people who live around it as the holiest place in the world, the place where the world itself emerged into being. Dry land is fashioned out of the primordial waters, shaped and molded out of mud by the great God Enki. The temple of Erradu is to Enki, and it serves as a symbol not just of the victory of order over chaos, of eternity over oblivion, but as the very place where the great God Enki, the creator God himself, actually lives.

If the God who ensures that order is preserved, that the lands around the sea don't just melt back into the chaos of the waters, you need to keep him on board. You need to keep him happy. And so inevitably, this results in the emergence of a priesthood. And they have authority over the people who are contributing labor and goods to this temple because they can say, well, if you don't do what we say, then the world will collapse and melt away. What it reminds me of is Stonehenge, which is built much later, but a similar process of a site that is clearly very holy, not just to locals, but to people from far across Britain. You get people coming for great feasts at the site of Stonehenge. The temple itself remains sacrosanct, but you do get signs of large villages, large settlements. But again, the comparison with Stonehenge only focuses the puzzle. How do you get from this temple on an island in Southern Mesopotamia to the emergence of the first city, to the emergence of Uruk?

Because Erudu doesn't become a city, but Uruk does. There's some story, isn't there? Is there some folk tale about how they get the idea from Erdu and they take it to Uruk? Have I remembered that right, Tom?

Yes. So Enki is in his temple, and basically, he's being selfish. He's not sharing the gifts of civilization, the fruits of his knowledge. In Greek myth, he's a bit like Jesús hoarding fire. And in the Greek myth, Prometheus, the Titan, comes and steals fire and gives it to humanity, and then human civilization can begin. And that role in Mesopotamian myth is played by the goddess we've already mentioned, Inanna, who will become Ishta to the Babylonians. She steals the secrets of civilization from Enki by getting him drunk on beer. She gets him pissed. She steals everything that he knows. If you like, it's a data theft. She moves in and she recognizes knowledge is power. She takes these secrets and she takes it to the Ayyana, the house of heaven that we mentioned as being this great temple in Uruk, and this is the place where she settles. It establishes a second focal point for the peoples of Southern Mesopotamia. Only this is one in which the God is not hogging knowledge to himself, but is generous with it, wants to share it with the whole of humanity.

How does that story match the archeological evidence of the temples in Uruk, Tom?

Beautifully. This is why it's so wonderful. I mentioned these two great temples that get founded about 5,000 BC, the Eana and the neighboring temple, the temple to Anu, the sky god, the Kalaba. They are like the temple to Enki on Erdu, that they are constantly being built and rebuilt and rebuilt. And each time they are rebuilt, the existing structure is incorporated within it. So Gwendoline like in her book says, The past and the memory are sealed and a new foundation laid quite literally upon the leveled remains. And the result, as the centuries and then the millennia pass, is architecture on an absolutely unprecedentedly monumental scale. These are by miles the larger structures that any humans have built at that time.

And an obvious question, how Are they building this? Who's doing it? I mean, are they doing it with a willing workforce? Are they doing it with slaves? How's that happening?

Well, the thing that's fascinating is that it does seem to be more voluntary than perhaps the more pessimistic takes on the emergence of urbanism would have it. There's a brilliant scholar of this whole process called Pieter Steinkeller. He describes these these cylinder seals, which are tubes, and you roll them in clay. They give you a strip cartoon. They're not exactly writing, but they are images encoded with meaning. He refers to an assembly of cylinder seals, and he describes them as being the only evidence of a potentially historical nature that survives from late prehistoric times. That's amazing. Before the invention of writing, there are pictorial representations that you can extrapolate information about what the people who lived in that period were doing. What these seals suggest is that the construction of these great temples at what will become Uruk is a collective activity. It records gifts of commodities and, in fact, labor as well to Inanna, the deity of Uruk. This implies a, I guess, a Confederacy.

Because people are giving the gifts.

Yeah, from different settlements.

Yeah, there must be some wider federation or something.

But what this also implies is that it's not just Inanna who is the beneficiary of this, but Uruk itself. To quote Steinkeller, it now becomes clear that Uruk, rather than being merely one of the participating settlements, was the focus and beneficiary of the system. I absolutely love this because it turns out that the origins of urbanism, Dominic, lies in the dimension of the sacral.

I guess so. Or you could say a form of colonialism that one city is extracting resources from its neighbors, could you not?

Yes, but this is a display of devotion to the gods.

The sacrality is merely a pretext for what's at the heart of history, which is power.

Well, you could say that the sacral and the manifestations of power in the here and now are so interfused that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish them.

But just before we get to the break, Tom, they're not just building big temples and stuff like that, are they?

No, they're not.

They're also doing engineering, reshaping the landscape around them, I guess.

Well, into the fourth millennium The landscape is being reshaped by the climate because the sea is starting to retreat again. It's gone right the way up into Iraq, and now in the fourth millennium, it is starting to retreat back to where the Persian Gulf begins now. As a consequence of this, the marshes are drying up, and People who had been dependent for their food on the wildfire in the marshes or the fish and the mollusks in the sea are now having to look for other ways to sustain themselves. What they do, it's obviously a terrible crisis for them, but they They have these two great temples, which by now are millennia-old, and they serve as reassurances, symbols that the gods will look after them, that they will uphold the order that to merge back in the beginning with Enki. So they flocked to Uruk because it seems the safest place to go. It's a refuge. And the people who are coming are people who are very, very familiar with irrigation, with using water to sustain themselves, and probably have the engineering skills that will enable Uruk to be sustained by building canals, by starting to fertilize the fields with water and so on.

And Algaze in his book, fascinating interestingly compares this process to how Chicago emerged in the 19th century. He says that Chicago initially lived in what he describes as its natural landscape. In other words, Chicago is built as a Great Lakes port. That's what initially enables to become a major settlement. But then in the 19th century, developments like expansion of the railroads, the opening up of the Wild West, refrigeration, enable it to serve as a focus for what Algarze calls a created landscape. You can see the parallel there with Uruk. Initially, it's there because you have all these lagoons, the sea and everything. But when it retreats, you have to create a new infrastructure, a new environment. Uruk proves able to deal with that as well, and not just to survive, but to flourish.

Okay, brilliant. Here we have the first story in human history of a city evolving, right? Yeah. And a human landscape changing. You mentioned in the first half that you wanted to talk about how it changes us how Uruk, the first city, changes what it means to be human. So let's do that after the break. Like a young man building a house for the first time, like a girl establishing a woman's domain. Holy Inanna did not sleep. That she ensured that the warehouses would be provisioned, that dwellings would be founded in the city, that his people would eat splendid food, that they would drink splendid beverages, that those who had bathed for holidays would rejoice in the courtyards, that the people would throng the places of celebration, that acquaintances would dine together, that foreigners would cruise about like unusual birds in the sky, elephants, water Buffalo, exotic animals, as well as thoroughbred dogs, lions, mountain ibexes, and sheep with long wool would jostle each other in the public squares. The city walls, like a mountain, reached the heavens. That's from The Curse of Akad, a poem that was written in about 2000 BC, so long after the heyday of Uruk.

We're recording this in New York, and our American listeners will be very pleased there by the mention of beverages, Tom, or what in English we call drinks. Tell us about Akad. So Akad is often seen as one of the great early cities, isn't it? So Accad is the capital of Sargón.

Yeah. It's a purpose-built capital. Sargon is the first great imperial conqueror. That poem describes the fall not of Uruk, but of Akad around 2000 BC. That's 3,000 years after the founding of Uruk. The reason that that poem describes Inanna as the founderess of Accad is that Sargón and his heirs had attempted to appropriate everything that Uruk was and attribute it to this new upstart city of Akad. He describes Sargon in one inscription, describes himself as the overseer of Inanna, another as the anointed one of Anu. It's an illustration of the way in which the path that is blazed by Uruk is followed by countless cities, countless conquerors, countless great leaders in the millennia that follow it. I guess there be a parallel with the barbarians who conquer the Roman Empire or China. Once they have subdued the empires, they want a bit of it. This is why they've come. They want the wealth, they want the sophistication, they want the character and the color and the mythology of these great societies. But there is a difference because the debt that the cities of Mesopotamia, like Accad, owe to Uruk, is infinitely profounder. I mean, Uruk is the prototype, not just of a civilization like Rome or China, but of civilization itself.

There has been nothing like it ever.

You've compared it in your notes to AI, so an absolute game changer. So something that changes the human condition, what it is to be human and to live in the world. Exciting, but also potentially dangerous, indeed deadly.

Yeah. The other parallel with AI is that the real transformation is in the dimension less of hardware than of software. So in the rewiring of the brain itself. In fact, you could say that the city is like an enormous brain, a collective brain. The existence of this brain requires new ways of thinking, but it also generates new ways of thinking. And these new ways of thinking in turn result in new forms of social organization, of communication, and maybe just of conceptualizing the very nature of what it is to be human and how humanity relates to the broader Cosmos, the broader universe.

You've given an example in your notes, haven't you? You have two innovations that come about because of the need to cope with particular challenges. And those are challenges really born of scale because a city like Uruk, it needs stuff It needs stuff. It needs supplies, it needs materials, it needs food. Talk us through these two innovations.

These are on the technical level, the technological level. This is hardware rather than software. One of these is the domestication of the humble donkey, which the people of Uruq seem to have been the first to domesticate. The stats on this are striking. It's been estimated that a train of, say, 40 donkeys could carry almost £7,000 of cargo over 20 miles a day. Again, if you think of the parallel with Chicago, the invention of the railroads opens up vast, vast stretches of territory that the people of Chicago can now exploit. In its own humble way, the donkey is doing the same. The other thing that seems to have been developed in Uruk is wheel and the axel. Again, that's responding to a need, but it's also because you have people who would be qualified to come up with this invention. You have very skilled craftsmen who can shape wheels, who can shape axels, and so on. Again, it's not surprising that it in Uruk that this momentous innovation emerges.

Because you need tools to make these things, so that spurs an innovation of a different kind. Because we're in Mesopotamia, it's also in the Tigris and the Euphrates, so sails, right? Boats, they're bringing stuff in by as well. That must be a massively important thing. I guess that gives you a sense of the idea that the city is the hub of a great network that extends out beyond itself, that it's not self-sufficient, that they're bringing stuff in, metals or food or whatever.

Or wood, particularly, because there's almost no wood in Mesopotamia.

Now, here's a question for you. In the first half, I said, is it like a colonial relationship exploiting the hinterland? So is it? Are they paying for this stuff or are they just taking it?

Well, Well, this is much debated. There are scholars, so Algaze, he's very keen on the idea that there is a colonial system that gets established. There are others who say it's largely a trading network. But again, this reminds me of debates around Britain's role as the first industrial nation. Is the process of industrialization what enables the colonial system to be established? Is it the other way around? Is it a bit of both? It's clear that as with Britain, so with Uruk, being the brand leader, the first to develop a way of organizing your in a way that maximizes what you can produce, it massively opens up trade links because you can control those trade links and you then have things to sell. What is also happening in Uruq is that things like pottery, things like textiles, things like metals are being developed on a scale and with a degree of sophistication that, again, has never been seen ever in history. So potters in Uruk seem to have developed the potter's wheel, kilns that enable more and more pots to be developed. Very, very distinctive pottery is made in Uruk, and it's been found across in Syria, in Anatolia, even as far as what's now Pakistan, Iran.

Of course, this encourages foreign communities to model themselves on Uruk. A great exporting power is able to shape the tastes of those who are importing them. In that sense, there's a cultural colonialism, isn't there?

This must, therefore, be production on a scale that we haven't seen before. So production of the textiles or the pottery or whatever. Again, that reinforces that parallel with Britain and the Industrial Revolution. That Britain has developed mass production. It's got the prototypical factories of the late 18th and early 19th century. If Uruk can do this, then that must mean it has a level of organization that no community in human history has ever had to this point. Would that be right?

Yeah. I said how it's really in dimension of software rather than hardware, that Uruk's potency is most vividly displayed. There are two real innovations in that field. The first is in the field of what we would now call data management. Uruk, and specifically the great temple to Inanna in the heart of Uruk, is home to the earliest surviving writing found anywhere in the world. If we discount that writing that we talked about in Serbia as not actually being writing. This essentially is where writing is invented, and we can trace its evolution in some detail. Those cylinder seals that I described, those circular tubes that you inscribe details on, drawings and so on, and you then roll them in clay. These are illustrated with motifs that are starting to move towards pictograms. So images that are conveying quite a lot of information that will be understood by quite a broad array of bureaucrats. Then you have things that are called bull eye, so little balls, little hollow clay balls. These contain little clay tokens. These tokens, a bit like, I suppose, items on a monopoly board or something.

Yeah, like board game tokens.

Yeah, they are shaped to represent something that you want to sell, a commodity. I don't know, a roll of cloth or a pot or a jar of oil or something like that. These are basically contracts. You have an agreement. If it's to deliver a load of pottery, you have a pot, you put it in this bull eye in this clay ball, and then you take it to the temple, you leave it there, and then once the contract has been completed, you crack open the clay ball and the accounting tokens are removed. This demonstrates that the contract has been fulfilled and the agreement can be legally terminated. Over the course of time, these various images start to evolve to become what we would recognize as writing writing. They evolve into, well, famously, wedge-shaped images. From the Latin, this comes to be called cunaform. This will be a form of writing that will endure for thousands and thousands of years. The thing that I was as an enthusiast for literature and poetry, the thing I always find sobering about this is you realize that literacy and writing begins not with poets. It begins not with storytellers, as I'd always imagined, but with accountants.

Tom, I love this.

And amazingly, we probably have the name of one of these accountants. So sometime in the late fourth millennium, a scribe writes a receipt. By this point, the writing has developed that you can put it into writing. And this scribe wrote down 28,000 and '86 Bali, 37 months, Khushim. So what or who is Khushim? So Khushim could be the name of the holder of an office or a particular institution, but it's much more it is an individual. To quote Ben Wilson, If so, Kushim is the very first person in history whose name we know.

Crikey.

He's an accountant. So any accountants out there listening to this, pat yourselves on the back.

To give people a sense of just how exciting and fun-packed the Restes History Club is, we have a lot of accountants in the Restes History Club, tax specialists and whatnot. I hope they will enjoy that. They'd love all this. They're all over this.

But now, a slightly darker perspective on the role played by accountants in the emergence of urbanization, because I said that there are these two innovations. The other one is what you can only really describe as the mass exploitation of labor.

So we're talking, in a word, slavery.

Well, to be discussed, yes, there is definitely slavery by this point. We know this from another receipt that's written maybe a couple of generations after Cushim wrote that very first receipt. It's on a tablet, and it's a record of ownership. The owner is a man called Gal Sal.

Crazy name, crazy guy.

Well, but the name of his male slave is even crazier. It's Npap-X. It's like a rapper, isn't it?

This is something from the future. Yeah.

Npap-x. There's a female slave called Sook Algea. This is the second. These are the second group of people named in history, and two of them are slaves. It demonstrates how writing and urbanism and civilization coexist with slavery right from the beginning. The reason that I said it's not just slavery, it's much broader than that. It's about the exploitation of what you might call the working classes more generally. It reflects the fact, essentially, it seems impossible to have a system of living as complex and vast as a city without having people who are exploited by the rich to do the dirty jobs. They might be slaves, they might be people from a particular caste, they might be serfs, they might be oppressed laborers, but right from the beginning, they are there. Algaze sums this up brilliantly and very sinistially. He writes, early near Eastern villages, domesticated plants and animals, Urux urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.

Would these be people seized in wars?

Yeah, maybe.

For example, the people in Tenochtitland in the Aztec Empire, would these be people captured in great raids or in, I don't know, ritualistic campaigns or something, and then brought back to work on the land and to work in doing all the dirty jobs, do you think?

Definitely. By the end of the fourth millennium, you were starting to get images on seals in Uruk that do show prisoners tethered, their hands bound up, guarded by armed soldiers, by armed warriors. But there are also native-born slaves as well. Again, to quote Algaze, you get foreign and native-born captives used as laborers, and they are described by the bureaucrats, by the accountants, with age and sex categories identical to those used to describe state-owned herded animals, including various types of cattle and pigs. You're getting humans as commodities that are on a level with livestock. In fact, not just livestock, but commodities more generally. In all the various of texts that we have from Uruk, barley is the commodity that gets the most mentions, 496. But the commodity that comes after that is female slaves. Really? And you get 388 mentions of them.

That's a pretty grim story, isn't it?

You might wonder why particularly female slaves. I think the answer to that is the importance of the textile industry, which, again, is such a comparison with the industrial revolution in Britain, that the textile industry is massive in Uruk. It's no longer really flax that they're using. They're using wool by now taken from the sheep, and they need female slaves to do it. Weaving the manufacture of commodities is seen in Mesopotamia stereotypically as the role that is played by women. If you're going to do it on a vast scale, then effectively, it seems from the evidence, the people of Uruk felt that they needed slaves to do it. Yeah,.

Right from the start about urbanism, the city, civilization has this dark and terrifying side. If you're a pessimistic person about human nature as I am, you won't be very surprised by this because someone aren't writing saying, The pictures on the seals, they show prisoners cowering and people surrounded by guards and stuff like that, which is in a way what you would expect. There is a celebration of power and domination and oppression. What other words can you use?

Yes, but the development of a further worrying trend, which is, of course, that by this time, so the end of the fourth millennium, when you're starting to get the evidence of transportation of captives to Uruk, you are also starting to see that the people of Uruk are no longer the single city anymore, that rivals are starting to grow, and in due course, Akad will be one of them. So these great city walls are built around 3000 BC, and this seems to indicate the fact that by this point, Uruk is coming under threat from rivals. And Uruk survives another 700 years after that. But when Sargans turns up in around 2,300, he destroys the walls, levels them to the ground. By that point, the Ayana, the great temple to Inanna, had already been leveled for reasons that nobody knows why this had happened. It seemed to have been for internal reasons, but we don't know why. With the conquest by Sargans, Uruk, basically, its ancient glory, its ancient supremacy is lost forever. It remains a significant place, but the memory of its status as having been the first city is forgotten. The Mesopotamians don't remember Uruk as being the very first city.

But having said that, not everything about Uruk's ancient glory is forgotten. I'll read you lines from a poem written about Uruk. One square mile of city, one square mile of gardens, one square mile of clay pits, a half square mile of Inanna's dwelling, three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk. And those are lines from Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh. I wondered if Gilgamesh might pitch up.

Yeah, by Miles, the most famous of Mesopotamian poems in a great work, great epic. We have it in many different versions. And Gilgamesh doubly derives from Uruk. So first of all, he seems to have been a real person. He seems to have been a king who lived maybe around 2,900. And the fact that you are now having big men, big bosses, the Lugal, they're called, the big man. So like Mayor Daily.

Mayor Daily of Mesopotamia. Yeah.

So that's who Gilgamesh was. But the other way in which Gilgamesh could not have been written without Uruk is, of course, the fact that it is being written, that writing has been developed. And so what had been used for accountancy is now being used to write poetry and so on.

The accountant's tool has become the poet's tool, Tom. Exactly.

So it's not all bad. And the other thing that Gilgamesh does for the Mesopotanians into the age of Babylon and so on, is that it preserves the association of Ulruk with Inanna because Gilgamesh in the poem, is often cast as the particular servant of Inanna. In fact, in the very earliest version of the poem, he comes to the rescue of Inanna's sacred tree, which is being menaced by a sinister bird. That's what Gilgamesh does originally.

We do like a sinister bird.

We've talked about how the gifts of urbanism are dark ones, that it imposes on humanity a new way of living, which you might think maybe we'd have been better off carrying on as hunter-gatherers or whatever.

I don't think so.

But Inanna, right the way up to, I don't know, the age of the Persians or the Greeks or the Romans, is remembered as the Goddess of pleasure. She's not just the Goddess of the arts of civilization, but of everything that makes a city fun. Uruk is celebrated as a place of festivals, of singing and dancing. I'll just finish by quoting from Gwendoline like on this aspect of Uruk, the role that Inanna plays in her mythology. Inanna, Gwendoline like writes, stands for the erotic potential of city life, which is set apart from the strict social control of the tribal community or the village. She frequents taverns and alehouses where men could meet single women, and she is said to proule the streets of Kulab in search of sexual adventure. Copulation in the streets was apparently a normal and joyful event, and young people sleeping in their own chambers is singled out in a late poem as a most worrying state of affairs. I guess you could say, Yvouruk, that maybe there are worse things to be remembered for.

Brilliant, Tom. That was an absolute tour de force, and we're in Manhattan, and outside our windows of our hotel, at this very moment, people may be performing in a similar way.

Copulating in the streets.

I think we should head out and investigate, Tom. On that bombshell, we'll leave the rest of you to contemplate city life.Thank you very much, and goodbye. Bye-bye. Tom, we have something unbelievable believably exciting to share with our listeners, don't we?

Absolutely, we do, Dominic. It's that time of year again when you've got to find that perfect gift for the loved one in your life, and we are thrilled to help you with that challenge. We are announcing the launch of the Rest is History merchandise. Yes, you can now own a piece of history, literally. We've literally got shirts, mugs, phone cases, notebooks, so much, just in time for Christmas. Unbelievable scenes, Tom, because these aren't just any shirts and mugs.

Tom, these are exclusive Rest is History designs, and they have been designed specifically to outdo the Rory and Alastair T-shirts that our friends on the Rest is Politics team have been flogging on their tour of England that they've done.

That's right, Dominic. History will always Trump politics. Our new merch truly is the perfect gift for any history fan, whether they're a friend of the show or dare we say, someone who's not yet a friend of the show.

Yeah, this is an unbelievably cunning wheeze, isn't it? Really is. Because if you're a loyal friend of the show, you can wear a T-shirt that proudly declares your allegiance. If you still need convincing, you know who you are, then you can buy a not a friend of the show version as well.

You can make your point with a T-shirt or a hoodie.

It is the perfect icebreaker at parties. What's this? You you say? You don't know the rest is history? Well, let me tell you, and you will have the perfect shirt while you talk to people about General Gordon or pigeons or the Kaiser or whatever it might be. So the possibilities are endless.

And Dominic, there's lots more. There are sacral mugs, so that's brilliant. And maybe you're an Athelstan. You are catered for as well. Lots of Athlstan stuff. So truly, it's beyond a dream gift, isn't it?

People, Tom, have never had it so good. And in fact, if you're a club member, there is a special discount code that will come in the newsletter for members. And if you order before the first of December, then you'll get this amazing discount and everything will be brilliant.

So basically, this is going to be the best Christmas ever. So what you need to do is head over to www. Goalhanger. Shop, grab your Rest is History gear, and make sure you order before the first of December if you're a club member, to get that discount.

If you want to outdo your friends, especially people who listen to other goalhanger podcasts like the Rest is Politics, this is absolutely the way to do it. So remember to head to www. Goalhanger. Shop to get your merch.

And remember, club members order before the first of December to take advantage of that exclusive discount. And we'll be sharing on social media our favorite pictures of you in your Rest is History merch. So send these in over Christmas morning.

And remember, that is www. Goalhanger. Shop.