Uruk stood on the southern Mesopotamian plain, built from mudbrick, river clay, labour, grain, ritual, and memory. Its ruins at Warka preserve one of the oldest great urban sites in the world: temple districts, administrative buildings, mass-produced bowls, sealings, proto-cuneiform tablets, and sacred architecture rebuilt over centuries. This book investigates the city behind the famous names: Inanna and her sanctuary at Eanna, Utu/Shamash and divine justice, the Sumerian King List, Enmerkar, Lugalbanda, Dumuzi, and Gilgamesh. These figures carried Uruk into myth, but the city beneath them was real: walls, temples, storehouses, workers, scribes, offerings, fields, flocks, and clay records.The earliest writing from Uruk was not heroic poetry. It counted grain, labour, animals, beer, textiles, and obligations. The temple was not only a place of worship. It was the house of a god, an estate, a workplace, a storehouse, and a centre of authority. Kingship did not appear as a clean political office. It formed through ritual, divine favour, city memory, and the hard problem of organizing people at a scale earlier communities had not faced. Uruk became a city of gods because it was also a city of systems. This is a study of archaeology, myth, kingship, sacred space, and written memory: the mudbrick city beneath Gilgamesh, the cult world behind Inanna, and the old Mesopotamian attempt to explain power through temples, gods, rituals, lists, and stories.

Uruk stood on the southern Mesopotamian plain, built from mudbrick, river clay, labour, grain, ritual, and memory. Its ruins at Warka preserve one of the oldest great urban sites in the world: temple districts, administrative buildings, mass-produced bowls, sealings, proto-cuneiform tablets, and sacred architecture rebuilt over centuries. This book investigates the city behind the famous names: Inanna and her sanctuary at Eanna, Utu/Shamash and divine justice, the Sumerian King List, Enmerkar, Lugalbanda, Dumuzi, and Gilgamesh. These figures carried Uruk into myth, but the city beneath them was real: walls, temples, storehouses, workers, scribes, offerings, fields, flocks, and clay records.The earliest writing from Uruk was not heroic poetry. It counted grain, labour, animals, beer, textiles, and obligations. The temple was not only a place of worship. It was the house of a god, an estate, a workplace, a storehouse, and a centre of authority. Kingship did not appear as a clean political office. It formed through ritual, divine favour, city memory, and the hard problem of organizing people at a scale earlier communities had not faced. Uruk became a city of gods because it was also a city of systems. This is a study of archaeology, myth, kingship, sacred space, and written memory: the mudbrick city beneath Gilgamesh, the cult world behind Inanna, and the old Mesopotamian attempt to explain power through temples, gods, rituals, lists, and stories.

Uruk stood on the southern Mesopotamian plain, built from mudbrick, river clay, labour, grain, ritual, and memory. Its ruins at Warka preserve one of the oldest great urban sites in the world: temple districts, administrative buildings, mass-produced bowls, sealings, proto-cuneiform tablets, and sacred architecture rebuilt over centuries. This book investigates the city behind the famous names: Inanna and her sanctuary at Eanna, Utu/Shamash and divine justice, the Sumerian King List, Enmerkar, Lugalbanda, Dumuzi, and Gilgamesh. These figures carried Uruk into myth, but the city beneath them was real: walls, temples, storehouses, workers, scribes, offerings, fields, flocks, and clay records.The earliest writing from Uruk was not heroic poetry. It counted grain, labour, animals, beer, textiles, and obligations. The temple was not only a place of worship. It was the house of a god, an estate, a workplace, a storehouse, and a centre of authority. Kingship did not appear as a clean political office. It formed through ritual, divine favour, city memory, and the hard problem of organizing people at a scale earlier communities had not faced. Uruk became a city of gods because it was also a city of systems. This is a study of archaeology, myth, kingship, sacred space, and written memory: the mudbrick city beneath Gilgamesh, the cult world behind Inanna, and the old Mesopotamian attempt to explain power through temples, gods, rituals, lists, and stories.