519. The World's First City

0:10Three 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 whole 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 equaled 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.

1:01I determine 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 Babylon and Nineveh. So Tom, that was Sir William Loftus, and he's writing in Travels and Researches in Chaldea or Chaldea and the Susiana, which is in 1857. He's a British geologist, isn't he? And he's been working as part of an international commission drawing up the border between the empires of the Ottomans and the Persians. So tell us what he's, the place he's talking about here, because this is one of, we love a mystery story. And this is one of history's greatest mysteries.

1:45So 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. And it's a site like Ozymandias. Nothing beside remains. You know, you have the lone and level sands stretching far away. And Loftus 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. And there absolutely is. And people who are watching this on YouTube will realize that we're not recording this at home.

2:28And 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. And 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. And it takes a process of archaeology stretching right the way up to the present day. So Loftus himself, he does come back. He does some kind of desultory excavations and then he leaves Waka. And then Germans come in. They're excavating here just before the First World War.

3:07They continue after that. Obviously, there've been kind of interruptions for the various Iraq wars over recent years. but the process of archaeology has revealed that Loftus' initial sense that this was a really key spot was absolutely true. And 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 is history because 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 so what is it about waka that makes it so significant there are two dimensions to it the first is it is incredibly old so i said that it gets abandoned in the age of Muhammad, so around a few generations after the Arab conquest.

4:10So about 700. Yeah, about that. But we now know that the origins of this place stretch all the way back to 5000 BC. So it's been continuously inhabited for almost 6000 years. And we now know that it was a place originally called Uruk. But you can see that, you know, Waqa, 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. So imagine you are approaching this place, Uruk, in 3 ,000 BC. And what do you see? As you approach it, you are surrounded by canals, by irrigation systems, by fields.

4:59The 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. And 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 plain around, this city sprouting tall from earth to sea, this Uruk whose very name gleams 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 Loftus sees. They're about 23, 24 feet tall, six miles in circumference.

5:42Within the walls, as you approach it, you can see that there are two towering temples. The first of these is called the Ayanna, 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 Inanna, 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 plaster. It's radiant. It catches the lights of the sun. So that's what the meaning of the phrase gleaming like the rainbow.

6:20Again, a stupefying sight if you've never seen anything like this. You then go in through the gates. You're surrounded by market gardens. So, you know, dates and various things like that. There are industrial zones. So brick making factories, potteries, all this kind of stuff. And then you go into the actual city itself. And it is, again, I mean, this is a place that 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. and these are carefully zoned districts. So a lot of thought has gone into the urban planning.

6:59The 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 kind of stuff. And 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, archaeologists have seen this as the world's first city.

7:39Yeah. As the first place where human beings lived 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. And in the fourth millennium, to quote Gwendolyn Lyke, who wrote a book called Mesopotamia, tellingly the subtitle is The Invention of the City. I mean, she describes it as being the only really large urban center in the fourth millennium. And so the question then is, how did Uruk begin and why was it Uruk? Why was it this particular place?

8:14and the arguments around it and the fascination of this kind of 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. So why does it specifically happen in Britain? And likewise, why does urbanization happen in Uruk? And 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 in history of people living together in a city, does it change what it is to be human?

8:50Does it kind of 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? So it's just such an amazing story, I think. Well, let's try to put this in a bigger context, Tom. So the great sort of shift in human history, the first great shift called the agricultural revolution, that happens at the end of the last ice age which is almost 12 000 years ago and that's the point at which hunter-gatherers start domesticating crops and obviously mesopotamia iraq as we would now call it that kind of zone because it's the fertile crescent and it's the most obvious place for agriculture to start so tell us something about that to give us a bit of context for this yeah so mesopotamia is part of the fertile crescent but the fertile crescent consists of more than Mesopotamia.

9:38So you've also got the uplands of Anatolia, what's now Turkey. You've got Syria going down into Israel, Palestine. And 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, peas, 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'll remember, we talked about this in the context of the Aztecs as why the Americas do not develop in the way that Eurasia does.

10:24They don't have draft animals. And also they don't have animals that they can domesticate. So 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. And if you're a hunter gatherer, if you're kind of roaming around and then you find a spot where, you know, there's wild wheat growing and also you have herds of animals, then why would you continue roaming? You might as well kind of settle down and enjoy the fruits of nature. And that is what people do start to do very, very early on. And these camps then start to become kind of settled communities.

11:06So probably the oldest, certainly the most famous of these kind of 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? So 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, you know, there are kind of developments that will become features of urbanism. So 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.

11:44So these are 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 kind of foreshadowings of urbanism there, but it doesn't become a city. There's no urban liftoff. 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 Fertile Crescent that are kind of starting to sprout up in a similar way to Jericho.

12:17There's a very famous one called Çatal Hayek in Turkey, maybe about 5 ,000 inhabitants there. So 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, I mean, 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 kind of proto cities, large villages developing both in the north and the south of Mesopotamia.

12:51So an example of a city in the north is a place called Tel Brak in what's now Syria, merges about the same time as Chattel Hayok, so the seventh millennium. And by the fourth millennium, it seems to be ready for liftoff, 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 fourth millennium, it goes into remission. It's kind of contracting, it's disintegrating, it's collapsing. But this is the very time down in southern Mesopotamia that Uruk is starting to enjoy takeoff. So to quote Guillermo Algarze, and I hope I've pronounced his name right, might be Algarze, but I'll call him Algarze, who's written a book, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization.

13:35And he puts it in this way, a decisive shift in favor of southern Mesopotamia, of the balance of urbanization, sociopolitical 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 Anatolia. Hadn't happened in Northern Mesopotamia. So why? So, I mean, this is obviously a fascinating, very, very pressing question. And so there have been lots of very broad brush theories about it.

14:13And 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. And then with the coming of European colonists, you start to get the city that we're now sitting in. So is this proof that the Sumerians had come and they had founded, planted this great city in the middle of nowhere. 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?

14:53It doesn't really answer the puzzle. And also recent archaeology, so over recent decades, has demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that there were no newcomers, that the people we call the Sumerians were very, very anciently rooted there. The parallels of the culture of Uruk are easily traceable to the archaeological remains that precede the emergence of Uruk. So that theory is no longer accepted. And 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.

15:32You've got these two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. And if you're going to irrigate the mudflats beyond them, you need great workforces to dig the irrigation canals. And 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. And 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. And of course, also keeping the elites in the comfort to which they're becoming used. And so for the elites of Uruk, this would be brilliant.

16:08It would be a kind of 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. And you have rising sea levels. And the Persian Gulf, back in the fifth millennium, going into the fourth millennium, it reaches inland about 200 miles higher than it does today.

16:46So much higher up into the kind of the flatlands of what is now Iraq. And the spread northwards of seawater means that you have an unbelievably rich variety of potential foodstuffs. You have seafish, you have mollusks, you have marshlands, and in them you have kind of waterfowl. You have the floodplain, of course, where you can grow wheat. And then you have kind of more arid, almost kind of 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 seawaters spread northwards into what's now Iraq, so people start to congregate along its shores and to go out into the marshes and to kind of build settlements there.

17:32And 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're starting to get a greater concentration of people than anywhere else on the planet. So I remember reading something about this in a book a few years ago by Ben Wilson called Metropolis. It's a brilliant book, yeah. And he was talking about people building these sort of settlements on these marshy islands. And there's one in particular, isn't there, where they build a shrine. And he points to that as a sort of key moment in the emergence of this kind of proto-urban culture, if you like.

18:07So tell us a bit about that, Tom. I'll actually quote Ben Wilson. I've lifted a passage from his wonderful book Metropolis on this. This is a shrine that's built around 5 ,400 BC. And 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 earliest 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 mussel shells, suggesting this holy spot was a place of ritual feasting. In time, a small shrine was built to worship the god of fresh water.

18:43And then the centuries pass and Eridu is built and rebuilt and rebuilt and it becomes larger and larger and larger. And 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, kind of shaped and molded out of mud by the great god Enki. and the temple of Eridu is raised 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.

19:28So 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 kind of 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.

20:14And you get people coming for great feasts at the site of Stonehenge. The temple itself remains kind of 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 right because erudu doesn't become a city but uruk does there's some story isn't there is there some sort of folk tale about how they get the idea from erudu 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.

20:54He's not sharing the gifts of civilization, the fruits of his knowledge. In Greek myth, he's a bit like Zeus 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 Ishtar to the Babylonians. And she steals the secrets of civilization from Enki by getting him drunk on beer. So she gets him pissed and she steals everything that he knows. I mean, if you like, it's a kind of data theft. She moves in and she recognizes knowledge is power.

21:33And she takes these secrets and she takes it to the Ayanna, the house of heaven that we mentioned as being this great temple in Uruk. And this is the place where she settles. And it establishes a second focal point for the peoples of southern Mesopotamia. Only this is one in which the god is not kind of hugging knowledge to himself, but is generous with it, wants to share it with the whole of humanity. How does that story match the archaeological evidence of the temples in Uruk, Tom? Beautifully. I mean, this is why it's so wonderful. So I mentioned these two great temples that get founded about 5000 BC, the Eanna and the neighboring temple, the temple to Anu, the sky god, the Kalaba.

22:20And they are like the temple to Enki on Eridu, that they are constantly being built and rebuilt and rebuilt. And each time they are rebuilt, the existing structure is kind of incorporated within it. So Gwendolyn Lyke 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 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 and who's doing it? I mean, are they doing it with a willing workforce?

23:02Are 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 kind of more pessimistic takes on the emergence of urbanism would have it. So there's a brilliant scholar of this whole process called Pieter Steinkeller. He describes these kind of these cylinder seals, which are kind of tubes and you roll them in clay. They give you a kind of strip cartoon. So they're not exactly writing, but they are images encoded with meaning. And 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.

23:39So that's amazing. I mean, 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. And 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. and this implies a kind of, 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.

24:21So 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. So I absolutely love this because it turns out that the origins of urbanism dominate. 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 neighbours. Could you not? Yes, but this is a display of devotion to the gods. And 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.

25:02But 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 kind of engineering, sort of 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. So 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. And as a consequence of this, the marshes are drying up. And so people who had been dependent for their food on the wildfowl in the marshes or the fish and the mollusks in the sea, are now having to look for other ways to sustain themselves.

25:39And so what they do, it's obviously a terrible crisis for them, but 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 emerged back in the beginning with Enki. So they flock to Uruk because it seems the safest place to go. It's a kind of 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.

26:25and Al Ghazé in his book fascinatingly 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 so in other words Chicago is built on you know as a Great Lakes port that's what initially enables it 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 Agazi calls a created landscape. You can see the parallel there with Uruk. Initially, it's there because you have all these lagoons, you know, the sea and everything.

27:04But when it retreats, you have to create a new infrastructure. Right. A new environment. Yeah. And Uruk proves able to deal with that as well. And not just to survive, but to flourish. Okay, brilliant. So here we have the first story in human history of a city evolving, right? Yeah. And the human landscape kind of 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.