519. The World's First City

In as early as 5000 BC the vast and spectacular city of Uruk - replete with towering walls, glistening temples and complex irrigation systems - lay sprawled across the face of Southern Mesopotamia. Not only is Uruk the oldest city in the world, but it is arguably one of the most consequential, having facilitated one of the great turning points of human civilisation. Here, in this mysterious metropolis lay the origins of urbanisation, making Uruk the predecessor and antecedent of every modern city today. It was the cradle of formidable trading networks, sophisticated craftsmanship, agricultural prosperity, the earliest examples of writing, and even home to the very first person in human history to be named. Yet, by 700 AD this once great wonder of the ancient world had been abandoned, leaving nothing behind but haunting ruins and two burning questions: firstly, how did this marvel of urbanisation come to exist, and secondly, what led to its ruin? Was it colonisation, climate change, or conquest…? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Uruk, the first city in the whole of world history and the mother of modern urbanisation, revealing the remarkable tale of its discovery, its mysterious origins, and equally enigmatic decline. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 Warka was a much more important place than had been hitherto supposed,

• 1:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 researchers at Warka, 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. And he's a British geologist, isn't he? Yeah. 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,

• 2:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  because the This is one of, we love a mystery story and this is one of history's greatest mysteries.

• 2:15Tom Holland?

  So it's a very mysterious place. As he said in his book, it's called Warka 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 realise that we're not recording this at home.

• 2:58Tom Holland?

  And 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 Warka. And then Germans come in, they're excavating here just before the First World War, they continue after that. Obviously, there've been kind of interruptions for the various Iraq wars over recent years.

• 3:44Tom Holland?

  But the process of archaeology has revealed that Loftus's 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.

• 4:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 mysterious ruined city, you could argue, is the single most important place in the history of humankind.

• 4:19Tom Holland?

  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 Warka 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. So about Seven hundred. Seven hundred. Yeah, about that. But we now know that the origins of this place stretch all the way back to 5,000 B.C. So it's been continuously inhabited for almost 6,000 years. And we now know that it was a place originally called Uruk. But you can see that, you know, Warka, Uruk, it's clearly the same place then.

• 4:59Tom Holland?

  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 B.C. It is enormous. Right. So imagine you are approaching this place, Uruk, in 3,000 B.C. And 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. And it is a thing of wonder.

• 5:43Tom Holland?

  And, you know, 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. Yeah. They're about 23, 24 feet tall, six 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.

• 6:27Tom Holland?

  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. Again, you know, 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, pottery, all this kind of stuff. And then you go into the actual city itself.

• 7:09Tom Holland?

  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, you know, 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. The population may be as high as eighty thousand. I mean, eighty thousand 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 two hundred, contained an area only twice that size.

• 7:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. 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.

• 8:16Tom Holland?

  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 Light, 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 centre 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? And 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 industrialisation could have happened and they don't. So why does it specifically happen in Britain?

• 9:01Tom Holland?

  And likewise, why does urbanisation happen in Uruk? And then there is a further question, a further mystery, which is, how does this process of urbanisation change humanity? Because if this is the first experience in history of people living together in a city.

• 9:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Tom Holland?

  Does it change what it is to be human? Does it kind of rewire the brain? Does it set up patterns of behaviour 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.

• 9:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 10:02Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so Mesopotamia is part of the fertile crescent, but the fertile crescent consists of more than Mesopotamia. So 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, you know, 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.

• 10:45Tom Holland?

  And you'll remember, we talked about this in the context of the Aztecs, is why the Americas do not develop in the way that Eurasia does.

• 10:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  They don't have draft animals.

• 10:55Tom Holland?

  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. So probably the oldest, certainly the most famous of these kind of hunter gatherer camps

• 11:40Tom Holland?

  that become a permanent settlement is Jericho in what's now on the West Bank.

• 11:44Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 11:50Tom Holland?

  It's the oldest continuously inhabited.

• 11:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 11:52Tom Holland?

  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 B.C., you've got reliable winter rains, you've got productive harvests and abundant wild game. So 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.

• 12:35Tom Holland?

  I mean, and of 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. There's a very famous one called Châtele Hayuk in Turkey, maybe about 5,000 inhabitants there. So this is in the seventh millennium. It seems to be quite an oppressive place.

• 12:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  They love a skull.

• 12:59Tom Holland?

  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.

• 13:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, like New York.

• 13:09Tom Holland?

  Yeah, that 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. So an example of a city in the north is a place called Tell Bra. In what's now Syria, emerges about the same time as Chattle Hauk, 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 industrialise 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.

• 13:49Tom Holland?

  But this is the very time down in southern Mesopotamia that Uruk is starting to enjoy takeoff. So to quote Guillermo Alguerze, and I hope I've pronounced his name right, it might be Alguerze, but I'll call him Alguerze. He's written a book, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, and he puts it in this way. "A decisive shift in favour of southern Mesopotamia, of the balance of urbanisation, 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 Anatolia, hadn't happened in northern Mesopotamia.

• 14:33Tom Holland?

  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. And 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. Yeah. And the analogy that is often pursued is with the emergence of where we are today, Manhattan. Yeah. Over the course of the 17th into the 18th century, because there had to be no sign of urbanisation 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? Yes.

• 15:16Tom Holland?

  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? 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.

• 15:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 15:36Tom Holland?

  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. You know, you've got these two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. And if you're going to irrigate the mud flats beyond them, you need great workforces to dig the irrigation canals.

• 16:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yep.

• 16:11Tom Holland?

  And the only way that this could have been organised would be by having a powerful elite who could organise 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, you know, massive walls and temples.

• 16:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Towers and stuff, yeah.

• 16:30Tom Holland?

  And of course, also keeping the elites in the comfort to which they're becoming used.

• 16:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 16:35Tom Holland?

  And so for the elites of Uruk, this would be brilliant. It 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 labour 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 B.C. And it's only really recently been conclusively proved is a process of climate change.

• 17:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 17:05Tom Holland?

  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. So 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 sea fish, 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.

• 17:49Tom Holland?

  And so it's understandable that as the seawater has 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. 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're starting to get a greater concentration of people than anywhere else on the planet.

• 18:14Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 18:20Tom Holland?

  It's a brilliant book, yeah.

• 18:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. So tell us a bit about that, Tom.

• 18:38Tom Holland?

  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 5400 B.C. 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 muscle 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." And then the centuries pass and Eridu is built and rebuilt and rebuilt and it becomes larger and larger and larger.

• 19:22Tom Holland?

  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 it's the very place where the great god Enki, the creator god himself, actually lives.

• 19:58Tom Holland?

  So 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 labour 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.

• 20:37Tom Holland?

  But a similar process of a site that is clearly very holy, not just to locals, but to people from far across Britain. And 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?

• 21:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, because Eridu 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 Eridu and they take it to Uruk? Have I remembered that right, Tom?

• 21:19Tom Holland?

  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 Zeus hoarding fire.

• 21:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Tom Holland?

  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. 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.

• 21:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 22:00Tom Holland?

  She moves in and she recognizes knowledge is power. And she takes these secrets and she takes it to.

• 22:08Tom Holland?

  The A'anna, 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.

• 22:30Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 22:37Tom Holland?

  Beautifully. I mean, this is, this is why it's so wonderful. So I mentioned these two great temples that get founded about 5,000 B.C. The A'anna and the neighboring temple, the temple to Anu, the sky god, the Kalaba. And 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.

• 23:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 23:03Tom Holland?

  So Gwendolyn, 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 largest structures that any humans have built at that time.

• 23:26Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 23:34Tom Holland?

  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 Peter 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. So 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 we're doing.

• 24:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Tom Holland?

  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, labour as well to Inanna, the deity of Uruk. And this implies a kind of, I guess, a confederacy.

• 24:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because people are giving the gifts.

• 24:40Tom Holland?

  Yeah, from different settlements.

• 24:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there must be some wider federation or something.

• 24:44Tom Holland?

  But what this also implies is that it's not just Inanna, who is the beneficiary of this, but Uruk itself. So to quote Stein Keller, 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, Dominic, lies in the dimension of the sacral.

• 25:07Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 25:14Tom Holland?

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

• 25:17Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 25:22Tom Holland?

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

• 25:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  But just before we get to the break, Tom.

• 25:33Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're not just building big temples and stuff like that, are they?

• 25:36Tom Holland?

  No, they're not.

• 25:37Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 25:42Tom Holland?

  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. And so what they do, you know, it's obviously a terrible crisis for them. But they have these two great temples, which by now are millennia old and.

• 26:20Tom Holland?

  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. And Al Ghazi, in his book, fascinatingly compares this process to how Chicago emerged in the 19th century.

• 27:03Tom Holland?

  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 Al Ghazi 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. But when it retreats, you have to create a new infrastructure.

• 27:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 27:38Tom Holland?

  A new environment.

• 27:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Tom Holland?

  And Uruk proves able to deal with that as well. And not just to survive, but to flourish.

• 27:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, brilliant. So here we have the first story in human history of a city evolving, right?

• 27:52Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the human landscape kind of changing.

• 27:54Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 28:06Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 28:44Speaker 03

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• 29:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like a young man building a house for the first time, like a girl establishing a woman's domain, holy Inanna did not sleep as 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.

• 30:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  The city walls, like a mountain, reached the heavens. So that's from The Curse of Akkad, a poem that was written in about 2000 B.C., 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.

• 30:18Tom Holland?

  Yep.

• 30:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  So tell us about Akkad. So Akkad is often seen as one of the great early cities, isn't it? So Akkad is the capital of Sargon.

• 30:26Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so it's a purpose-built capital. Sargon is the first great imperial conqueror, and that poem describes the fall not of Uruk but of Akkad around 2000 B.C., so that's 3,000 years after the founding of Uruk. And the reason that that poem describes Inanna as the founderess of Akkad is that Sargon and his heirs had attempted to appropriate everything that Uruk was and kind of attribute it to this new upstart city of Akkad. So he describes Sargon in one inscription describes himself as the overseer of Inanna, another as the anointed one of Anu, and it's an illustration of the way in which the path

• 31:11Tom Holland?

  that is blazed by Uruk Is followed by countless cities, countless conquerors, countless great leaders in the millennia that follow it. And I guess there would be a parallel with, you know, 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 Akkad owe to Uruk is infinitely profounder. I mean, Uruk is the prototype, not just of a civilization like Rome or China, but of civilization

• 31:55Tom Holland?

  itself. There has been nothing like it ever.

• 31:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 32:11Tom Holland?

  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. And in fact, you could say that the city is kind of like an enormous brain, a collective brain. And the existence of this brain kind of 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, you know, of conceptualizing the very nature of what it is to be human and how humanity relates to the broader cosmos, the broader universe.

• 32:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  So 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 at a point of scale because a city like Uruk, it needs stuff, it needs supplies, it needs materials, it needs food. So talk us through these two innovations.

• 33:12Tom Holland?

  So these are on the technical level, the technological level.

• 33:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Tom Holland?

  So this is hardware rather than software. And one of these is the domestication of the humble donkey.

• 33:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 33:21Tom Holland?

  Which the people of Uruk seem to have been the First to domesticate and the stats on this are striking. So it's been estimated that a train of say forty donkeys could carry almost seven thousand pounds of cargo over twenty miles a day. And 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. And in its own humble way, the donkey is kind of doing the same.

• 33:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 33:50Tom Holland?

  And the other thing that seems to have been developed in Uruk is the wheel and the axle. And again, that's responding to a need. But it's also because you have people who would be qualified to come up with this kind of invention. You have very skilled craftsmen who can shape wheels, who can shape axles and so on. So again, it's not surprising that it's in Uruk that this kind of momentous innovation emerges.

• 34:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 are bringing stuff in by water as well.

• 34:23Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that must be a massively important thing. And 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, you know, metals or food or whatever.

• 34:39Tom Holland?

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

• 34:42Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 34:52Tom Holland?

  Well, this is much debated. There are scholars, so Agaze, he's very keen on the idea that there is a kind of colonial system that gets established. There are others who say it's largely a trading network. But again, I mean, 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? And it's clear that as with Britain, so with Uruk, being the brand leader, the first to develop a way of organizing your society 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. So.

• 35:35Tom Holland?

  What is also happening in Uruk 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 kind of pottery is made in Uruk and it's been found across, you know, in Syria, in Anatolia, even as far as what's now Pakistan. And of course, this encourages foreign communities to model themselves on Uruk. You know, a great exporting power is able to shape the tastes of those who are importing them.

• 36:20Tom Holland?

  And in that sense, there's a kind of cultural colonialism, isn't there?

• 36:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  This must therefore be kind of production on a kind of scale that we haven't seen before. So production of the textiles or the pottery or whatever. And again, that reinforces that kind of parallel with Britain and the Industrial Revolution, that Britain has developed mass production, you know, it's got the prototypical factories of the late 18th and early 19th century. And if Uruk can do this, then that must mean it has a level of organisation.

• 36:45Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  That no community in human history has ever had to this point. Would that be right?

• 36:50Tom Holland?

  Yeah. You know, I said how it's really in the dimension of software rather than hardware that Uruk's potency is most vividly displayed. And there are two real kind of innovations in that field. So the first is in the field of what we would now call data management.

• 37:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 37:07Tom Holland?

  And 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. So those cylinder seals that I described, those kind of circular tubes that you inscribe details on, drawings and so on, and you then roll them in clay.

• 37:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Tom Holland?

  These are... Illustrated with kind of motifs that are starting to move towards kind of pictogram. So images that are conveying quite a lot of information that will be understood by quite a broad array of bureaucrats. And then you have things that are called bulli, so little balls, little hollow clay balls. And these contain little clay tokens. And these tokens, a bit like, I suppose, items on a monopoly board or something.

• 38:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, like board game tokens.

• 38:07Tom Holland?

  Yeah, they are shaped to represent a kind of, you know, something that you want to sell, a commodity. So, I don't know, a roll of cloth, or a pot, or a jar of oil, or something like that. And these are basically contracts. So you have an agreement, you know, if it's to deliver a load of pottery, you have a pot, you put it in this bulli, in this kind of 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. And this demonstrates that the contract has been fulfilled and the agreement can be legally terminated.

• 38:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 38:44Tom Holland?

  Over the course of time, these various images start to evolve to become what we would recognise as writing. So they kind of evolve into, well, famously, kind of wedge-shaped images. So from the Latin, this comes to be called cuneiform.

• 39:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 39:01Tom Holland?

  And this will be a form of writing that will endure for thousands and thousands of years. And the thing, I was, as an enthusiast for literature and poetry.

• 39:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Tom Holland?

  The thing I always find sobering about this is you realise that literacy and writing begins not with poets.

• 39:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Tom Holland?

  It begins not with storytellers, as I'd always imagined, but with accountants.

• 39:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Tom, I love this.

• 39:22Tom Holland?

  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, you know, the writing has developed that you can put it into writing. And this scribe wrote down, twenty eight thousand and eighty six barley, thirty seven months, Kushim.

• 39:42Tom Holland?

  So what or who is Kushim? So Kushim could be the name of, you know, the holder of an office or a particular institution, but it's much more likely that it is an individual. And so to quote Ben Wilson, if so, Kushim is the very first person in history whose name we know.

• 40:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey.

• 40:03Tom Holland?

  And he's an accountant. So any accountants out there listening to this, you know, pat yourselves on the back.

• 40:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  To give people a sense of just how exciting and fun-packed the Rest is History Club is, we have a lot of accountants in the Rest is History Club, tax specialists and whatnot.

• 40:18Tom Holland?

  I hope they will enjoy that.

• 40:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  They'd love all this, they're all over this, yeah.

• 40:21Tom Holland?

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

• 40:35Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 40:37Tom Holland?

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

• 40:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crazy name, crazy guy.

• 40:56Tom Holland?

  Well, but the name of his male slave is even crazier, it's NPAP X, which I mean, it's kind of like a rapper, isn't it?

• 41:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's just something from the future.

• 41:04Tom Holland?

  Yeah. NPAP X. And there's a female slave called Suk Al Ghir. And this is the second, you know, these are the second group of people named in history, and two of them are slaves.

• 41:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey.

• 41:19Tom Holland?

  And it demonstrates how writing and urbanism and civilisation coexists with slavery right from the beginning. And 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.

• 41:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 41:40Tom Holland?

  And it reflects the fact, essentially it seems impossible to have a system of living as complex and vast as a city without having...

• 41:49Tom Holland?

  People who are exploited by the rich to do

• 41:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Tom Holland?

  the dirty jobs. And they might be slaves, they might be, you know, people from a particular caste. They might be serfs, they might be oppressed labourers, but right from the beginning, they are there. And Al Ghazi sums this up brilliantly and very sinisterly. So he writes, early Near Eastern villagers, domesticated plants and animals. Uruk's urban institutions in turn domesticated humans.

• 42:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  So would these be people seized in wars?

• 42:20Tom Holland?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 42:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  For example, you know, like the people in Tenochtitlan in the Aztec Empire. Would these be people captured in great raids or in kind of, 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?

• 42:34Tom Holland?

  Definitely by the end of the fourth millennium, you were starting to get images on seals in Uruk that do show kind of prisoners tethered, their hands bound up, guarded by armed soldiers, by armed warriors. But there are also native born slaves as well. And again, to quote Al Ghazi, you get foreign and native born captives used as labourers. 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. So you're getting humans as commodities, you know, that are on a level with livestock.

• 43:16Tom Holland?

  And in fact, not just livestock, but commodities more generally. So in all the various 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.

• 43:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 43:34Tom Holland?

  And you get 388 mentions of them.

• 43:36Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 43:38Tom Holland?

  And you might wonder why particularly female slaves. And 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. So 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 manufacturing. Of commodities is seen in Mesopotamia stereotypically as the role that is played by women. And 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. So, yeah, kind of grim.

• 44:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  So right from the start about urbanism, the city, civilization, has this kind of dark and terrifying side. So if you're a sort of pessimistic person about human nature, as I am, you won't be very surprised by this because someone I'm 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 sort of celebration of power and domination and oppression. I mean, that's what other words can you use?

• 44:40Tom Holland?

  Yes, but the development of a further kind of 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, you know, Akkad will be one of them.

• 45:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Tom Holland?

  So these great city walls are built around 3,000 B.C. And this seems to kind of indicate the fact that by this point, Uruk is coming under threat from rivals. And Uruk survives, you know, another 700 years after that. But when Sargon turns up in around 2,300, he destroys the walls, levels them to the ground. And by that point, the Ayyana, the great temple to Inanna, had already been leveled for reasons that nobody knows, you know, why this had happened. It seemed to have been for internal reasons, but we don't know why. And with the conquest by Sargon, Uruk, basically, its ancient glory, its ancient supremacy is lost forever.

• 45:46Tom Holland?

  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. So 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.

• 46:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Gilgamesh. I wondered if Gilgamesh might pitch up.

• 46:20Tom Holland?

  Yeah, by miles, the most famous of Mesopotamian poems, you know, 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 two thousand nine hundred. And the fact that you are now having kind of big men, big bosses, the Lugal, they're called, the big man.

• 46:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 46:43Tom Holland?

  So like Mayor Daly.

• 46:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Mayor Daly of Mesopotamia. Yeah.

• 46:46Tom Holland?

  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.

• 46:59Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 47:02Tom Holland?

  Exactly. So it's not all bad. And the other thing that Gilgamesh does for the Mesopotamians into the age of Babylon and so on, is that it preserves the association of Uruk with Inanna because Gilgamesh in the poem is often cast as the particular servant of Inanna. And 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. So that's what Gilgamesh does originally.

• 47:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  We do like a sinister bird.

• 47:30Tom Holland?

  You know, 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.

• 47:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't think so.

• 47:46Tom Holland?

  But Inanna, right the way up to, I don't know, you know, the age of the Persians or the Greeks or the Romans, is remembered as the goddess of pleasure. So she's not just the goddess of the arts of civilization, but of everything that makes a city fun. So Uruk is celebrated as a place of festivals, of singing and dancing. And 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 the taverns and ale houses where men could meet single women. And she is said to prowl the streets of Kullab in search of sexual adventure.

• 48:31Tom Holland?

  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. And so I guess you could say of a rook that maybe there are worse things to be remembered for.

• 48:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant, brilliant, Tom. So 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.

• 49:00Tom Holland?

  Copulating in the streets.

• 49:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I think we should head out and investigate, Tom. And on that bombshell, we'll leave the rest of you to contemplate city life. Thank you very much and goodbye.

• 49:08Tom Holland?

  Bye bye.