This urbanization continued, with Uruk leading the way. The urbanization of this ancient city is evident in the creation of monumental architecture. For instance, the legendary king Gilgamesh is traditionally credited with the building of the walls of Uruk. These mighty walls were mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh , where the hero asks Ur-shanabi the Mesopotamian version of the Greek Charon to inspect them.
Parts of the city wall were discovered during excavations of the early 20th century. Other monumental structures at Uruk include the Anu Ziggurat, several other large temples, and administrative buildings.
Part the front of the Inanna temple of the Kara Indasch from Uruk. Uruk has been excavated mainly by German teams, and their work at the site has helped to enhance our understanding of this ancient city.
For instance, it was in this city that the earliest evidence of writing, in the form of simple pictograms inscribed on clay tablets, was discovered. Luxury goods from abroad have also been found, indicating that the city had established trade with foreign lands.
Moreover, it seems that the rulers of Uruk had pursued an aggressive expansionist policy. Male bust, perhaps Lugal-kisal-si, king of Uruk. From Adab Bismaya. Public Domain. In Susa a city located about km miles to the east of Uruk , for instance, ceramic seals and bullae counters were discovered. These objects served an administrative function, and the concept was probably brought there by the people of Uruk.
It seems that the Uruk expansion reached further afield as well. For instance, Uruk material culture has been discovered at sites in areas as far as Syria and southeastern Anatolia.
The nature of these settlements is still a subject of debate, as various views of such sites have been put forward. Some, for instance, have argued that these were colonies or trade posts set up by the inhabitants of Uruk, whilst others have suggested that these were locals who sought to emulate the culture of Uruk. Male deities pouring a life-giving water from a vessel.
The Temple was built by the Kassite ruler Kara-indash. Late 15th century BC. The Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany. Her worship went to the Greeks and Romans under the name of Aphrodite or Venus, who had exactly the same attributes as Ishtar. Uruk was an important city on two scores: religion and science, which is confirmed by the thousands of clay tablets dug up in it that goes back to the beginnings of writing about years ago - in the invention of which Uruk played a major role.
Excavations have revealed a series of very important structures and deposits of the 4th millennium BC and the site has given its name to the period that succeeded the "Ubaid" and proceeded the "Jemdet Nasr" periods of ancient Mesopotamia. The Uruk period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and led to the full civilization of the Early Dynastic period. It is not always fully realized how unique the site of Uruk was at this time: it was by far the largest settlement, with the most impressive buildings and the earliest evidence of writing.
It would be true to say that Uruk was Mesopotamia's - and the World's - first city. Masks are required for all visitors. For thousands of years, southern Mesopotamia ancient Iraq was home to hunters, fishers, and farmers, exploiting fertile soil, rivers, and abundant animals.
By around B. Large-scale sculpture in the round and relief carving appeared for the first time, together with metal casting using the lost-wax process.
These pictographs are the precursors of later cuneiform writing. Until around B. This lexical category continues into the following periods. It is important to note that the purpose of all of these early forms of writing, including the Uruk IV and Jemdet Nasr period texts, along with their precursors, was to record economic transactions.
Writing itself developed out of a need to remember exchanges of large numbers of goods among the inhabitants of those cities whose population had increased throughout the Uruk period so that face-to-face contact was no longer the norm. It was a tool of economic administration, not a means to record literature, history, or sacred ideas. It took several centuries for the written language to develop so that it could represent the complexities of grammar and syntax.
The earliest signs used in the Uruk texts, which were either pictographic representations of objects, symbols representing deities, abstract images, or numerical signs, eventually developed into the more abstract cuneiform signs characterized by horizontal and vertical wedges. In the Uruk IV and Jemdet Nasr phases, signs represented concepts or nouns, and perhaps simple verbs, but there is no grammatical relationship between those ideas represented on the texts.
Sometimes signs were combined to form ideas related to both signs such as the sign for disbursement which combines the sign for head with the sign for ration , and other times signs were combined to form words that sounded like those signs.
In this way, signs which originally had a pictographically assigned meaning became associated with abstract concepts that sounded similar. Later, the TI sign might be combined with other signs, whose sounds would act as the syllables that make up a longer word. Although it is generally agreed that the language represented on the archaic texts is Sumerian, it is only once the syllabic function of the signs was applied that language could truly be represented in a permanent medium.
The form of the signs also changed over time. Originally, pictographs were incised in clay using a sharp stylus. By the Jemdet Nasr phase, the sharp stylus was replaced by an angled stylus with a triangular tip. As the use of the triangular stylus continued, the signs themselves became more and more abstracted into combinations of horizontal and vertical wedges that no longer bore much resemblance to their original forms.
The range of sign forms used also decreased as the number of similar-looking signs reduced. Not only did the written documents appear in this period, but the Uruk period also saw the rise of the first cities, monumental art and complex political structures.
Prior to the Uruk period, maps of settlement in southern Mesopotamia show several sites of a small size, mostly under 10 hectares 0.
These sites are evenly distributed over the landscape, and some may have been economic or religious centers. At the start of the Uruk period, the number and size of sites increased dramatically. Uruk itself swelled to 70 hectares 0. The reasons for such an extraordinary change are unclear.
There may have been a sudden influx of new population groups or favorable changes in climate, but the trend continued into the Late Uruk period. By the end of the Uruk period, the site of Uruk occupied about hectares 1 km 2 , and more than half of the settled area of southern Mesopotamia was located in its vicinity. The rapid increase in the size of the settled area of Uruk meant that new developments in the social structure of society were inevitable.
The archaic texts, cylinder seals and monumental art all provide information about these changes. In the cylinder seals and seal impressions on tablets of levels IV and III, a bearded figure wearing a netted skirt and hat appears in religious, agricultural, or military scenes.
This figure is generally understood to represent the ruler of Uruk, whose role as priest, provider, and protector is emphasized. The same figure also appears on the Lion Hunt Stela, a basalt stone monument which shows him attacking lions with a spear and with a bow and arrow. On the Warka Vase, an alabaster vessel over a meter tall, he is depicted in relief presenting an offering to Inanna.
Below him runs a row of naked servants or priests carry offerings, and below them is a row of domestic animals and a row of plants growing from a river. The remarkable vessel clearly shows the shared view of a social hierarchy, at the bottom of which were the plants an animals that sustained society, and at the top of which were the ruler and the god, who managed and distributed those staples.
The Uruk period marks the first instance when these roles were expressed in figurative art, and this type of royal propaganda is a theme that continues in the millennia of Near Eastern history that follow.
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