In early April I visited Uruk, a place occupied circa 5000 BCE all the up to 630 AD. Traditionally, Uruk is where humanity shifted from prehistory to history, because it’s where writing began, or writing as commonly understood. Early cuneiform examples of writing come from the Eanna or Temple of Heaven and example a fair amount of accountancy; Sumerians, amid other things, were a bureaucratic bunch. Despite Uruk’s deep age the Sumerians had a romantic relationship with Eridu and claimed it was 250,000 years old… An impossibly primordial age which partakes of expanded Sumerian King List chronologies; at Ubaid levels Eridu and Uruk seem fairly coterminous.
The patron divinity of Eridu was Enki, god of wisdom, magic and closely associated with water. Beneath 17 occupational levels of a sacred structure at Eridu was found a shrine room with an altar upon which numerous remains of fish had been placed, which possibly associated with an early form of Enki. When Eridu was in use, the city bordered the Persian Gulf so was important to fishermen – it’s interesting that Canopus has been suggested as significant to Eridu, as this star was used in maritime navigation elsewhere. This bearing might also have related to the mythic homeland of Dilmun (Bahrain Island) although nothing the same age as original Eridu, or for that matter Uruk, is currently known there.
Anu, the father of the gods, however, chose Uruk as his home on earth. Slightly beyond the Eanna district (the Eanna was devoted to the Sumerian Ishtar – Inanna, identified with the planet Venus) are the remains of the so-called Anu Ziggurat. Expanded through several phases of construction, this building began with a single chamber with a terrazzo floor, beneath which bucrania (bull skulls) were found, very similar to Pre-Pottery Neolithic cultures further north.
It was a pleasure to visit this significant place but it takes a leap of the imagination to reconstruct the river, canals, multi-coloured temples and buildings that once defined it – millennia of hot desert dust and erosion have had their toll… Today the Euphrates, which flowed outside Uruk’s approx.15m high city walls, has shifted miles away. Though Eridu held cultic significance, Uruk became cosmopolitan in all manner of dimensions and a major trade spot of religion and materials over its long occupation.
There was a time when it was thought Sumeria was settled from southeast Asia or the Indian subcontinent. Although there appears to have been cultural contact, a lot of evidence these days (archaeological, aDNA) supports a northern origin of the Ubaid people and their Sumerian successors. There’s also an important cosmological component involved concerning the Zagros and Taurus Mountains present in Sumerian texts that plays this out. I’ll be raising some of the above themes in a paper on the Bull of Heaven in the Gilgamesh Epic.