Uruk, or, Was Civilization a Mistake?

Digital Reconstruction of the Uruk Temple District, c. 3500 BC

Some of the deepest roots of our civilization, things that have been around so long most people never even wonder about them – the twelve-hour day, the sixty-minute hour, the 360-degreee circle, the signs of the zodiac – come from ancient Sumer. The existence of Sumer was actually posited before any of its remains were discovered. In 1855, Assyriologist Jules Oppert noticed that the names for the characters in the Akkadian syllabary of 1800 BC did not mean anything in Akkadian; therefore, he surmised, the script was adopted from an older culture using a different, non-Semitic language.

Stone Vase from Uruk Showing a Procession in Honor of the Goddess Inana

That nation turned out to be Sumer. As one of the claimants to the title of "first civilization," Sumer has been intensely studied for 150 years now. But we keep learning more about it, thanks to ongoing archaeology and the steady stream of new clay tablets coming from Iraq and Syria; the Second Gulf War and the collapse of the Iraqi state lead to a surge of looting and a parade of new tablets coming onto the world antiquities market, half of them bought by the Hobby Lobby people. And the more we learn about ancient Sumer, the weirder it seems.

German excavations at Uruk, c. 1910

Which brings me to a question that has been much in the culture lately: was civilization all a big mistake? Various recent writers (Yuval Levin, David Wengrow and David Graeber, etc.) have argued that civilization was an utter disaster and we should have stuck to equality and freedom. Or, at least, we should have maintained the option of equality and freedom, allowing people to pass back and forth between the two ways of living as some seem to have done in the past. This way of seeing the course of our history, along with the new archaeological findings, leads me to revisit Sumer and ask what it was all about.

The place Sumerians identified as their first great city, Uruk, seems to have made the transition from big village to city between 4000 and 3500 BC. It was at Uruk that the Sumerians developed their writing system, transitioning from clay counters in different shapes to marks on clay tablets that represented the counters to pictographs for nouns to the recording of speech. The world we enter through the oldest tablets is both recognizable and bizarre.

The tablets describe the arrangements of large agricultural fields, most of them owned by the En – usually rendered King or Priest-King – and the rest by other senior figures. The people who worked in these fields were provided with housing and rations of bread, beer, and cloth that came from centralized warehouses where the produce of the whole economy was stored. Taken literally, they seem to describe a communist society with at best a weak notion of private property, in which everyone worked for the bosses in return for a government house and a salary paid in food and drink, the techno-communist's fantasy of the "resource-based economy." The most common artifact from the residential districts at Uruk is the infamous Uruk bowl (above), made from a ceramic archaeologists usually describe as "shit" and molded with zero aesthetic care into a vessel of a standardized size, probably equivalent to one ration of grain or beer. Now it should be said that this system did not encompass the whole economy. Archaeology reveals a lot of stuff not mentioned in the distribution tablets, so there was more going on; likely private garden plots, side jobs, and so on. But so far as we can tell the main staples of life were really distributed in this regimented way.

When they weren't laboring in the bosses' fields, ancient Sumerians seem to have spent a lot of time working on public building projects. Around 3500 BC the people of Uruk built the White Temple (digital reconstruction above), a fascinating building. After a foundation deposit had been laid down that contained the bodies of a lion and a leopard, work began. The excavators estimated that it would have taken 1500 workers, laboring 10 hours a day, about five years to build this one structure, at a time when the population of Uruk was likely around 30,000. When you add in the city walls, all the other temples, the palaces, the sewers, the major canals, etc., it seems like a very substantial portion of Uruk's available labor was spent on public works. I already mentioned here the calculations that show roughly 20 percent of all the available male labor in Old Kingdom Egypt went into building the great pyramids, and the figure for Uruk must have been similar.

Living in mud-brick houses – some examples are above, with an open courtyard in the center and rooms on either side – subsisting mainly on bread and beer, laboring long hours in the fields or on building projects; why did people do it? This was a world, remember, where this was the only such city-state, surrounded by places where traditional village life went on unmolested. Nobody had to stay in Uruk.

One thing we have learned in recent decades is that Uruk-style life was an exportable package. People from Uruk established colonies all around Mesopotamia, some of them independent towns and others neighborhoods within foreign cities. Life in those enclaves seems to have been as much like life in Uruk as it was possible to make it: the same centralized warehouses and rations of grain and beer, the same temples, the same officials, the same record-keeping, the same houses, the same miserable pottery. One of the Uruk colonies was at Habuba Kabira on the upper Euphrates in what is now Syria, 800 km (500 miles) from Uruk. The comparison above, from this lecture, shows stuff from Uruk on the right and Habuba Kabira on the left. This is as close as archaeologists ever get to identical assemblages.

I think the spread of Uruk's urban lifestyle into areas where most people lived quite differently shows that the people who lived this way liked it; otherwise they could have just walked away. So let me ask: what is there to like?

Uruk's Brick Walls

First, security; certainly when Uruk was the only large city in Mesopotamia its residents had little fear of being attacked by enemies, and this advantage endured for centuries. There was some degree of economic security as well, since rather than relying on their own fields people drew on the produce of the whole community; this probably explains the growth of the population, which we can infer from the colonies they planted all over the region. 

There was a rich community life, with lots of festivals and so on. 

Reconstructed Mosaic from Uruk's "Stone Cone Temple"

One thing I am curious about is the role of the massive public works projects in all of this. Think, for a moment, of all the space that famous ancient monuments take up in your mind: the pyramids, the Acropolis in Athens, Japanese castles, Stonehenge. I think about such things all the time, and I honestly wonder what I would think about instead if I didn't know them. How much did the people who built the pyramids or the ziggurats get out of that? Or of just being part of communities that had awesome monuments?

After all our first signs of big communities of people working together come from sites like Göbekli Tepe (above), where there wasn't even a town but folks put a lot of effort into erecting stone monuments and ritual enclosures. Presumably, they found the results worth the effort, because in 10,000 BC there certainly wasn't any government with a lot of enforcement powers.

From our modern perspective, civilization looks pretty burdensome: we have to work hard all the time, deal with millions of rules, and look on while other people live much richer, more exciting lives than we do. Some of us ponder hunter-gatherers with their more relaxed, less rule-bound lives and wonder if all our stuff is really worth the work we put into getting it. But life in Uruk already had many of civilization's drawbacks, especially the standardization, the rules, and the grotesque inequality. And yet so far as we can tell, the ancient Sumerians embraced this way of living heart and soul. Surely not all of them or all of the time; life isn't like that. But so far as we can tell these were thriving communities with little internal strife where people created ways of life that endured for centuries.

Maybe they knew something about life without civilization that we don't.