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Entry 5 of 240Invention

The Rise of the First City

c. 3500 BCE/Mesopotamia/Sumer (Uruk)
Today Warka, southern Iraq (near Samawah)Span Sumer · c. 4500–1900 BCE

Uruk, on the Euphrates in southern Sumer, swelled into what many consider the world's first true city — perhaps forty thousand people behind a great wall that legend credited to the hero-king Gilgamesh. Among them lived the first humans who never grew or hunted their own food: potters, weavers, priests, administrators, all fed by farmers' surplus. The city invented the full-time specialist, and with it the permanent division of labor and hierarchy every civilization since has been built on. To run a place this size, its managers would soon need a tool no one had ever had — a way to write things down.

◆ Worth knowingUruk's legendary king Gilgamesh became the hero of humanity's oldest surviving epic — a story first written down more than a thousand years after his city's walls rose.
◆ The mechanismState formation & institutional founding

A durable new order — a state, an institution, a system of rule — is deliberately built and consolidated, outlasting the people who founded it.

Also: Labor displacement · Wealth concentration & leveling

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