Who ruled Uruk?

Uruk, whose ruins are now called Warka, lies in Muthanna Governorate in southern Iraq, beside a dried-up former channel of the Euphrates. In the fourth millennium BCE it led the growth of the first true cities in Sumer, and around 3100 BCE it may have been the largest urban centre on earth. Remembered in legend as the city of Gilgamesh, it survived under a long series of foreign rulers for some four thousand years before it was finally deserted in the early Islamic era.

The site was inhabited from around 5000 BCE. Two Ubaid-period villages, Unug and Kullaba, grew and eventually merged, and their temple precincts became the two sacred quarters of the later city: the Eanna, devoted to the goddess Inanna, and the so-called Anu district, built on a high terrace. A network of canals ran through the streets and linked the city to river trade and the fields around it.

During the period now named after the city, roughly 4000 to 3100 BCE, Uruk changed from an agricultural settlement into a large urban centre with a permanent bureaucracy, an army and a ranked society. Some of the earliest monumental buildings in the world rose in the Eanna, and the oldest known writing appears there too: thousands of proto-cuneiform tablets record rations, goods and accounts. At its height Uruk may have had up to 50,000 inhabitants, with tens of thousands more living in the countryside, and its traders and colonists carried its culture as far as northern Mesopotamia and Syria. Around 3000 BCE a wall about 9 kilometres long was built around the city.

The Sumerian King List credits the founding of Uruk to a king called Enmerkar, and in the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero-king builds the city's walls. The list's chronology would place Gilgamesh in the twenty-seventh century BCE, but its reigns of hundreds of years show that it mixes myth with history and cannot be read literally. Scholars treat its dynasties of Uruk with caution.

What is clearer is that power among the Sumerian cities shifted back and forth. Uruk dominated Sumer for parts of the early third millennium, then lost its supremacy to Ur. In the twenty-fourth century BCE Lugalzagesi, ruling from Uruk, briefly united southern Mesopotamia before Sargon of Akkad defeated him and absorbed the city into the Akkadian Empire. After that empire fell, Utu-hengal of Uruk expelled the Gutians, and under the Third Dynasty of Ur the city revived as a major religious and economic centre, with a new ziggurat for Inanna.

When Ur collapsed around 2000 BCE, Uruk had a spell of independence under its own kings in the Isin-Larsa period, until Rim-Sin I of Larsa defeated it. It then declined steeply for many centuries. Around 850 BCE the Neo-Assyrian Empire made it a provincial capital, and under Assyrian and then Babylonian rule it recovered much of its former standing; Nabopolassar restored its temples and canals.

Uruk kept its importance under the Achaemenid Empire and especially under the Seleucid Empire, when the Greeks knew it as Orcha. In this period it covered about 300 hectares, perhaps with 40,000 inhabitants. Its Bit Resh temple was one of the two great centres of Babylonian astronomy, and the rebuilt ziggurat of Anu was the largest ever raised in Mesopotamia. The city remained in use after the Parthian Empire took Mesopotamia in 141 BCE, and its last dated cuneiform tablet, an astronomical almanac, comes from 79 or 80 CE.

A shift in the course of the Euphrates, and perhaps the salting of irrigated land, helped to bring about the city's decline. By about 300 CE it was largely empty, though a Mandaean community left traces there, and by around 700 CE, in the decades after the Arab conquest of the 630s, it had been abandoned completely.

William Kennett Loftus explored the site in 1849 and dug there between 1850 and 1854, identifying it with Erech, a city named in the Bible. German expeditions began work in 1912 and returned for 39 seasons in all, uncovering the Eanna temples, the city wall and many tablets. The marble Mask of Warka, a carved female face from around 3100 BCE, was stolen from the Iraq Museum amid the 2003 invasion and recovered later that year. German surveys of the city wall and the surrounding landscape resumed in 2016.