City of Gilgamesh
Uruk was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates and west of the Tigris River. The modern name Iraq is thought to be derived from the name Uruk. At its height, Uruk probably had 50,000–80,000 residents living in 6 square kilometres of walled area, the largest city in the world at its time.
Uruk represents one of the world’s first cities with a dense population. Uruk also saw the rise of the state in Mesopotamia with a full-time bureaucracy, military, and stratified society. Cities that coexisted at this time with Uruk were only about 10 hectares in area showing that it was vastly larger and more complex. Uruk is an important city because it represents a shift from small, agricultural villages to a larger urban center. The excavation of Uruk is highly complicated and shows different layers of Uruk from different periods of history. The latest layer most likely originated in the Late Uruk Period (3200-3000 BCE) and built on structures from Earlier Periods.
Uruk went through several phases of growth, from the Early Uruk Period to the Late Uruk Period. Uruk became a center for events such as trade, specialization of crafts and the evolution of writing. Evidence from excavations - such as extensive pottery and the earliest known tablets of writing - support these events.
One of the oldest and most important cities of Sumer, according to the Sumerian king list, Uruk was founded by Enmerkar, who brought the official kingship with him. In the epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, he is also said to have constructed the famous temple called E-anna, dedicated to the worship of Inanna (the later Ishtar). According to the Bible (Genesis 10:10), Erech (Uruk) was the second city founded by Nimrod in Shinar.
Uruk played a very important part in the political history of the country from an early time, exercising hegemony in Sumer before the time of Sargon of Akkad. Later it was prominent in the national struggles of the Sumerians against the Elamites up to 2004 BC, in which it suffered severely; recollections of some of these conflicts are embodied in the Gilgamesh epic, in the literary and courtly form that has come down to us.
Oppenheim states, “In Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, Sumerian civilization seems to have reached its creative peak. This is pointed out repeatedly in the references to this city in religious and, especially, in literary texts, including those of mythological content; the historical tradition as preserved in the Sumerian king-list confirms it. From Uruk the center of political gravity seems to have moved to Ur.”
The location of Uruk was discovered by William Loftus in 1849. The first significant excavations were by a German team led by Julius Jordan before World War I. This expedition returned in 1928 and made further excavations until 1939, then returned in 1954 under the direction of H. Lenzen and made systematic excavations over the following years. These excavations revealed some early Sumerian documents and a larger cache of legal and scholarly tablets of the Seleucid period, which have been published by Adam Falkenstein and other German epigraphists.