Charles River Editors - Eridu: The History and Legacy of the Oldest City in Ancient Mesopotamia

The word Mesopotamia highlights the central theme of life in the Fertile Crescent, coming from the ancient Greek for land between two rivers.

The people who settled in Mesopotamia were inextricably connected to their environmental context. In central and southern Mesopotamia the low hills and fertile plains were juxtaposed with swamps, jungles, and countless streams where the Tigris and Euphrates drained into the Persian Gulf most of which have disappeared over the course of time. Mesopotamia had few natural resources; no stone, wood, or precious metals could be found in southern Iraq. There was only water, and a rich alluvial soil with which a hardworking people could transform a land of scarcity into a land of plenty.

The Mesopotamian civilizations are amongst the worlds oldest, with archaeological evidence stretching back beyond 6000 BCE into the Neolithic. As hunter-gatherers discovered ways to farm and store their food for weeks and months at a time, instead of being itinerant they decided to colonize lands along the fertile banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. During the Ubaid Period (ca. 6500 3800 BCE), the earliest settlements were established in southern Mesopotamia. Many of the smaller villages were clustered in relatively close proximity to one another due to the nature of irrigation on the alluvial plain. The large cities would have had a number of smaller satellite towns in their hinterland. The archaeological remains of the latter have largely disappeared over time, so it is large sites like Eridu that archaeologists must look at to build a picture of life in ancient Mesopotamia.

John D. Crofts map of the region, with Eridu at bottom

The bulk of Mesopotamia is in what is now Iraq, but in ancient times this land was divided between two broad groups, the Sumerians and the Akkadians. The Sumerians lived in the south and spoke their own unique language. The Akkadians to the north, by contrast, were Semites who spoke a language whose modern relatives include Hebrew and Arabic. The Sumerians were able farmers who dug ditches to divert the life-giving waters of the Tigris and Euphrates to their fields, and thanks to the abundant food supply brought by their ingenuity, they flourished. Sumerian city-states grew to a size of many hundreds of thousands of people, each being organized around the worship of an individual deity associated with the temple of the main city.

The semi-nomadic Sumerian culture arrived in Mesopotamia in the middle of the 4 th millennium BCE, and they eventually came to dominate the southern part of the region, though their origins before they moved into Mesopotamia remain shrouded in mystery. Their culture became concentrated in the major urban centers of the region, namely Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Larsa, and Nippur, but they were not the only residents of southern Mesopotamia. Early villages were composed of settlers from many different regions, many with their own distinctive characteristics that differed from those of the Sumerians. Some have argued that it was these cultural differences that contributed to the many technological inventions and innovations that occurred in Mesopotamia in the formative stages of urbanization. It also partly explains the complexity of the regions religious systems.

The Sumerians were great inventors, and none of their inventions was more important than writing. Writing systems emerged at an early stage in the mid-4 th millennium BCE, first through pictographs and later by the cuneiform script. Cuneiform became the most dominant form of writing across the region, the letters of which were pressed into clay tablets with a triangular stylus, and it is thanks to this writing system that scholars have been able to reconstruct life in ancient Mesopotamia in such vivid detail.