Eanna

Listen first. Out here the wind does most of the talking. It moves across the low mounds and lifts a fine, pale dust that settles on your shoes. Underfoot, the ground is a mix of crumbled mud brick and broken pottery. Some pieces are red, some are buff, some are dark grey. Every one of them was shaped by a human hand, thousands of years ago. You are standing in Eanna, the sacred heart of ancient Uruk.

The name Eanna is usually translated as House of Heaven. This was the precinct of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, war and the morning star. Later peoples in Mesopotamia knew her as Ishtar. For a very long time, this ground was her home on earth. Kings rebuilt her temples again and again. Each new building rose on the ruins of the last one, so the mound under your feet is really a stack of many sanctuaries.

Here is the first thing most visitors do not realise. This spot is one of the places where writing began. In the layers of Eanna, excavators found thousands of small clay tablets from the late fourth millennium BCE. Scholars call them proto-cuneiform, an early stage of the wedge-shaped script that later spread across the Near East. They are among the oldest known written documents anywhere in the world.

And what did those first writers record? Not poems. Not prayers. Most of the tablets are accounts. They list grain, beer, sheep, textiles and workers. Some are word lists, a kind of early dictionary used to train scribes. Writing here seems to have started as a tool for managing a temple economy. It is a very practical beginning for something that later carried the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Uruk itself was enormous for its time. In the period that archaeologists name after this very city, the Uruk period, the settlement grew into one of the first true cities on earth. Thousands of people lived here. There were farmers, potters, weavers, priests and administrators. The Euphrates River once ran close by and fed a network of canals. Today the river has moved away, and the land around you is mostly dry and quiet.

Try to picture Eanna at its height. Archaeologists uncovered a series of large buildings in this precinct, some of them on a scale that still surprises specialists. Many followed a tripartite plan, with a long central hall and rows of rooms on each side. They were built mostly of mud brick, plastered and finished with care. The excavators gave them simple labels, letters and numbers, because no one knows their original names.

Now the second surprise. Some of these walls were covered in mosaics, but not with tiles. The builders pressed thousands of small clay cones into wet plaster, point first. The flat ends of the cones were coloured black, red and white. Together they formed zigzags, diamonds and triangle patterns, like a woven textile turned into architecture. If you look closely at the ground, you may still spot a fragment of one of these little cones.

Several famous objects came out of this precinct. One is the Warka Vase, a tall alabaster vessel carved in bands. The bands show water, plants, animals, and a procession of men carrying offerings toward a female figure, usually identified with Inanna. Another is the Mask of Warka, a marble face of a woman, sometimes called the Lady of Uruk. Both are now in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

The Warka Vase has its own modern story. It was taken during the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003. Some months later it was returned, damaged but recovered. Its journey is a reminder that these objects are fragile, and that the history of this site is still being written today, not only in the distant past.

The precinct did not stop with the Sumerians of the fourth millennium. Much later, around the end of the third millennium BCE, King Ur-Nammu of Ur built a ziggurat here for Inanna. A ziggurat is a stepped temple tower, a kind of artificial mountain of brick. Its eroded core still rises above the surrounding mounds. Later still, a Kassite king called Karaindash added a small temple with moulded brick figures of gods on its facade. Parts of that facade now stand in a museum in Berlin.

Much of what we know comes from long German excavations. Teams from Germany began working at Uruk in the early twentieth century, and they returned over many decades. Their careful digging and recording shaped the way scholars understand early cities. The work was slow. Mud brick looks very similar to the earth around it, and telling one wall from the next takes patience and skill.

Uruk also lives in literature. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero is the king of this city. The poem praises its great walls and mentions Eanna by name. Whether Gilgamesh was a real ruler is still debated, so it is best to hold him as a figure between history and legend. But the city in the story is real, and you are walking in it. Today Uruk is part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing for southern Iraq.

Before you go, look around once more. Notice how the colour of the mounds changes as the sun moves, from pale gold to a soft grey brown. Notice the silence, and the small sounds inside it. Somewhere beneath your feet, layer upon layer, people once counted sheep on clay and pressed coloured cones into temple walls. As you walk away, watch the ground. Every shard you pass is a small piece of the first city.