Adab

Listen first. Out here the wind carries a fine, pale dust that settles on your sleeves and gathers in the folds of your clothes. Underfoot, the ground crunches. Look down and you will see why. The surface is scattered with broken pottery, pieces of fired clay in buff, cream and dull red, lying where they have lain for thousands of years. You are standing on the low mounds of Adab, one of the cities of ancient Sumer, in the flat country between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Today the place is known locally as Bismaya. It does not look like a city. There are no columns, no gates, no towers. Instead there is a long, uneven spread of earth rises and shallow hollows, softened by wind and the occasional rain. But every mound here is made of something. It is the slow collapse of mud-brick houses, temples and walls, built and rebuilt on the same spot for generations until the city lifted itself above the plain.

That is the first surprise of a Mesopotamian site. In a land with almost no building stone, people built with river mud. They shaped it into bricks, dried it in the sun, and sometimes fired the most important ones in kilns. When a house fell down, the next family simply levelled the rubble and built on top. Over centuries, these layers stacked up into the hills you see around you. Archaeologists call such a mound a tell.

Adab belongs to the early world of the Sumerians, the people who lived in southern Mesopotamia and who are credited with some of the earliest writing on Earth. Their script, called cuneiform, was made by pressing a cut reed into wet clay, leaving small wedge-shaped marks. Adab was one of many independent city-states in this region. Each had its own ruler, its own patron gods, and its own fields fed by canals drawn from the rivers.

The river matters to this story. Today the land around you is dry and open. In Sumerian times, a watercourse ran near the city, and canals spread its water into fields of barley and date palms. Rivers in this plain shift their beds over the centuries. When the water moved away, the farms failed, and cities like Adab slowly emptied. The silence around you now is, in part, the silence of a river that left.

The great temple of Adab was known as the E-sar, and it belonged to the goddess Ninhursag. She was one of the most senior figures in Sumerian religion, a mother goddess linked with birth and with the rugged lands beyond the plain. For the people of Adab, her temple was the heart of the city. Offerings, festivals, and much of the local economy turned around it. Somewhere beneath these mounds lie the remains of that sacred house.

Now for a story that sits between history and legend. The Sumerian King List, an ancient text that names rulers city by city, includes a single king of Adab called Lugal-Anne-mundu. The list credits him with a reign of about ninety years, which tells you this is not a plain record of fact. Later tradition remembered him as a conqueror who ruled far beyond his city. Scholars treat these claims with caution, but they show that Adab held a proud place in Sumerian memory.

Modern attention arrived at the start of the twentieth century. In 1903 and 1904, an American named Edgar James Banks led excavations here on behalf of the University of Chicago. Conditions were hard. The site was remote, water had to be brought in, and the work was done by local labourers with simple tools. Banks later wrote a book about the dig, with a title that captures the mood of the era: Bismya, or the Lost City of Adab.

The most famous find from those seasons is a small seated statue of a king named Lugal-dalu. It is carved from white stone, and the figure sits with hands clasped in the familiar Sumerian gesture of prayer. Here is the detail most visitors miss. The statue carries an inscription naming the king and his city. That short line of writing helped confirm that these quiet mounds really were Adab, the city named in ancient texts.

Banks and his team also recovered clay tablets, inscribed bricks, fragments of stone vessels, and other objects from different periods. Together they showed a city that lasted through many centuries of Mesopotamian history, from the early Sumerian age into later times when larger kingdoms rose and absorbed the old city-states. Most of what was found is now held in museums far from here, so the site itself keeps only the earth, the sherds, and the shape of the city.

The second surprise is a more painful one. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, during years of war and economic hardship, many sites in southern Iraq suffered from illegal digging. Adab was among them. Large numbers of tablets said to come from here appeared on the antiquities market, stripped of their original context. Some have since been studied, and some returned. But when you see pits and disturbed ground, remember that not every hole here was made by archaeologists.

If you walk the site, move slowly and keep to the open ground. Notice how the colour of the soil changes between mounds. Grey patches can mean ash from ancient fires. Lines of harder, pale earth may be the remains of walls. The pottery fragments are part of the record, so look, photograph, and leave them exactly where they lie. In this landscape, the position of a single sherd can still tell a trained eye something useful.

Before you leave, turn slowly in a full circle. The horizon is almost perfectly flat in every direction, broken only by the low rises of the city and perhaps a distant line of palms or a farm track. Four or five thousand years ago, this view would have held canals, fields, reed boats, and the walls of a temple. Now it holds wind and light. Feel the crunch of clay under your shoes as you walk back... each step crosses the floor of a city that once knew its own name.