town or village

Erech

Today Uruk

Lifetime: … – c. AD 700

Uruk lived on through the Seleucid and Parthian periods and was mostly empty by AD 300; a small community, probably Mandaean, stayed on until it was finally abandoned around the time of the Islamic conquest.

Events

c. 3200 BCThe earliest known Mesopotamian writing: proto-cuneiform tablets at Uruk

History

Erech, Sumerian Unug and Akkadian Uruk, lay in southern Mesopotamia at the mounds of Warka, about 35 km east of modern Samawah, on a channel of the Euphrates that has long since dried up. In the fourth millennium BC it grew into one of the first cities in the world, covering some 250 hectares by its end. In its two temple quarters, Eanna of the goddess Inanna and the district of the sky god Anu with the White Temple, excavators found the earliest known written tablets, from the late fourth millennium BC.

By the early third millennium a city wall about 9 km long enclosed Uruk. The Sumerian King List counts Gilgamesh, the hero of the later epic, among its early kings. The city then lost the lead to other Sumerian cities and was ruled in turn from Akkad, Ur and Babylon, but it remained a great temple city of Anu and Ishtar. W. K. Loftus dug there in 1850 and 1854, and German expeditions have worked on the site, with long breaks, since 1912.

In Genesis, Erech is one of the first cities of Nimrod's kingdom, with Babel, Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar. The Book of Ezra lists the Archevites, usually understood as men of Erech, among the peoples whom the great and noble Asnappar, usually identified with Ashurbanipal of Assyria, had settled in the cities of Samaria, and who wrote to the Persian king against the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

Under the Seleucid kings Uruk flourished again: its great temples of Anu and Ishtar were rebuilt, and its scribes went on writing cuneiform ritual and astronomical texts. Strabo names the Orcheni as one of the schools of Chaldean astronomers. The Parthians, who took Babylonia in 141 BC, held the city after them, but it dwindled under the Sasanian kings and was in the end abandoned; dates from the fifth to the eighth century AD are given.

Scripture: Gen 10:10; Ezra 4:8–10

Sources

Sumerian King List (ETCSL 2.1.1), First Dynasty of Unug (Gilgamesh, lord of Kulaba)
Strabo, Geography 16.1.6 (the Orcheni among the Chaldean astronomers)
W. K. Loftus, Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana (1857)
H. J. Nissen, 'The City Wall of Uruk', in P. J. Ucko, R. Tringham and G. W. Dimbleby (eds.), Man, Settlement and Urbanism (1972)
M. Liverani, Uruk: The First City (2006)
M. Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (3rd ed., 2016) (middle chronology)

Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.

Verses (2)

Gen 10:10: And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.
Ezra 4:9: Then wrote Rehum the chancellor, and Shimshai the scribe, and the rest of their companions; the Dinaites, the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Susanchites, the Dehavites, and the Elamites,

King James Version