Ancient Mesopotamia

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The end of the highly successful Uruk IV period came rapidly, despite having endured throughout the bulk of the fourth millennium BC (see 'related links' in the sidebar for the full story).

Centred on the Sumerian city of Uruk, the only true city in Sumer at this time, it had spread its influences - and often settlers - far and wide across the Near East. But around 3200 or 3100 BC external contacts outside of Sumer suddenly ceased.

The purely Uruk-created colony city of Habuba Kabira in Syria disappeared for reasons unknown. Other settlements also found themselves being abandoned, such as Shakhi Kora.

Local traditions re-emerged in places which had taken on board Uruk influences. Village life again predominated in northern Mesopotamia, where the march towards creating cities was still in its early stages.

Uruk IV-type tablets ceased to be seen outside of Uruk itself, while the established centre at Susa in Elam seems to have been taken over by immigrants from the Zagros mountains.

A new political entity emerged there and on the western Iranian plateau which discarded Uruk IV cuneiform and language to replace it with 'Proto-Elamite', a precursor to all later Elamite city states and its late-unified kingdom.

In Uruk itself the monumental buildings were pulled down and the entire Eanna complex was levelled. The Uruk III period which succeeded Uruk IV saw Uruk itself being thoroughly reconstructed. Uruk-form tablets disappeared outside of southern Mesopotamia, with localised versions appearing in their place, or writing entirely falling out of use for a time.

Pottery found at the archaeological site of Shakhi Kora in north-eastern Iraq reveals the adoption of the Uruk IV cultural period and then the apparent abandonment of centralised authority in favour of individual farming

Small finds of tablets which were closely related to the new Uruk III cultural period have been found at Jemdet Nasr - around a hundred and fifty - to give this period its alternative name, and also at Uqair to the north of Sumer (around thirty-five tablets).

It was at Jemdet Nasir at which such cultural artefacts were first discovered by modern archaeology, so this title tends to predominate ahead of the use of 'Uruk III'.

The city of Uruk continued to be substantial in size. But now other Sumerian cities were developing to rival it. Previously non-urban elements of the population in southern Mesopotamia were moving into these cities, even while generally remaining farmers. Possibly this was as a result of social upheaval (which can also be seen in Uruk around 3100 BC), or perhaps it was a a result of an invasion which has not been recorded in any surviving historical or archaeological record.

Jemdet Nasr's 'Mound B' was further excavated in the 1980s, immediately prior to the First Gulf War, with the north-eastern area of that mound being examined here

However, the Jemdet Nasr cultural period penetrated deeply into peripheral Sumerian regions in a way in which the Uruk IV period had not managed.

City life proliferated across Sumer, much more widely than previously, and cultural infusion was much more solid and far less febrile and intensive. If Uruk IV was the enthusiastic prelude then the Jemdet Nasr was the pragmatic and down-to-earth succession.

It took several centuries for contacts to re-emerge between Sumer and the rest of the Near East, so the Jemdet Nasr was a period of internal development, leaving external connections for the subsequent 'Early Dynastic' in which Sumerian city states flourished and produced such a rich textual record that great areas of that period can be understood. Civilisation was well underway.

Some of the earliest cities, such as Sippar, Borsippa, and Kish in the north, and Ur, Uruk, and Eridu in the south, formed the endpoints of what became the complex Sumerian network of cities and canals (click or tap on map to view full sized)

Main Sources

Gwendolyn Leick - Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (Penguin Books, 2001)

Marc van der Mieroop - History of the Ancient Near East c.3000-323 BC (Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 2007)

Additional Sources

Amélie Kuhrt - The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC  (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II)

Clemens Reichel - Political Change and Cultural Continuity in Eshnunna from the Ur III to the Old Babylonian Period (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, 11 June 1996)

Enrico Ascalone - Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007)

J N Postgate - Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (Routledge, 1994)

John Heywood - Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC (Barnes & Noble, 2000)

Michael Road - Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (Facts on File, 2000)

Online Sources

Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Ancient World Magazine

Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (published between 2003-2021, part of the Babylonian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology)

Maps and text copyright © P L Kessler. An original feature for the History Files.