Uruk: The First City (BibleWorld)

the oldest city in the world leaves a lot to the immagination. this treatise is a little deep for me but for the scientist who sstudy every nook and cranny of available thought on the subject...it is good reading.

As someone with a strong interest in the history of Uruk this book was somewhat of a disappointment. It does not go into any detail about the city's traditions, rituals, architecture, religion. Instead it spends 80% of it's pages into arguing with previously published papers on the reasons behind the agricultural and urban revolutions, it even spends pages arguing with the terminology. Unfortunately, it reads like a college paper that a student continuously expands to meet the minimum word count. It still provides some interesting insight into the religious organization, but it's lost among endless arguments against other historians. I suggest looking elsewhere if you want a holistic introduction into the history of Uruk. Honestly, you can learn more from just the internet. As a supplement to better works, this book works just fine though.

Wsrka, the site of the most ancient city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, has been painstakingly explored by German archaeologists for almost a hundred years. It was the largest urban centre of southern Mesopotamia at the time, in the last centuries before 3000 BC, when urbanism was in its formative stages. Most of the excavations have been concentrated on the massive, central monumental temple precinct. We have known for a long time that the temple institution relied on a complex economic system of rural estates that produced huge amounts of grain and farmed animals. That system needed a recording system that allowed administrators in the temple to control and redistribute the incoming produce, for example in the form of food rations in lieu of pay for labourers. When old records, in the form of inscribed clay tablets, became redundant, they were used to help in the making up of level surfaces for new or replacement buildings. There is now an archive of several thousand of these earliest written records. In order to make sense of all this, one needs to be something of an archaeologist (the tablets have been found in stratified contexts that cover a period of several centuries), and at the same time something of a cuneiform specialist (in order to make some sense of these earliest forerunners of the classic Mesopotamian cuneiform script and languages). Liverani fits those requirements really well. And he is also a highly respected thinker about social and economic history and the processes that brought the earliest urbanism into being. Finally, he is able to say a great deal that provokes a lot of thought in the space of remarkably few pages. This is a very slim book, but I would guarantee that any reader will get a great amount out of reading Liverani's clear and exciting text and his excellent selection of illustrations.

brilliant