561 AM · ≈ 3200 BCE · world history
Sumer and the First Cities
The world's first cities and the first writing system, cuneiform, appear in Mesopotamia.
In the land between the Tigris and Euphrates the first true cities appear—Uruk, Ur, Lagash—with temples, canals, granaries and administrators. Writing is born here, first as accounting marks pressed into wet clay, then as cuneiform able to record laws, contracts and poetry.
Sources
Documents of the period
- cuneiform chronicles and king lists — the Sumerian King List and the administrative tablets of Uruk — humanity’s oldest written documents
Scholarship
- archaeology of Mesopotamia — the excavations of Uruk and Ur: temple precincts, canals and the scale of the first cities
Basis: documents and evidence.