The world’s first cities

security of their family homes and villages and came together with others to create something far more complex and difficult: the world’s first city, called Uruk. There is not much left now of Uruk, which is about 250 kilometres south of Iraq’s capital Baghdad, but enough does remain to show that this initial experiment in urban living was extraordinarily successful. At its height, around 5,000 years ago, Uruk was home to more than 40,000 people. The outlines of the city walls indicate an enclosed area of about 600 hectares. The archaeological record of Uruk reveals the intensive building and rebuilding which went on for four or five centuries after the city’s initial establishment. In that period the people of Uruk built a dozen or so large public-buildings. They would carefully level what had stood before, and then build another structure on top, often trying out a different building material or an innovative technique. They seemed to be searching for ways in which architecture could express the revolutionary new social structures that had come into being there.