Why Eridu Gets Called The First City At All

Why This Matters

The phrase “Eridu was the first city” sounds like trivia, but it quietly shapes how we imagine the birth of urban life: a single, magical moment when someone flipped the switch from village to city. Once you look at how that claim is actually built—from mudbrick layers, pottery fragments, and a temple rebuilt on the same spot for millennia—you realize it’s less about a winner in a race and more about a particular pattern of slow, uneven growth that we can actually see in the ground. Understanding why Eridu gets that label makes you suspicious of neat origin stories and better at reading what early cities really looked like, in Mesopotamia and everywhere else.

The Insight

Eridu is called the ‘first city’ not because someone found a sign saying so, but because its mound preserves one of the earliest, clearest sequences where a small ritual hub grows—layer by layer—into something recognizably urban. The title is a convenient shorthand for a very specific archaeological pattern, not a cosmic award for being literally first in every sense.

See It

Imagine standing on the mound of Eridu and slicing it like a cake from top to bottom:

• Top layers (late 3rd–2nd millennium BCE):

  • Ruins of later temples and small structures, some already eroded.
  • Pottery styles match other known Early Dynastic and later sites.

• Middle layers (4th millennium BCE, late Ubaid / early Uruk):

  • A substantial temple platform with multiple rebuilds on the same footprint.
  • Storage rooms, courtyards, and more densely packed houses around the temple.

• Lowest accessible layers (6th–5th millennium BCE, early Ubaid):

  • A modest shrine and a few associated buildings.
  • Simple, characteristic Ubaid pottery; no writing, no city walls, no palaces.

Archaeologists date each layer by its pottery and occasional radiocarbon samples, then line those up with other sites. The fact that Eridu has this deep, continuous stack—starting earlier than the big urban showpieces like Uruk—underpins the claim that it’s one of, and maybe the, earliest true city‑like places in southern Mesopotamia.

How It Works

When people say “Eridu was the first city,” they’re compressing several different lines of evidence into one punchy sentence. Archaeologically, Eridu (modern Tell Abu Shahrain in southern Iraq) has one of the deepest and earliest continuous occupation sequences in southern Mesopotamia, starting in the 6th millennium BCE. At the bottom of that mound are small, simple structures and a modest shrine that, layer by layer, grow into a substantial temple complex with surrounding houses. That long, uninterrupted build‑up is what lets archaeologists say, with some confidence, that Eridu is among the earliest places where a ritual center turned into something recognizably urban.

The mechanism for this claim is stratigraphy plus cross‑dating. Each building phase leaves a layer: foundations, fill, broken pottery, ash. As new temples are built on the ruins of old ones, the mound literally rises. Pottery styles in each layer can be matched to other sites whose dates we know from radiocarbon or, later, from historical synchronisms. At Eridu, the lowest levels line up with the Ubaid period, before cities like Uruk explode in size. That makes Eridu a chronological anchor: we can say, “here is a place with a temple, planned architecture, and a community around it, earlier than the classic big cities we usually think of.”

But there’s a trade‑off baked into calling it “the first city.” Modern definitions of a city lean on population density, economic specialization, and administrative complexity. The earliest Eridu levels don’t tick all those boxes; they look more like a sacred precinct with a small attached settlement. Over time, the temple grows, storage rooms appear, and the surrounding area fills in—religious centrality first, urban complexity later. So we gain a powerful origin story—one place we can point to and say “urbanism starts here, roughly”—but we lose nuance about how messy and gradual that process was, and how many other proto‑urban sites were evolving in parallel.

This matters most when we use Eridu as a mental model for “the first city” elsewhere. If you imagine cities being born as fully formed, wall‑ringed metropolises, you’ll misread other early sites that look half‑finished by that standard. Eridu shows a different pattern: a long‑lived ritual core that slowly accretes economic and residential functions. When you look at early centers in other regions—Egypt’s Predynastic towns, the Indus early phases, or early Chinese walled platforms—it’s worth asking: are we seeing another Eridu‑style sacred nucleus, or something closer to a ready‑made administrative capital? The answer changes how we tell the story of “first cities” globally.

Takeaways

• Treat ‘first city’ as shorthand for ‘earliest well‑documented urbanizing center in this region,’ not as an absolute global timestamp.
• Look for the sequence temple core → repeated rebuilding → surrounding settlement growth when evaluating whether an early site is on the path to urbanism.
• Cross‑check textual claims (like the Sumerian King List) against stratigraphy and pottery sequences before repeating them as historical fact.
• Remember that erosion, groundwater, and incomplete excavation mean the earliest phases we see at Eridu are a floor, not the absolute beginning.
• When comparing early cities across regions, separate ‘religious centrality’ from ‘urban complexity’—Eridu is heavy on the first long before it fully achieves the second.

Gotchas

• Taking ‘first city’ literally → you miss that Eridu’s earliest levels look more like a ritual hub with scattered houses than a dense urban grid; the slogan survives because it’s poetic, not because it matches a modern census definition.
• Relying only on written sources → you’ll over‑weight late Sumerian and Babylonian texts that already mythologized Eridu, ignoring earlier, mute evidence from pottery, architecture, and radiocarbon dates that tell a more nuanced story.
• Forgetting erosion and the water table → parts of Eridu’s lowest levels are gone or waterlogged, so any confident statement like ‘this is the exact first temple’ is really ‘this is the earliest layer we can still see and date.’
• Assuming ‘first’ means ‘most influential’ → by the time writing, law codes, and big empires show up, places like Uruk and Nippur matter far more; Eridu’s importance is front‑loaded in time and then mostly religious and symbolic.

Did You Know

• The Sumerian King List opens with Eridu as the place where ‘kingship descended from heaven,’ which is less a GPS pin and more a theological statement about cosmic order anchored to a real settlement mound.
• Eridu’s main temple to the god Enki was rebuilt on the same spot so many times that archaeologists count more than a dozen superimposed temple levels, turning the mound itself into a 4,000‑year‑long architectural time‑lapse.
• When Eridu was already in decline, nearby Ur and Uruk were booming; for a while people were living in a world where the legendary ‘first city’ was a half‑abandoned religious center while newer cities did the actual economic heavy lifting.

References

• Eridu (article)
• The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: Theories and Approaches (book)
• The Ubaid and the Origins of Urbanism: Reconsidering Eridu (article)

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