Uruk: The City That Counted

Around 3300 BC a man poling a reed raft down a canal in the far south of what is now Iraq would have seen the city long before he reached it: two high platforms of mud brick above the smoke of thousands of cooking fires, one of them painted white. This film tells the story of Uruk, the largest town of its age, from two villages and a shrine on a river channel to a city of perhaps fifty thousand people: William Loftus at Warka in 1850, the German excavations from 1912, the cone-mosaic halls of Eanna, the White Temple and the marble face called the Lady of Uruk, the millions of crude ration bowls, the clay tokens and the Uruk Vase, the outposts up the Euphrates at Habuba Kabira and Jebel Aruda and in the mountains at Godin Tepe, the end of that network, and the first written tablets, which were bookkeeping. 0:00 A boat on the canal 2:05 A country made of mud 3:57 Two villages and a shrine 5:44 A geologist at Warka 7:49 Walking the mounds 9:58 Inside the city 12:51 The House of Heaven 15:44 The White Temple and the Lady of Uruk 18:22 A bowl for every worker 20:43 Counting in clay 24:02 The vase and the man in the netted skirt 26:23 Up the river 28:31 Beyond the river 30:44 Fire in the north and the end of the network 32:49 The first tablets Photographs from Wikimedia Commons. Those under Creative Commons licences, by author and licence, with the time each first appears: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0: 14:24, 17:20, 17:45, 24:20, 24:30, 24:42, 25:06, 25:18, 25:43, 33:42 Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0: 19:48, 23:53, 30:09, 33:08, 34:05 Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0: 15:44 Mary Harrsch, CC BY 2.0: 20:43 Neoclassicism Enthusiast, CC BY-SA 4.0: 25:25 Solider 16IQ, CC BY-SA 4.0: 18:22 The rest of the photographs are in the public domain or under CC0, from Neoclassicism Enthusiast, (not stated on Commons), Internet Archive Book Images, Marie-Lan Nguyen, Poulpy and Vassil. Maps drawn for this film from Natural Earth (public domain) and Terrain Tiles elevation and sea depth (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1). Music, our own piano recordings of songs from public-domain scores: Antonin Dvorak, Poco adagio e molto cantabile, String Quartet No. 11, Op. 61, second movement; Johanna Kinkel, 6 Lieder, Op.19: 2 Durch Carthago’s Trümmerhallen; Franz Schubert, Moment Musical No. 3 in F minor, D. 780; Johannes Brahms, An ein Bild, 9 Lieder und Gesänge, Op.63, No. 3; Edvard Grieg, The Death of Åse, Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46; Franz Schubert, Einsamkeit, Winterreise D. 911 No. 12; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Fugue in G minor, K. 154; Johann Sebastian Bach, Contrapunctus I, The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080; Felix Mendelssohn, Song without Words in A minor, Op. 53 No. 5; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Andante, String Quartet No. 21 in D major, K. 575, second movement; Frédéric Chopin, Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4. Made with AI: the narration is a synthetic voice, and the paintings in the film and the channel's opening and closing pictures were made with AI. The photographs and maps were not. #Mesopotamia #archaeology #documentary