Uruk, the First City

One evening in Uruk, about five thousand years ago, when it was the largest city in the world. The sun goes down over a plain flatter than almost anywhere, reed boats are poled in along the canals, the flocks come home to be counted, and the White Temple glows on its platform in the last of the light.

In a quiet room by the temple, a writer presses barley accounts into soft clay with a reed: some of the earliest writing anywhere, and most of it receipts. Along the way, the clay-cone mosaics of the Eanna, the counting in sixties that still sets your clock, a tablet that may carry one of the oldest written names, and a stone vase carved with the whole life of the city, from the river to the temple.

The ending, given away now: supper is eaten, the lamps go out, and the families carry their mats up onto the flat roofs to sleep under the stars. Nothing happens. Nobody leaves.

The first minute

Let the day come to an end now. You have done what there was to do. Whatever is left can wait until morning. It will still be there, and it will be smaller then. For now, there is only the bed, and the dark, and the long quiet hours ahead. Let your shoulders fall a little. Let your jaw go loose…

Why this one works at night

It is one evening, walked in order: the canal, the reeds, the flocks, the lamplit tablets, supper, the roof. There is always a next small place to arrive at, and every one of them is warm. The facts are the real thing, carefully sourced, but they are the ordinary facts of a city at rest — bricks drying, bread baking, beer drunk through reed straws — so there is nothing to follow, only somewhere to be.

“…A small round mark. A curved mark. A little drawing, made of short, careful lines. An ear of barley. A jar. The head of—”

The kind of sentence people fall asleep during