Matthew 1

[JLG]

1)

Mesopotamia: The Rise of Cities
Once upon a time, in the land known as Sumer, the people built a temple to their god, who had conquered the forces of chaos and brought order to the world. They built this temple at a place called Eridu, which was "one of the southernmost places, on the very edge of the river plain and near the marshes: the transition zone between sea and land, with its shifting waters, its islands, and its deep thickets of reeds" (Leick, 2).

 

[JLG]

2)

Mythological Origins
This marshy area, surrounded by dry land and sand dunes, represented to the people the life-giving force of their god and provided the physical manifestation of the order that god had created out of chaos. The fresh waters of life were celebrated at Eridu because they were associated with what the Sumerians called the abzu, the primordial source of all existence, the realm in which the gods lived and from which they emerged.
The god Enki emerged from the abzu and dwelt in Eridu, and the Sumerian king list states that "once kingship had descended from the heavens, it was located in Eridu." This cultural center became the first city for the Sumerians: Historian Gwendolyn Leick writes:
So the Mesopotamian Eden is not a garden but a city, formed from dry land surrounded by waters. The first building is a temple... This is how Mesopotamian tradition presented the evolution and function of cities, and Eridu is the mythical paradigm. Unlike the biblical Eden, from which humans were banished forever after the Fall, Eridu remained a real place, imbued with sanctity but always accessible.
Eridu was not only the first city in the world for the Sumerians, but also the beginning of civilization. All other cities that emerged later, the Sumerians believed, had their origin in the sand and waters surrounding Eridu.

 

[JLG]

3)

Modern Theories
Modern scholars disagree on why the world's first cities arose in the Mesopotamian region and not elsewhere. Theories range from ancient alien hypotheses to social or natural upheavals that forced people to coalesce in urban centers, environmental problems, and even the forced migration of rural communities to cities. None of these theories is universally accepted, although every reputable scholar rejects the ancient alien hypothesis. However, what they do agree on is that, at the very moment the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia decided to begin the process of urbanization, they changed the way human beings would live forever. Historian Kriwaczek writes:
This was a revolutionary moment in human history. The [Sumerians] aimed for nothing less than to change the world. They were the first to adopt the principle that has driven progress and advancement throughout history, and that still motivates most of us today: the conviction that it is humanity's right, its mission and its destiny, to transform and improve nature and become its master.

 

[JLG]

4)

The Eridu site doesn't offer much to suggest that it was once anything more than a sacred center; perhaps something we would define today as a large town or village.
The principle Kriwaczek refers to may be nothing more than the natural inclination of human beings to gather together for safety from the elements, or it may be rooted in religion and shared religious practices, which, among the benefits they offer, offer reassurance that there is order and meaning behind the seemingly random events of life. Historian Lewis Mumford states that "the habit of resorting to caves for the collective celebration of magical ceremonies appears to date back to an earlier period, and whole communities, living in caves and hollowed-out rock faces, have survived in widely scattered areas to the present day." The design of the city as an external form as well as an internal pattern of life may have had equally ancient origins". Whatever led to the development of the first cities in Mesopotamia, the world would never be the same again.

 

[JLG]

5)

Kriwaczek writes:
From before 4000 BC, for the next ten to fifteen centuries, the people of Eridu and their neighbors laid the foundations for almost everything we know as civilization. It has been called the Urban Revolution, although in reality the invention of cities was the least of it. With cities came the centralized state, the hierarchy of social classes, the division of labor, organized religion, monumental construction, civil engineering, writing, literature, sculpture, art, music, education, mathematics, and law, not to mention an enormous range of new inventions and discoveries, from things as basic as wheeled vehicles and ships to the potter's kiln, metallurgy, and the creation of synthetic materials. And to top it all off, there's the enormous collection of notions and ideas so fundamental to our way of seeing the world, such as the concept of numbers, or weights, completely independent of the objects being counted or weighed (the number 10, or a kilo), which we've long since forgotten had to be discovered or invented. Southern Mesopotamia is the place where all this was first achieved.

 

[JLG]

6)

The Rise of Uruk
The concept of a city, first expressed in the construction of Eridu, did not remain there for long. Urbanization spread rapidly throughout the Sumerian region beginning around 4500 BC with the rise of the city of Uruk, now considered the world's first city. Eridu may be the world's first city, as Sumerian myths proclaim, but Eridu was founded around 5400 BC, long before the invention of writing (around 3000 BC), and by then, Uruk had been established for some time and had created and discarded numerous artifacts that today attest to its size and population, thus substantiating the claim that Uruk is the world's first city. The Eridu site, on the other hand, does not offer much to suggest that it was ever anything more than a sacred center, perhaps something that today we would define as a large town or village.