Record · Ancient world · West Asia · 3300 BC · Daily life · Places & monuments

Uruk, the early city whose first writing was bookkeeping

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Published 2026-07-12 · Reviewed 2026-10-11 · 5 min read

carved alabaster vase with rows of figures bringing offerings — Top register of the Warka Vase from Uruk, about 3000 BC. Iraq Museum, Baghdad. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) / CC BY-SA 4.0. Source

TL;DR — Uruk, in southern Iraq, was one of the world’s earliest cities, covering 200 hectares with perhaps 40,000 people; its first writing, from about 3300 BC, was mostly bookkeeping.

Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, was one of the first cities on Earth, and its scribes kept accounts before they wrote anything else. The German Archaeological Institute (DAI), whose long-term excavations at the site fill its Uruk-Warka Collection, calls Uruk “one of the world’s earliest metropolises” and “the place of origin of the development of cuneiform script.” Robert K. Englund, in a 2011 study of early accounting, estimated that the settlement grew “into an expanse of 200 hectares, with a population estimated to have approached 40,000 or more.”

Quick facts

When: Growth in the Middle and Late Uruk periods; proto-cuneiform emerged c. 3300 BC; archaic tablets c. 3200–3000 BC
Where: Uruk (modern Warka), southern Iraq
Who: The administrators of the Eanna district; an official named Kushim
Outcome: Uruk grew to about 200 hectares and perhaps 40,000 people, and its earliest writing was mostly administrative records

A city of 200 hectares

That growth came in the Middle and Late Uruk periods, and it came with building on a large scale. Englund wrote that “very large numbers of this population evidently were available for the construction and maintenance of the massive public district known as Eanna.” He called its monumental architecture “surely the clearest testimony to the extraordinary new surplus economy supporting Uruk.” The DAI dates the city’s “impressive buildings” to “as early as 5,500 years ago.”

Later writers gave the city a hero. According to “ancient written sources,” the DAI notes, Uruk “was home to the legendary king Gilgamesh.”

the eroded mudbrick mound of an ancient temple platform rising from flat desert ground — The ruined ziggurat platform of Uruk's White Temple, photographed in 1933 to 1934. Annemarie Schwarzenbach / Public domain. Source

Clay balls before tablets

The first written signs at Uruk were numbers. Englund, building on the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat on small clay tokens, concluded that many of them represent “the precursors of writing in Mesopotamia, and therefore that cuneiform began with numerical signs.” The tokens, he wrote, “were gathered in discrete assemblages and encased in clay balls in the periods immediately before the emergence of proto-cuneiform c. 3300 bc,” and the balls were sealed with cylinder seals.

The tablets that followed fall into two phases. In a 2001 paper, Englund dated the archaic period “roughly to 3200–3100 (Uruk IV) and 3100–3000 B.C. (Uruk III/Jemdet Nasr).”

Accounts from the Eanna offices

Most of what survives was written to keep track of goods. Englund counted “5,000 archaic tablets and fragments from Warka excavations alone,” against about 400 proto-cuneiform tablets from other excavations or the antiquities market. The administrative documents, he wrote, make up “some 85 percent of the text corpus from that site.” The rest are mainly lexical lists, word lists among which, in his view, there is “good reason to assert that we have among these lists the earliest known example of literature.”

Many tablets reached the excavators as waste. Englund described them as texts “which formed part of the rubbish cleared from accounting offices of the Eanna district,” and their surfaces are often damaged.

Kushim's barley account

One account shows the scale. A tablet from Uruk now in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo, MS 1717, dated to the Uruk III period, is translated by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative as “5617 1/5 N1’s, exchange barley, 37 months, Kushim’s final account.” The catalog converts the total to 134,813 liters of barley, to be delivered over 37 months to Kushim, the official responsible for the brewery at the Inanna temple in Uruk.

Bowls by the thousand

The city left another kind of mass record: crude pottery bowls with a slanting rim. An article in the Parseh Journal of Archaeological Studies describes these bevelled-rim bowls as “found in vast quantities across Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau.” The best-known explanation is the “ration bowl” hypothesis, that they held barley or grain for workers. It is “bolstered by the sheer quantity of bowls found at administrative centers and the association of the bowls with the archaic cuneiform sign NINDA, meaning bread.”

The case is not closed. Critics “point to the variability in bowl sizes and the lack of direct evidence for their use in ration distribution,” and others have proposed that the bowls were molds for baking bread. The article itself argues for a ritual use, while granting that “concrete evidence remains elusive.”

Key facts

The German Archaeological Institute calls Uruk “one of the world’s earliest metropolises” and the place where cuneiform script developed (DAI).
Englund estimated that Uruk covered 200 hectares, with a population that “approached 40,000 or more” (Englund 2011).
Clay tokens were sealed inside clay balls just before proto-cuneiform emerged around 3300 BC (Englund 2011).
The archaic tablets date to about 3200–3100 BC (Uruk IV) and 3100–3000 BC (Uruk III) (Englund 2001).
Englund counted 5,000 archaic tablets and fragments from Warka, about 85 percent of them administrative (Englund 2001).
A tablet in the Schøyen Collection records about 134,813 liters of barley over 37 months as “Kushim’s final account” (CDLI).
Bevelled-rim bowls are often read as ration bowls, but their use is still debated (Parseh Journal).

FAQ

Was Uruk the world's first city?

It was one of the first. The German Archaeological Institute, which excavates there, calls Uruk "one of the world's earliest metropolises" and the place where cuneiform script developed.

How many people lived in Uruk?

Robert Englund estimated that in the Middle and Late Uruk periods the city grew to 200 hectares, "with a population estimated to have approached 40,000 or more."

What was the first writing used for?

Mostly for accounts. Englund counted administrative documents as about 85 percent of the archaic texts from Uruk, and argued that cuneiform began with numerical signs.

Who was Kushim?

A name on an Uruk III account tablet now in the Schøyen Collection. The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative translates it as "Kushim's final account" for barley over 37 months and describes Kushim as the official responsible for the brewery at the Inanna temple.

What were bevel-rim bowls used for?

No one is certain. They are often explained as ration bowls for barley or bread, but other scholars propose baking molds or ritual use.

Sources

Cite this article

APA: Song Letter. (2026, October 11). Uruk, the early city whose first writing was bookkeeping. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/west-asia/ancient/worlds-first-city-uruk/
Chicago: Song Letter. “Uruk, the early city whose first writing was bookkeeping.” Our Earth's History, October 11, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/west-asia/ancient/worlds-first-city-uruk/.
MLA: Song Letter. “Uruk, the early city whose first writing was bookkeeping.” Our Earth's History, 11 Oct. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/west-asia/ancient/worlds-first-city-uruk/.

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