The Builders of the First City: Sumer — Sleep Podcast

There is a plain, and it is very old. It is the land between two rivers, in the place we now call Iraq, and in the long evening of the world, it was the place where the first city was built, and the first words were written, in wet clay, by a people whose own name for their land was the country of the noble lords.

We know their name only because the people who came after remembered it: Sumer. The Sumerians gave us the first city, the first writing, the wheel and the chariot, the number sixty we still read on the face of the clock, the ziggurats that reached for the sky, and the oldest stories still told in the world, the flood, the descent of the goddess into the dark, and the king who crossed the sea looking for what cannot be found, and came home to the wall of his city.

This evening, we walk that plain, from the first light to the last. We stand in Uruk, the first city. We look up at the White Temple. We watch the reed press its first mark into the clay. We go down the seven gates with the goddess, and we cross the water with the king of Uruk. We stand in the royal tombs, in the blue and the white of the inlay. And we stay, on the plain, until the wind lets go of the light.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About forty-five minutes.

Source notes: Wikipedia and World History Encyclopedia articles on Sumer, Uruk, the Anu ziggurat, proto-cuneiform and cuneiform, the Sumerian King List, the Gilgamesh flood myth and Utnapishtim, the Standard of Ur, the ziggurat of Ur, the Descent of Inanna, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sargon of Akkad and Lugal-zagesi (accessed 2026-09-21); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Origins of Writing," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (Ira Spar, 2004); Smarthistory entries on Uruk, the Standard of Ur and the Ziggurat of Ur; H. J. Nissen, P. Damerow & R. K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (1993); S. D. Houston, The First Writing (2004); J.-J. Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform Writing in Sumer (2003); ETCSL, "Inana's descent to the nether world."