First Cities Ever

A long, long time ago, people did not live in cities at all. Small groups of families moved from place to place looking for food. Then, about 5,000 years ago, near two rivers in a land called Sumer, people did something nobody had ever done before: they built the very first city. Its name was Uruk.

Where the very first city was built Why people started living in cities instead of moving around What everyday life looked like in the city of Uruk

The first city, Uruk, was built in Sumer, a land between two big rivers called the Tigris and the Euphrates. Today, that same land is part of the country of Iraq. By around 2900 BCE (that's almost 5,000 years ago!), Uruk grew so big that as many as 40,000 people lived there — more people than in most small towns today.

Long before cities, people had to keep moving to hunt animals and find wild plants to eat. But near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the soil was so good for farming that people could grow more food than they needed — right in one spot. Because they didn't have to move around anymore, families could build homes close together. Some people farmed, some made pottery, some built houses, and some kept track of supplies. A city is really a place where everyone has a different job and shares with each other.

Houses in Uruk were built from mud bricks, dried hard in the hot sun. In the middle of the city stood a giant stepped tower called a ziggurat, built to honor the Sumerian gods — it was probably the tallest thing anyone in Uruk had ever seen. Uruk also had busy marketplaces where people traded grain, pottery, and cloth. To help keep track of who owed what grain to whom, the people of Sumer invented one of the very first writing systems in the world, called cuneiform, pressed into wet clay with a sharp stick.