Uruk

Uruk was a Sumerian city in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq's Muthanna Governorate, occupied from around 5000 BC until roughly 700 AD. Uruk gives its name to the Uruk period of the mid-4th millennium BC, when the settlement grew into what may have been the world's first true city, with a population estimated at up to 50,000 at its peak around 3100 BC. The city was organized around two major temple precincts, the Eanna district sacred to the goddess Inanna, distinguished by early monumental cone-mosaic facades, and the Anu district, crowned by a massive ziggurat. Uruk is also where the earliest known writing and the earliest known monumental public architecture both emerge in the archaeological record, and legend holds that the hero-king Gilgamesh ruled the city in the 27th century BC.