The city that tradition put first
Eridu, whose ruins are now called Tell Abu Shahrain in southern Iraq, is the city that Sumerian tradition names as the first place where kingship was lowered from heaven. The Sumerian King List, a composition put together in its known forms in the late third and early second millennia BCE, begins with Eridu and gives its first ruler, Alulim, an impossibly long reign of tens of thousands of years. These figures are mythic, not historical. The list is best read as a statement of how later Mesopotamians understood their origins, not as a record of real events.
Archaeology adds a different but compatible point. The site has some of the earliest settlement levels known in southern Mesopotamia, going back to the Ubaid tradition and perhaps the sixth millennium BCE according to the excavators’ dating. It is therefore one of the oldest long-lived centres in the region. Whether it was a “city” in the early phases, rather than a village with a shrine, is a matter of definition, and most scholars would call the earliest phases a small settlement.
Enki and the Abzu
The patron god of Eridu was Enki (Ea in Akkadian), associated with fresh water, wisdom and craft. His home was the Abzu (Apsu), the sweet-water ocean thought to lie beneath the earth, and the temple at Eridu was called E-abzu, “House of the Abzu.” This links well with the setting: the city stood on the edge of the marshes and lagoons near the head of the Gulf, in a landscape where fresh and salt water met.
Enki is a prominent figure in myths about the ordering of the world and the making of humans, and sources from the second millennium BCE record stories in which he gives skills and divine powers to other gods. One well-known Sumerian poem has the goddess Inanna visit him at Eridu and carry the divine powers, called me, away to Uruk. Such stories are part of the Mesopotamian creation myth tradition and the wider Sumerian pantheon. They were composed centuries after the city’s earliest levels, so they say more about how later writers viewed Eridu than about its beginnings.
A stack of shrines
Eridu’s best-known archaeological contribution is its sequence of temples. Excavations in the 1940s by Iraqi and British archaeologists, building on earlier work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, uncovered a series of temple buildings stacked one above another, with more than a dozen successive levels reported. The lowest was a small, simple room, and later versions grew into larger tripartite buildings with altars, offering tables and niched facades, eventually standing on a raised platform.
The sequence matters because it is a vivid case of continuity: people rebuilt in the same spot for many centuries, and the sacred location persisted even as the buildings changed. It also shows the evolution of Mesopotamian temple architecture from a one-room shrine to a monumental building, and it gives archaeologists a reference sequence for Ubaid-period pottery. Reports from the earliest levels mention fish bones and offering deposits, which fits the water-god setting, though such details should be treated as the excavators’ interpretation rather than proven ritual practice.
The sequence is a textbook example of tell stratigraphy, and its dates rely on a mix of pottery comparison and, for some periods, radiocarbon dating. Absolute dates for the earliest levels are therefore approximate and have been revised over time.
Later centuries
Eridu continued as a cult centre into the third millennium BCE and later. In the late third millennium the Third Dynasty of Ur under Ur-Nammu built a ziggurat at Eridu in honour of Enki, and parts of it still stand as a prominent mound. Rulers kept the temple repaired because Enki’s cult carried prestige, and the city remained a religious site long after it had lost political weight.
Political importance in the Early Dynastic period appears to have gone mainly to other southern states. Eridu is mentioned in royal inscriptions as a place worth patronising. By the first millennium BCE the evidence suggests that it was small, and it was eventually abandoned.
Why did it decline?
No single reason is established. Explanations that scholars discuss include:
- Shifting watercourses. Southern cities depended on canals and river branches. When the channel moved, the water supply changed, leaving some towns stranded.
- Salinisation and soil change. Irrigation in a hot, flat landscape can raise salt levels in fields, reducing yields over time, a problem relevant to Sumerian irrigation farming generally.
- Political change. As power shifted to cities such as Ur, Babylon and later capitals, smaller religious centres drew fewer resources.
- Coastal and marsh changes. The head of the Gulf has changed over thousands of years, and this altered a city that relied on lagoons and marsh produce.
Probably several of these worked together, and the story differs from the early centuries to the late ones.
Eridu in modern knowledge
The ruins were first examined in the mid-nineteenth century by the British consul J. G. Taylor, and the major excavations were carried out in the mid-twentieth century. Interest in the area has continued, and the surrounding marshes and ruins are within a protected landscape designated by UNESCO in 2016. As part of the story of Sumerian rediscovery, Eridu shows how a place known first from texts could be identified, dug and its earliest layers recovered.
Eridu is best seen as the oldest anchor of a long tradition. Its claim to be “first” rests on Sumerian belief and on a very old stack of shrines, not on proof that it was the first city anywhere. That is still enough to make it one of the most informative sites in southern Iraq.