WORLD HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -By around 3200 B.C., the largest settlement in southern Mesopotamia, if not the world, was Uruk: a true city dominated by monumental mud-brick buildings decorated with mosaics of painted clay cones embedded in the walls, and extraordinary works of art.

Detailed explanation-2: -Eridu (present day Abu Shahrein, Iraq) was considered the first city in the world by the ancient Sumerians and is among the most ancient of the ruins from Mesopotamia.

Detailed explanation-3: -The remains of the city of Uruk lie today in a dusty, featureless desert, several kilometres east of the River Euphrates in southern Iraq. Five thousand years ago, however, it was surrounded by freshwater reed marshes, fertile alluvial soil, and waterways giving access to neighbouring towns and the Persian Gulf.

Detailed explanation-4: -Uruk-Warka was initially excavated by the British explorer William Loftus in the 1850s but he soon gave up, disappointed at not finding the spectacular stone wall reliefs that Layard and Botta had recently discovered in the great Assyrian cities of north Mesopotamia, at Nimrud and Nineveh.