Ubaid

Before the city, before writing, before Sumer itself, the Ubaid culture spreads across southern Mesopotamia. People build mud-brick villages, dig the first irrigation canals, fashion painted pottery. At Eridu — which later Sumerian tradition will remember as the first city to receive kingship from heaven — the earliest temple layers belong to this period. The cultural substrate of what becomes Sumer is laid down here, in clay and mud, without a single written word.