Five thousand years, in order.

Before writing — the first villages, the first temples.

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.

The birth of the city, the birth of writing.

In the marshlands of southern Iraq, the world's first true cities rise. Uruk, the largest, may have held forty thousand souls. Around 3300 BCE, in its temple administration, accountants invent something new: marks pressed into clay to count things. Writing is born — not as poetry, but as bookkeeping.

City-states, kings, the first wars.

Sumer fragments into competing city-states — Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Kish, Nippur. Kings emerge as a permanent class, supported by temples and armies. The earliest royal inscriptions, the earliest border disputes (Lagash vs. Umma), and the earliest literary fragments date to this turbulent age.

The world's first empire under Sargon.

Sargon of Akkad unifies the city-states by force, founding what is arguably the world's first empire. Akkadian, a Semitic language, joins Sumerian on the tablets. His granddaughter Enheduanna — high priestess at Ur — composes hymns that survive: the first author in history we can name.

A bureaucratic golden age, the Code of Ur-Nammu.

After the Akkadian collapse, the Third Dynasty of Ur restores Sumerian as the prestige language and builds an empire of paperwork. Tens of thousands of administrative tablets survive from this single century — more than from any other. Ur-Nammu's law code, predating Hammurabi by three centuries, also dates to here.

Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mathematics.

Sumerian becomes a learned tongue, like Latin in medieval Europe; Akkadian dominates daily life. In Babylon, Hammurabi inscribes his code on a black diorite stele. Scribal schools copy and refine the Epic of Gilgamesh into the form we know. Mathematicians on tablets like Plimpton 322 work out Pythagorean triples a thousand years before Pythagoras.

Aššur the merchant city — the great trade with Anatolia.

While Hammurabi unifies Babylonia in the south, the city of Aššur on the upper Tigris becomes a node in a long-distance trade network reaching deep into Anatolia. The Old Assyrian merchants establish kārum settlements at Kaneš (modern Kültepe) and elsewhere; their family archives — preserved by the thousand at Kaneš — record loans of tin and textiles in Akkadian dialect.

The Kassite kings, international diplomacy.

Foreign Kassite dynasties rule Babylon for four centuries — a remarkably stable period. The Amarna letters, written in Akkadian on clay, document an international system stretching from Egypt to the Hittites: humanity's first known diplomatic correspondence.

Aššur's first imperial expansion.

Assyria comes into its own as a regional power. Tukulti-Ninurta I sacks Babylon and brings its gods and tablets back to Aššur. Tiglath-pileser I leads campaigns west to the Mediterranean and north into the mountains. The Middle Assyrian Laws (MAL), copied at Aššur, are the most extensive legal corpus before the Neo-Babylonian period.

Empire, library, terror, scholarship.

Assyria builds the largest empire the ancient world has yet seen, ruled with calculated terror. King Ashurbanipal, paradoxically, assembles the first encyclopedic library: tens of thousands of tablets gathered at Nineveh — including the most complete surviving copy of Gilgamesh.

Nebuchadnezzar, exile, late astronomy.

Babylon's last great flowering. Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city with the Ishtar Gate and the legendary hanging gardens; he also exiles the Judeans, an event recorded both in the Hebrew Bible and in his own tablets. Babylonian astronomers reach unprecedented precision in tracking the planets.

Persian rule, the long twilight of cuneiform.

Cyrus the Great takes Babylon in 539 BCE without a battle, ending native Mesopotamian rule. The Achaemenid Persian Empire governs from Susa and Persepolis; Aramaic becomes the lingua franca of administration. Yet cuneiform does not die — Babylonian astronomers, priests, and scholars continue to write on clay for several more centuries, producing some of the most precise astronomical records of the ancient world. The last dated cuneiform tablet known belongs to 75 CE.