1 dawn of the city Uruk, 4000-1900 bc Enkidu lives in harmony with nature. Strong as a "rock from the sky" and possessing godlike beauty, his heart delights as he runs free with the wild animals. That is until he sees the naked figure of Shamat bathing at the waterhole. Entranced by his first sight of a woman, Enkidu makes love to Shamat for six days and seven nights. Sated by their unbridled, rapturous sexual union, Enkidu attempts to return to the freedom of the wilderness. But his power over nature has faded. The beasts shun him; his strength is diminished; and he feels pangs of loneliness for the first time. Confused, he returns to Shamat.

She tells her lover about her home, the fabled city of Uruk, a place of monumental buildings, shady palm groves and great throngs of humanity behind mighty walls. In the city men labour with their brains, not just their brawn. The people wear gorgeous clothing and every day there is a festival, when "drums rap out the beat." And there are the most beautiful women in the world, "graced with charm and full of delights." Shamat teaches Enkidu how to eat bread and drink ale. In the city, Shamat tells Enkidu, his godlike potential will be translated into real power. His hairy body shaved, his skin anointed with oils, and his nakedness concealed under costly garments, Enkidu sets off for Uruk. He has renounced the freedom and instincts of nature, drawn to the city by the lure of sex, food and luxury.

Cities from Uruk and Babylon to Rome, Teotihuacan and Byzantium, from Baghdad and Venice to Paris, New York and Shanghai, have bedazzled people as the idealised cities of the imagination made real, the pinnacles of human creativity. Enkidu represents mankind in a pristine state of nature, forced to choose between the freedom of the wild and the artificiality of the city. Shamat is the personification of sophisticated urban culture. Like her, such cities beguile and seduce; they promise the realisation of our powers and potential.1 The tale of Enkidu comes at the beginning of The Epic of Gilgamesh, humankind''s oldest surviving work of literature, its written form dating back to at least 2100 bc. The epic was the product of the literate, highly urbanised Sumerian people, who lived in Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq. Someone approaching Uruk for the first time at its height in about 3000 bc, like the fictional Enkidu, would have had their senses assaulted. With a population of between 50,000 and 80,000 and occupying three square miles, Uruk was the most densely populated place on the planet.

Like an anthill, the city sat atop a mound created by generations'' worth of activity, layers of garbage and discarded building materials creating a man-made acropolis dominating the horizontal plains and visible for miles. Long before reaching the city you would have become aware of its presence. Uruk had cultivated the surrounding area, harnessing the countryside to serve its needs. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of fields, artificially irrigated by ditches, produced the wheat, sheep and dates that fed the metropolis and the barley that provided beer for the masses. Most stunning of all were the towering temples dedicated to the goddess of love and war, Eanna, and to Anu, god of the sky, constructed on gigantic platforms high above the city. Like the bell towers and domes of Florence or the forest of skyscrapers in twenty-first-century Shanghai, they were an unmistakable visual signature. Built with limestone and covered with gypsum plaster, Anu''s great White Temple reflected the light of the sun as impressively as any modern skyscraper. A beacon in the plains, it radiated a message of civilisation and power.

For the ancient Mesopotamians, the city represented humankind''s triumph over nature; the domineering artificial landscape made that strikingly clear. The city walls, studded with gates and projecting towers, were nine kilometres in circumference and seven metres tall. Enter through one of the gates and you would see immediately the way in which the city''s inhabitants had won their own victory over nature. Surrounding the city proper were neat gardens producing fruit, herbs and vegetables. An extensive network of canals brought water from the Euphrates to the heart of the city. A subterranean system of clay pipes discharged the waste of tens of thousands of people outside the walls. The gardens and date palms gave way in due course to the inner city. The labyrinths of narrow, twisting streets and alleys crowded with small, windowless houses might have looked horrendously cramped and offered few open spaces, but this layout was designed to create an urban microclimate in which the shade and breeze offered by the narrowness of the streets and the density of the housing mitigated the intensity of the Mesopotamian sun.

2 Noisy, cramped, busy, Uruk and its sister cities in Mesopotamia were unique on the face of the earth. In a work of literature from about the same time as The Epic of Gilgamesh the author imagines the goddess Inanna ensuring that the warehouses would be provisioned; that dwellings would be founded in the city; that its people would eat splendid food; that its people would drink splendid beverages; that those bathed for holidays would rejoice in the courtyards; that the people would throng the places of celebration; that acquaintances would dine together; that foreigners would cruise together about like unusual birds in the sky.that monkeys, mighty elephants, water buffalo, exotic animals, as well as thoroughbred dogs, lions, mountain ibexes, and alum sheep with long wool would jostle each other in the public squares. The writer goes on to portray a city with huge granaries for wheat and silos of gold, silver, copper, tin and lapis lazuli. All the good things of the world flowed to the city for the enjoyment of the people in this highly idealised account. Meanwhile, "inside the city tigi drums sounded; outside it, flutes and zamzam instruments. Its harbour where ships moored was full of joy."3 "Uruk" means simply "the city.

" It was the world''s first city and for over 1,000 years its most powerful urban centre. When people clustered into vast communities things changed with incredible velocity; the citizens of Uruk pioneered world-changing technologies and experienced radically new ways of living, dressing, eating and thinking. The invention of the city on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris unleashed a new, unstoppable force in history. The end of the last Ice Age, approximately 11,700 years ago, profoundly altered human life on earth. Around the world, hunter-gatherer societies began to cultivate and domesticate wild crops that benefited from a warming planet. But it was the Fertile Crescent--a semicircle that stretches from the Nile in the west through to the Persian Gulf in the east encompassing modern Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, the south-east part of Turkey and the western edge of Iran--that provided the most favourable area for agriculture. This relatively small region contained a wide range of topographies, climates and altitudes, which in turn provided extraordinary biodiversity. Most importantly for human societal development, it contained the wild progenitors of much of modern agriculture--emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, flax, chickpea, pea, lentil and bitter vetch--and large mammals suitable for domestication: cows, goats, sheep and pigs.

Within a few millennia the cradle of agriculture became the cradle of urbanisation. Archaeological work began in 1994 at Göbekli Tepe (Pot-Belly Hill) in Turkey under the direction of Klaus Schmidt. An extensive ceremonial complex, consisting of massive T-shaped stone pillars arranged in circles, was uncovered. This impressive site was not built by an advanced and settled agricultural community. The great twenty-ton stones were quarried and carried to the hill 12,000 years ago (construction of Stonehenge, in contrast, began 5,000 years ago). The discovery overturned conventional thinking. Here was evidence that hunter-gatherers congregated and cooperated on a truly massive scale. It is estimated that 500 people from different bands or tribes had to work together to quarry and carry the limestone megaliths to the hill.

Their motivation was the worship of god or gods unknown to us and the fulfilment of sacred duty. There is no evidence that anyone ever lived at Göbekli Tepe: this was a place of pilgrimage and worship. In the conventional interpretation, it was believed that such achievements came only after a surplus of grain freed up a portion of the community from the burden of daily subsistence and allowed them to do specialised, non-productive tasks. That is to say, after the invention of agriculture and villages. But Göbekli Tepe turns that thinking on its head. The earliest builders and worshippers on the hilltop were sustained by an amazing abundance of game and plants. That profusion of wild food, when it coexisted with a sophisticated system of religion, encouraged Homo sapiens to make radical changes to ways of life and tribal structures that had existed for over 150,000 years. The temple came before the farm; it might even have made the farm necessary to feed a settled population devoted to worship.

Genetic mapping shows the first ever domesticated einkorn wheat strains originated from a site twenty miles from Göbekli Tepe some 500 years after work began on the sanctuary. By that time, T-shaped pillars had been erected on hilltops in the wider area, and villages were established near them. Göbekli Tepe lay preserved for modern archaeologists because it was deliberately buried for some unknown reason in about 8000 b.