Uruk

The endonym for the city in its own language, Unug, written with the UNUG sign and the place-determinative ki. It is among the very first place-names ever written, appearing in the archaic tablets excavated at the site itself, the earliest body of writing known, where the city’s own administrators recorded the goods of Inanna’s temple around 3200 BCE. The name’s etymology is uncertain; it is inseparable from the great sanctuary, the Eanna, “house of heaven,” that stood at the city’s heart.

Unug is the headwater of every other form on this page, and it is also, quite literally, one of the first words in the human written record, set down in the very city it names. From this Sumerian word two long and separate descents begin: the Semitic line that yields Uruk and Erech, and the line that the Greeks would later hear as Orchoē. The name that opens the history of writing also opens one of the longest tangles of transmission in this atlas.

The Akkadian name for the city, Uruk, written URU.UNUG, an Akkadianized development of the Sumerian Unug. It is the name under which the city appears throughout Akkadian literature, above all in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Uruk “of the strong walls” is the hero’s city and the poem’s opening and closing image. Uruk remained inhabited and named in Akkadian texts for an extraordinarily long span, from the Sargonic period down to the Seleucid and early Parthian centuries, when scribes there were still writing the latest cuneiform tablets known.

This is the form that survived, and it survived twice. Uruk is the spelling that modern scholarship restored as the city’s name once cuneiform was deciphered, displacing both the biblical Erech and the classical Orchoē in common use. It is also, by an etymology that is often proposed though far from certain, a candidate for the ultimate origin of the name Iraq. The oldest city’s oldest name, in its Akkadian dress, may quietly persist in the name of the modern country built over its ruins.

The Hebrew name for the city, Erech, listed in Genesis 10 among the first cities of Nimrod’s kingdom in the land of Shinar, “Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh.” The form preserves the old name Uruk with the Hebrew vocalization and a spirantized final k, and its identification with the Sumerian city is the settled consensus. It is the Semitic name’s appearance in the text that would carry it furthest, since the whole later European knowledge of “Erech” descends from this one verse.

Erech is the pivot of the Semitic road. Standing beside Babel and Accad in Nimrod’s city-list, it is the form from which the Syriac Bible took its Erech and the Septuagint its Orech, and so the ancestor of every biblical naming of the city. That the same place was, at that very moment, being called Orchoē by Greek geographers who had never read Genesis is the quiet irony of this page: the Bible and the atlas were naming one city twice, in mutual ignorance.

The city in Imperial Aramaic, surfacing not as a bare place-name but as an ethnikon: the Aramaic of Ezra 4:9 lists Arkəwāyēʾ, “the Erechites,” among the deported peoples that the Persian administration resettled in Samaria, the men of ʾErek, that is, of Uruk. The verse is a roll-call of the empire’s uprooted communities written in the chancellery Aramaic of the Achaemenid period, the same passage that names the people of Susa and of Babylon, and it places the Erechites among them.

The Aramaic form is a reminder that a city’s name can be preserved chiefly in the name of its scattered people. Uruk appears here not as a place on a map but as a label on exiles, the Arkəwāyēʾ counted off beside the Babylonians and Susians, all of them named for the cities the empire had moved them from. The same administrative verse that gives this atlas its Aramaic Babylon and Susa gives it, in the same breath, its Aramaic Uruk.

The first of the city’s two Greek names, Orech, the transliteration by which the Septuagint carried the Hebrew Erech into Greek in the Table of Nations at Genesis 10:10. The translators did not know what city the name denoted; they simply transcribed the Hebrew consonants of Nimrod’s third city into Greek letters, producing a name that means nothing in Greek and points to nowhere on a Greek map. It belongs entirely to the biblical road, a Hebrew word in Greek dress.

Orech is one half of this page’s central irony, and the more invisible half. The same Greek language that, in the mouths of its geographers, called the living city Orchoē here, in the mouths of its Bible translators, called it Orech, and the two camps never suspected they were naming one place. A Greek reader of the Septuagint and a Greek reader of Ptolemy could each have spoken the city’s name without either recognizing the other’s.

The second of the city’s two Greek names, Orchoē, the form under which the Greek geographers knew the living Babylonian city. Strabo names the Orchēnoi, a school of Chaldean astronomers, alongside the Borsippeni, and Ptolemy plots Orchoē among the towns of Babylonia. This is the name as it reached Greek not through a text but through contact, from the still-inhabited city whose temple-scholars were famous, in the Hellenistic world, for their astronomy.

Orchoē is the form that descends from Uruk by the Hellenistic road, the city’s name as the classical world actually encountered it, and the one that gave Latin its Orcheni. That it sits on the same page as Orech, its unrecognized Septuagint twin, is the point of this entry: here the Greek language named one Mesopotamian city by two roads, the scholar’s and the scripture’s, and kept the two names a thousand miles and several centuries apart in its own usage without ever joining them.

The Latin name for the city, Orchoē, taken from the Greek of the geographers; Pliny lists the Orcheni among the Chaldean schools, beside the Hippareni and the others, naming the people for their city as the Greeks did. It is the western end of the Hellenistic road, the city of the astronomers passed from Greek learning into Roman.

Latin received only one of the city’s names, and it was the geographers’ Orchoē, never the scriptural Erech; the Vulgate, when Jerome later came to Genesis 10, kept the Hebrew Erech rather than reaching for the classical Orchoē, so that even in Latin the two names stayed apart, one in the geographers and one in the Bible. The oldest city in the world ended its long onomastic life as two strangers in the same language, the Orchoē of the maps and the Erech of the scriptures, never introduced.

The Syriac name for the city, Erech, as the Peshitta Old Testament renders the Hebrew Erech in the Table of Nations at Genesis 10:10. Because the Peshitta Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew, it carries the Semitic name directly across into Syriac script, where it stands in the same list of Nimrod’s cities, beside Bābel and Akkad, that the Hebrew gives.

The Syriac entry belongs wholly to the Semitic road and owes nothing to the Greek. It is the eastern Christian continuation of the biblical Erech, taken from the Hebrew rather than from the Septuagint, and it has no inkling of the Orchoē by which the Greek geographers, working from the living Babylonian city a few hundred miles to the south, knew the very same ruins.