City wall with towers and gates
Muralla urbana con torres y puertas
- Date
- c. 3000 BCE · confidence high
- Place
- Uruk (wall of Gilgamesh), Iraq; Habuba Kabira, Syria
- Credited to
- Sumerians (tradition attributes the Uruk wall to Gilgamesh)
- Field
- Tools
What it is
A 9 km mudbrick enclosure with more than 900 semicircular towers that walled Uruk around 3000 BCE. The city wall legally and physically defines the city against the countryside and requires a central power able to mobilise mass labour.
Jericho (c. 8000 BCE) has an earlier wall of disputed function; Uruk represents the fully developed military city wall.
What it led to
- War between city-states and the wall as a matter of civic pride (prologue of Gilgamesh)
- Corvée and compulsory labour, an instrument of the early state's fiscal system
- Distinction between citizen and foreigner, and control of gates, customs and markets
- Siege warfare as a response
Built on
- Stone wall and tower of Jerichoc. 8000 BCE
- Grid-planned cityc. 2600 BCE
- Walls of Jericho
- Moulded mudbrick
Made possible
- Battering ram and siege towerc. 1900 BCE
- Great Wall (continuous frontier wall)c. 214 BCE (muros anteriores, century VII a.C.)
- Motte-and-bailey castlec. 950
- Monumental city gate (Hattusa, Mycenae)
- Rammed-earth glacis