The Sumerian city-states
Ur, Lagash, Kish and their neighbours invent the state and immediately start fighting each other.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 666 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
By 3000 BCE southern Mesopotamia holds a dozen or more independent cities, each centred on a temple to its own god, each with a ruler, walls, irrigated fields and a hinterland. They trade, intermarry and go to war constantly — the Stele of the Vultures commemorates a border dispute between Lagash and Umma and is among the earliest historical records of a specific war. The city-state, not the empire, is the original political form.