Tonight, travel back more than six thousand years to the plains of ancient Mesopotamia, where a settlement beside the rivers slowly became something the human world had scarcely seen before: a true city.

This is the story of Uruk — one of the earliest and greatest urban centers in history.

Follow its long transformation from fields, canals, mud-brick houses, and small farming communities into a vast city of temples, craftsmen, administrators, merchants, and thousands of strangers learning to live together. Discover how the demands of urban life helped encourage new systems of organization, accounting, monumental architecture, and some of the earliest known writing.

We’ll wander through the temples of Inanna, the world of early scribes, the distant trade networks connected with Uruk, the rise of kingship, the legends surrounding Gilgamesh, and the centuries in which empires rose around the ancient city.

And then, slowly, Uruk begins to change.

Other cities grow. Capitals move elsewhere. Kingdoms become empires. Yet Uruk survives for thousands of years — as a sacred city, a center of scholarship, and eventually a place where astronomers record the movements of the heavens on the same clay that earlier administrators once used to count grain.

There is no sudden ending here.

Uruk simply becomes quieter, generation after generation, until its walls return to the earth from which they were made.

Settle in, lower the lights, and let the long history of the world’s first great city carry you toward sleep.

The Sleepkeeper — Sleep Stories from History.