Looking for Jesus according to Matthew

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5)

Kriwaczek writes:
From before 4000 BC, for the next ten to fifteen centuries, the people of Eridu and their neighbors laid the foundations for almost everything we know as civilization. It has been called the Urban Revolution, although in reality the invention of cities was the least of it. With cities came the centralized state, the hierarchy of social classes, the division of labor, organized religion, monumental construction, civil engineering, writing, literature, sculpture, art, music, education, mathematics, and law, not to mention an enormous range of new inventions and discoveries, from things as basic as wheeled vehicles and ships to the potter's kiln, metallurgy, and the creation of synthetic materials. And to top it all off, there's the enormous collection of notions and ideas so fundamental to our way of seeing the world, such as the concept of numbers, or weights, completely independent of the objects being counted or weighed (the number 10, or a kilo), which we've long since forgotten had to be discovered or invented. Southern Mesopotamia is the place where all this was first achieved.

 

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6)

The Rise of Uruk
The concept of a city, first expressed in the construction of Eridu, did not remain there for long. Urbanization spread rapidly throughout the Sumerian region beginning around 4500 BC with the rise of the city of Uruk, now considered the world's first city. Eridu may be the world's first city, as Sumerian myths proclaim, but Eridu was founded around 5400 BC, long before the invention of writing (around 3000 BC), and by then, Uruk had been established for some time and had created and discarded numerous artifacts that today attest to its size and population, thus substantiating the claim that Uruk is the world's first city. The Eridu site, on the other hand, does not offer much to suggest that it was ever anything more than a sacred center, perhaps something that today we would define as a large town or village.

 

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7)

Uruk and Eridu in Mythology
Sumerian mythology supports the claim that Uruk replaced Eridu in the poem "Inanna and the God of Wisdom." In this work, the goddess Inanna, whose home is in Uruk, goes to Eridu to visit her father, Enki. Kriwaczek points out that,
The Mesopotamians recognized Enki as the god who brings civilization to humanity. He is the one who gives rulers their intelligence and knowledge; he "opens the doors of understanding." He is not the ruler of the universe, but the wise counselor of the gods and their elder brother. Most importantly, Enki was the custodian of the meh, what the great Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer explained as the "fundamental, unalterable, and complete array of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, related to civilized life."