Erech (Uruk)

Erech was among the earliest cities of human civilisation, named in Genesis as part of the kingdom of Nimrod "the mighty hunter before the LORD."

A city of Nimrod's kingdom

"And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar" (Genesis 10:10). Erech stands at the dawn of the post-flood world's first empire, in the plain of Mesopotamia where Babel would also rise.

The land of Shinar

Shinar — lower Mesopotamia — is the same land where humanity gathered to build the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:2). Erech was one of its great urban centres.

Echoes in exile

The city's people ("the Archevites") appear again much later among those resettled in Samaria after the Assyrian conquest (Ezra 4:9), a reminder of how the empires of Shinar shaped Israel's story.

Erech is the biblical name of Uruk, whose ruins at Warka in southern Iraq are among the most important in the world: Uruk was one of the largest cities of ancient Sumer, a cradle of urban life, monumental temple architecture, and — in its clay tablets — the earliest known writing.