Sumerian city-states
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Between about 3500 and 2900 BCE the towns of southern Mesopotamia grew into the world's first cities, and writing, the wheel and the state appeared there for the first time. Uruk, on the Euphrates, reached perhaps 40,000 people by 3000 BCE, more than any settlement had ever held, and its Eanna precinct held the temple of Inanna, whose administrators kept accounts on clay. From those accounts the pictographic signs of the proto-cuneiform developed into the wedge-shaped script that could record any language. The cities were theocracies: the temple owned land, herds and workshops, and a class of priests and scribes managed irrigation, storage and distribution. Cylinder seals, made from stone, rolled an owner's mark onto clay, and the period produced the earliest narrative imagery, such as the war panel of the Stele of the Vultures from Lagash. The hero Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, appears in the poems that followed. Around 2900 BCE the cities fought each other, as the same stele records, and the pattern of rival city-states with a shared Sumerian culture defined Mesopotamia for the next thousand years. The city's canals were cleaned by organised labour, and the first rations were recorded in tokens and then in tablets.