Sumerian Settlements, Housing and Living Conditions

Sumer describes a cultural and linguistic region of southern Mesopotamia, not one continuous empire. During the fourth and third millennia BCE, its cities and smaller settlements occupied alluvial fields, marshes and channels in what is now southern Iraq. Waterways carried people and goods as well as supporting cultivation. Excavations at Early Dynastic Lagash and at Ur’s early second-millennium residential district preserve different moments in that history.

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Cities, fields and marshes

Lagash was one of the cities in a larger city-state and flourished in the Early Dynastic period, c.2900–2300 BCE. The Penn Museum describes it as a settlement in a mixed zone of fertile fields and marshland, where boats connected cities and moved resources. Survey and remote sensing have identified neighborhoods, streets, houses, waterways and production areas across the site.

Recent work in an Early Dynastic non-elite neighborhood at Lagash found a public eating place dated to about 2700 BCE, with benches, an oven, a clay cooling jar and food-storage vessels. Nearby excavations exposed kilns and pits holding different clays used in pottery production, as well as a dwelling with a kitchen area containing jar stoppers, bowls and a grinding stone. The eating place served shared meals, while the house’s grinding stone and vessels point to food preparation within a household.

Building and using domestic rooms

Builders in southern Mesopotamia commonly used mudbrick, a material made from wet earth dried in the sun. Roofs and doors required timber and reeds, which were less available in the alluvial plain than mud. Plaster covered some walls. Households repaired walls and floors and could divide rooms differently as needs changed, while rebuilding over earlier structures gradually raised the settlement mound.

In the early second-millennium BCE Larsa phase at Ur, excavator Leonard Woolley described a house on Straight Street arranged around a paved courtyard with a central drain and brick stands for water jars. Its entrance lobby led into the courtyard. The kitchen held a circular bread oven, raised hearth and open fireplace; a small lavatory and a guest washing room had drains. The courtyard opened inward-facing rooms to daylight, while some upper rooms sat above only part of the court. Woolley described night lighting in Ur’s houses as small saucer lamps with wicks floating in oil. Households brought water from public wells and stored it in large porous jars in a courtyard compartment.

Later houses at Ur

Ur’s excavated residential district includes more than fifty houses connected by narrow, winding streets. Its best-preserved floors mostly belong to the early second millennium BCE, after the Ur III dynasty ended around 2004 BCE. The examples here come from Larsa and Old Babylonian phases; underlying Ur III walls represent an earlier level.

At the city’s edge, a large house excavated by the LMU team in 2017 and 2019 belonged to Sîn-nāda, an official of the Ningal temple, and his wife Nuṭṭuptum. Built around 1850 BCE, it had sixteen rooms, a courtyard, bathrooms, a reception room, a kitchen with ovens and drains, a staircase and a family tomb outside the house. Texts from its rooms document the couple’s temple affairs. This unusually well-appointed residence belonged to a wealthy household; Woolley’s smaller Straight Street house gives a different scale of domestic space.

Burial beneath the house

Under-floor burials occur in Ur’s later residential district. Hafford describes one arched tomb built with reused bricks and a nearby channel lined with bitumen, a natural tar. The arrangement has been interpreted as possibly connected with liquid offerings, but the channel’s function is not certain. Such burials show that domestic space and family commemoration could meet in this early second-millennium setting.