Billet de blog | Rejibah (Southern Iraq): A city at the dawn of Mesopotamian urbanisation - CEPAM

source : https://archeorient.hypotheses.org/39275

Introduction: urbanisation at the margins of Ur

In October 2025, the EURUK Project (Early Urbanisation: Roots, Unfolding and Kick-off) launched its first field season at Rejibah, a vast archaeological site located less than 15 km southwestof Ur, in southern Iraq (Fig. 1). The project aims to investigate the origins of a Mesopotamian city, from the proto-urban phase of the 4^th millennium BCE to the emergence of an early Sumerian centre in the first centuries of the 3^rd millennium BCE.

Early urbanisation in the heartland of cities (Adams 1981) has long been a fundamental and much-debated topic in Mesopotamian archaeology, ever since the first excavations at major sites in the southern alluvium between the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In recent years, it has again become the focus of renewed interest, accompanied by a new wave of field investigations. While the process of urbanisation in Lower Mesopotamia has been extensively studied from a landscape perspective (Hritz 2010; Hammer 2022; Giosan and Goodman 2025), research addressing the timing and pattern of the development of proper urban features within major southern Mesopotamian centres remains limited (Ur 2014). The size of large sites such as Uruk or Ur and their very long occupation extending into late periods have been a challenge for this kind of investigation. Moreover, fieldwork was largely confined to monumental areas and rarely extended to workspaces or residential districts. The paradoxical outcome is that, although southern Mesopotamia is the cradle of the very notion of an “Urban Revolution” (Childe 1950), currently available data on the earliest stages of urbanisation are more abundant for Syria and northern Mesopotamia, where sites tend to be smaller.

Although severely affected by heavy looting, the site of Rejibah offers a rare opportunity in this regard. It lies in an area that has been densely inhabited since the proto-urban phase. Currently estimated at almost 120 ha – though its southern limits remain to be determined – its size alone suggests that it was certainly not a satellite settlement. It was closely connected to major centres such as Ur and Eridu, and developed through the aggregation of several mounds, according to a complex logic whose functional and organisational implications remain to be documented.