Why Humanity's First City Appeared Together with 'City Walls' | Joo Won-jun, Senior Researcher at the Hannim Bible Research Institute

Summary

This episode of 3PRO TV's 'Dialogue with God' features Joo Won-jun, a senior researcher at the Hannim Bible Research Institute, explaining the origins of humanity's first cities in ancient Mesopotamia. He describes how Uruk and other Sumerian city-states formed around city walls, how occupational specialization and writing (first as commercial accounting) emerged, and how Sargon of Akkad built the world's first empire. The discussion also contrasts Mesopotamian kingship with Egypt's deified pharaohs and covers the later neo-Sumerian revival. The video contains no investment or market-related content.

• Ancient Near Eastern history from roughly 3500 BCE is divided into about three and a half millennia, with Mesopotamia and Egypt as the two main centers.
• Joo Won-jun argues that the first city, Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, effectively began with the construction of city walls.
• Walls created a divide between urban residents and outsiders, enabling job specialization, guilds, and a sharp urban-rural status gap.
• Writing originated as commercial record-keeping, evolving from clay tokens and sealed clay envelopes into cuneiform accounting documents.
• Sumerian cities such as Ur, Uruk, Nippur, and Kish had strong individual identities, which the speaker compares to the rivalries of European city-states.
• Sargon of Akkad founded the first empire around 2350 BCE, creating titles such as 'King of the Four Quarters' and 'King of Sumer and Akkad'.
• In Mesopotamia kings were never deified, unlike Egyptian pharaohs, which laid groundwork for the idea of rule as delegated by the gods.
• After the fall of Akkad, the neo-Sumerian period produced most of the Sumerian records that survive today.