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Updated: June 18, 2025
And now the Germans, with scientific as well as commercial and political purpose, with their railroad to pass down the valley through Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, which gives them predominant influence, have sent expeditions well equipped with scholars and engineers to the choicest sites in Babylonia, to Warka, the ancient Erech, and to Babylon itself; and with Teuton thoroughness they are excavating the most famous of ancient ruins and gathering fresh treasures of archaeological research.
As it stands the subordinate sentence reads "the king of Erech who built with the people of Erech". Either the object governed by the verb has been omitted, in which case we might restore some such phrase as "the city"; or, perhaps, by a slight transposition, we should read "the king who built Erech with the people of Erech". In any case the first building of the city of Erech, as distinguished from its ancient cult-centre Eanna, appears to be recorded here in the tradition.
Tradition already told us that Erech was the native city of Gilgamesh, the hero of the national epic, to whom his ancestor Ut-napishtim related the story of the Flood. Gilgamesh too is in our list, as king of Erech for 126 years. We have here in fact recovered traditions of Post-diluvian kings.
The chief seat of his worship is Huruk or Erech the modern Warka which becomes the favorite Chaldaean burying city, as being under his protection. There are some grounds for thinking that one of his names was Dis.
Lugalzaggisi of Erech enumerates an extensive pantheon, which contains most of the chief deities, and from which we may conclude that the temple of Nanâ was similarly the center of a large precinct in which the cult of other deities was carried on.
who is called 'the mistress of Uruk. The importance of Erech in the early history of Babylonia is emphasized by the inscriptions from Nippur, recently published by Dr. Hilprecht. It is natural, therefore, to find several deities of a purely local type commemorated by kings who belong to this region. The goddess Umu is not heard of again.
In both cases we may regard the fact as indicative of a gradual spread of empire towards the north, and of the advance of civilization and settled government in that direction. A king, who disputes the palm of antiquity with Naram-Sin, has left various records at Erech or Warka, which appears to have been his capital city. It is proposed to call him Sin-Shada.
After the dreadful deluge has come, Ishtar breaks out in wild lament that mankind, her offspring, has perished: "What I created, where is it?" She is called 'the mistress of the gods, and if Jensen is correct in an ingenious restoration of a defective text, Aruru is given the same epithet in a lexicographical tablet. The Ishtar occurring in the Gilgamesh story is the old Ishtar of Erech.
Now, the cycle of narratives of which Hasisadra's adventure forms a part contains allusions not only to Surippak, the exact position of which is doubtful, but to other cities, such as Erech. The vast ruins at the present village of Warka have been carefully explored and determined to be all that remains of that once great and flourishing city, "Erech the lofty."
These would correspond to the Antediluvian dynasty of Berossus, the last member of which was Xisuthros, the later counterpart of Ziusudu. In support of the exclusion of Nippur and Erech from the myth, it will be noted that the second city in the list is not Adab, which was probably the principal seat of the goddess Ninkharsagga, the fourth of the creating deities.
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