Uruk, Hellenistic

The site of Uruk (modern Warka; Greek Ὀρχόη, biblical Erech) lies some 110 miles (177 km) southeast of Babylon. A city already in the 4th millennium bce, Uruk had been continuously occupied since prehistory and remained an important center for the survival of cuneiform culture well into the Hellenistic era. At that time, the city was physically dominated by its two major temple precincts, that of the sky god Anu and that of the goddesses Ishtar and Nanaya. In contrast to Babylon with its Greek theatre, the long-running German excavations at Uruk have yielded no evidence of Greek-style buildings; rather, the temples and other structures were built in traditional Babylonian style. Members of the priesthood dominated the urban community, playing a prominent role in civic affairs as well as in the transmission of Babylonian scholarship. They continued to write their legal and administrative documents in Akkadian using the cuneiform script, although Aramaic had likely replaced Akkadian by now as the predominant spoken language. Traces of a Greek presence in Uruk include administrative bullae bearing inscriptions of Seleucid tax offices, as well as Greek personal names and occasional Greek words occurring in cuneiform tablets.