Which Sumerian city gave us the earliest known written epic hero?

Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia - the mound of Warka in modern Iraq - has a decent claim to being the first real city anywhere. By around 3100 BC it may have held between forty and eighty thousand people inside a wall some nine kilometres round, at a moment when nowhere else on the planet had gathered that many strangers into one place. Archaeologists named an entire period of prehistory after it.

Its king in legend was Gilgamesh, hero of the oldest epic we have. The poem opens and closes on the walls of Uruk, inviting the listener to walk them and inspect the brickwork - a boast about civic engineering wrapped around a story about failing to escape death.

The city has a second and larger claim. The earliest writing yet found comes from its temple precincts: proto-cuneiform tablets of around 3300 BC, impressed into clay. They are not poetry. They are accounts - measures of barley, quantities of beer, numbers of sheep, and the names of the officials responsible. Writing appears to have been invented to keep track of stock, and only afterwards discovered that it could carry a story about a king who could not accept that his friend had died.