Habuba Kabira on the Euphrates bend in Syria lies 500 mls (800 km) from Uruk. Yet everything about it is typical of an Uruk period settlement in Sumer itself.
Its temples are built to the same design and in the same style of bricks as those of Sumer; they have yielded bevelled rim bowls that suggest a daily grain ration issued to temple workers, as well as tablets bearing numerals, seals and sealings, signs of official recording familiar from the cities of southern Mesopotamia.
Its fortification wall is the earliest known from a Sumerian town; but town and city walls soon after become a feature of the Sumerian heartland too.
Archaeologists seem agreed that Habuba must have been a Sumerian merchant colony, planted here to control the major trade route into Anatolia and the Levant.
