Sumer

• 1. Introduction

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  Sumer is the earliest known civilization, rooted in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now south-central Iraq. It emerged during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages, somewhere between the fifth and fourth millennium BC. Sumerian farmers worked the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, growing more grain than they needed, and that surplus let them build the first urban settlements. From two of those settlements, the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr, come the world's earliest known written texts, dated to around 3350 BC, following a period of proto-writing reaching back to around 4000 BC. Who built those cities, which gods they answered to, and how a scatter of farming towns became the source of writing itself, is the story clay tablets and ruined temples still have to tell.

• 2. Who The Sumerians Were

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  In their own inscriptions, the Sumerians called their land Kengir, the Country of the noble lords, and their language Emegir. The name history remembers, Sumer, actually comes from Akkadian, the tongue of the Semitic-speaking people who later took over the Sumerian city-states from the northwest. Scholars still do not agree on how the Akkadian term šumerû developed into that name. Three related words for southern Mesopotamia, Hebrew Šinʿar, Egyptian Sngr and Hittite Šanhar, may be western versions of the same word.

  Where the Sumerians themselves came from is even less settled. Most historians place the first permanent settlement of the region between roughly 5500 and 3300 BC, by a people speaking Sumerian, a language with no known relatives and no ties to any Indo-European or Semitic tongue. Other researchers have proposed a North African origin, with farmers migrating out of a once-green Sahara. A 2016 study by Lazaridis and colleagues found a partial North African signature in the genomes of Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic people, though it did not test Sumerians directly. That theory runs against strong evidence that farming itself first began in the Fertile Crescent.

  Sumerian legend offers a different clue. Texts describe Dilmun as the home city of the land of Sumer, and in Sumerian mythology it was also the home of the god Enki. Some scholars have proposed Dilmun, identified with the island of Bahrain, as the Sumerians' ancestral homeland, a claim supported by the discovery there of Mesopotamian-style round stone disks, though it remains unproven. The researcher Juris Zarins has argued instead that the Sumerians once lived along the coast of Eastern Arabia, in today's Persian Gulf, before rising seas flooded the region at the end of the Ice Age.

  Before any of these people, a population scholars call the Ubaidians, who evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia, may have been the first to civilize Sumer. Sumerian texts never mention them, but they are credited with draining marshes for agriculture and building the region's first trades in weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry and pottery. At Eridu, one of the region's oldest cities, three separate groups may have merged: Ubaidian farmers living in mud-brick huts, nomadic Semitic-speaking herders living in black tents, and marsh-dwelling fisher folk in reed huts, who may have been the direct ancestors of the Sumerians. Modern genetics offers one more thread: the closest living population to the ancient Sumerians is said to be the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq.

• 3. Digging Up Sumer

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  The word Sumer first reached the public on the 17th of January 1869, when the French scholar Jules Oppert used it in a lecture, the earliest known appearance of the name in modern scholarship. Real excavation began soon after: the French archeologist Ernest de Sarzec started digging at Girsu in 1877, John Punnett Peters of the University of Pennsylvania worked at Nippur between 1889 and 1900, and the German archeologist Robert Koldewey excavated Shuruppak in 1902 and 1903. Their finds reached print in Léon Heuzey's 1884 volume on de Sarzec's discoveries, François Thureau-Dangin's 1905 study of Sumerian and Akkadian inscriptions, and Arno Poebel's 1923 grammar, the book that gave scholars their first real grip on how the Sumerian language worked. Their digs eventually traced a chain of independent city-states stretching from Eridu on the Persian Gulf coast to Mari, some 330 kilometres northwest of Agade.

• 4. Cities, Kings And Conquest

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  Reliable written history in Sumer opens with Enmebaragesi, a king of the first dynasty of Kish who reigned during the Early Dynastic I period, though the record stays hard to read until the Early Dynastic III period, around the 23rd century BC. Each city-state by then answered to its own patron god or goddess, worshipped at a central temple, and was ruled by either a priestly governor called an ensi or a king called a lugal.

  One of the first empires in history belonged to Eannatum of Lagash, who annexed nearly all of Sumer, including Kish, Uruk, Ur and Larsa, and forced tribute from Lagash's rival city Umma. His Stele of the Vultures depicts vultures pecking at the severed heads of his defeated enemies, and his realm reached into Elam and along the Persian Gulf before collapsing soon after his death. Lugal-zage-si, priest-king of Umma, later overthrew Lagash's dynasty, conquered Uruk and made it his capital, and claimed an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He was the last ethnically Sumerian king to rule before Sargon of Akkad.

  Sargon of Akkad founded the Akkadian Empire around 2334 BC, the first state to unite most of Mesopotamia.

  When Akkad's last strong ruler, Shar-Kali-Sharri, died around 2218 BC, the semi-nomadic Gutian people from the Zagros Mountains gradually seized Akkadian territory, taking the capital itself in 2193 BC. The Akkadian Empire's final collapse in 2154 BC marked the height of Gutian power, a period so poorly documented that historians treat it as a dark age. Utu-hengal of Uruk broke Gutian rule around 2119 BC by defeating their last king, Tirigan, and Ur-Nammu of Ur then overthrew Utu-hengal in turn, founding the Third Dynasty of Ur in 2112 BC.

  Under Ur-Nammu and his successor Shulgi, the Third Dynasty of Ur extended its power as far as southern Assyria, though later historians' label for the period, a Sumerian renaissance, is misleading, since the region was growing more Semitic, not less. Waves of Amorite migrants, called Martu, founded rival power centers at Isin, Larsa and Eshnunna even as Ur III held on. The kingdom's farmland was also failing: poor drainage and evaporation built up salt in irrigated soil, forcing farmers to swap wheat for the more salt-tolerant barley, and between 2100 and 1700 BC the population of the region is estimated to have fallen by nearly three-fifths. Elamite forces sacked Ur under king Ibbi-Sin around 2028 BC, and Sumer passed into Amorite hands, with the Amorite states of the next two centuries later remembered as the Dynasty of Isin. That dynasty ended when Hammurabi united Mesopotamia under Babylonian rule around 1800 BC. Centuries later, rulers of Assyria and Babylonia still reached for Sargon's old title, King of Sumer and Akkad; Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria claimed it after about 1225 BC.

• 5. Writing And The Epic

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  Clay tablets are Sumer's largest archaeological legacy, hundreds of thousands of them, covering personal letters, business receipts, word lists, law codes, hymns, prayers, stories and daily records. Sumerian writing began as picture-based hieroglyphs before logosyllabic cuneiform took over, pressed with triangular, wedge-shaped reeds into moist clay.

  The best-known work to survive this way is the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in the ruins of Uruk and written in standard Sumerian cuneiform. Spread across several clay tablets, it tells the fictional adventures of a king named Gilgamesh, called Bilgamesh in Sumerian, and his companion Enkidu, and it is considered the earliest known surviving work of fiction. At one point Enkidu is urged to drink the beer of Gilgamesh's people, gulps down seven jugs of it, and by the text's account grows expansive and sings with joy.

  Sumerian itself belongs to no known language family, unlike Akkadian, which sits within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages, and repeated attempts to link it to any other tongue have failed. It is agglutinative, building words by stacking units of meaning together rather than assembling separate words into sentences. The earliest surviving texts are also the hardest to read, since they often skip the full grammar and seem to have served scribes only as memory aids. By around the turn of the third and second millennium BC, Akkadian had largely replaced Sumerian as an everyday spoken language, though Sumerian went on being taught and used for religion, ceremony, literature and science in Babylonia and Assyria until as late as the 1st century AD. Among the many tablets that outlived Sumer's political collapse are prayers addressed to a crowded pantheon of gods, each with a city and a following of its own.

• 6. Gods And The Afterlife

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  At Eridu, Sumer's first city, Sumerian religion pictured creation as a hieros gamos, a sacred marriage between opposing male and female divine forces. The later Akkadian version of the story, the Enuma Elish, cast that union as fresh water, the god Abzu, mixing with salt water, the goddess Tiamat, whose offspring, the muddy Lahmu, gave their name to the gatekeepers of Enki's temple in Eridu. Sumerian tradition itself described the same mingling of silt and salt water producing Anshar and Kishar, the sky-pivot and earth-pivot, parents of Anu the sky and Ki the earth. Eridu eventually ceded its religious primacy to Nippur in central Mesopotamia, whose priests held political sway over the rest of the Sumerian city-states for the remainder of the period.

  An, whose very name means sky in Sumerian, personified heaven itself, paired with his consort Ki, whose name means earth. Every city-state kept its own patron god, honored at its own temple and served by its own priest-king, though the gods of one city were freely recognized elsewhere. Enki, worshipped at Eridu, ruled the fresh waters beneath the ground and was credited with giving humanity its arts, sciences and industries; even the first law book was said to be his creation. Enlil, god of storm, wind and rain, held the position of chief god and patron of Nippur, paired with the south-wind goddess Ninlil. At Uruk, Inanna, goddess of love, sexuality and war and the deification of the planet Venus, shared a temple with An, and some kings reenacted her mythic marriage to the shepherd god Dumuzid with the city's priestesses. Beyond this core group stood hundreds of lesser gods, and Sumerians believed all of them had shaped humanity from clay purely to serve them, a duty citizens could discharge through irrigation labor for the temple, or buy their way out of with silver.

  Sumerians pictured the earth as a rectangular field with four corners, ringed by peoples who defined the edges of the known world: the hill-dwelling Subartu to the north, raided for slaves and timber; the tent-dwelling, pastoral Martu to the west; Dilmun, associated with the dead and with creation itself, to the south; and the rival Elamites, frequent enemies, to the east.

  Death led to Ereshkigal's gloomy underworld, guarded by monster-flanked gates, where the dead existed as a ghost called a Gidim. Most Sumerians were buried outside the city walls beneath small mounds, with food and offerings left for the monsters guarding the way; those who could afford it tried instead for burial at Dilmun. At the Royal Cemetery of Ur, archaeologists found evidence of human sacrifice in the death pits, where Queen Puabi was buried accompanied by her own servants. Her burial also included a hoard of foreign goods, physical proof that Sumer's cities were never as isolated as their mudbrick walls might suggest.

• 7. Family, Law And Daily Life

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  The Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest such law code yet found and dated to the Ur III period, lays out how rigidly stratified Sumerian society was. Below the king sat two basic classes, the free lu and the slave, called arad if male and geme if female, and a woman's social identity shifted with her marriages, moving from daughter to wife to widow. In Sumer's earlier centuries, women served publicly as priestesses, owned property, conducted business and had their rights protected by the courts, and sons and daughters inherited equally. After roughly 2300 BC, that status eroded: women's control over their own property shrank, and female deities lost standing alongside them. Urukagina of Lagash, ruling around 2350 BC, recorded reforms banning the older custom of polyandry, prescribing that any woman who took multiple husbands be stoned with rocks inscribed with her crime.

  One Sumerian proverb paints the picture of an ideal marriage as a husband boasting that his wife had borne him eight sons and still wanted sex. Real marriages were arranged by the parents of the bride and groom, sealed with contracts on clay tablets, and made legal once the groom delivered a bridal gift to his bride's father. Brides were expected to be virgins, grooms were not, though neither Sumerian nor Akkadian had a single word for virginity, and assessments of it relied mostly on a woman's own account rather than any physical exam. Sumerians judged sexual acts not by morality but by ritual cleanliness, and both masturbation and anal sex were widely practiced without stigma; entu priestesses, barred from bearing children, used anal sex as a method of birth control.

  Sumerians grew barley, chickpeas, lentils, wheat, dates, onions, garlic, lettuce, leeks and mustard, fishing and hunting fowl and gazelle to round out their diet. They irrigated with the shaduf, canals, channels, dykes, weirs and reservoirs; the government could conscript labor, a corvée, to keep the canals clear of silt, though the wealthy could buy their way out of the duty. The Sumerian Farmer's Almanac lays out the yearly routine after the Akitu New Year festival: flooding then draining the fields, having oxen trample down weeds, dragging the ground with pickaxes, plowing and harrowing it three times, and pulverizing it with a mattock before planting. At harvest, three-person teams of a reaper, a binder and a sheaf handler brought in the crop, and oxen-drawn threshing wagons and sleds separated the grain from the stalks and chaff. Managing temple accounts for all this labor is credited with pushing the development of writing itself, around 3500 BC. Sumerians were also among the first known beer-drinking societies, brewing wheat, barley and mixed-grain beers from their plentiful cereal harvests. That surplus of grain, and the silver and barley used to price it, would soon draw Sumer into trade networks stretching far beyond its own fields.

• 8. Trade, Money And Legacy

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  Imports reached Ur from across the ancient world: obsidian from Anatolia, lapis lazuli carried from Badakhshan in what is now northeastern Afghanistan, beads from Dilmun in the Persian Gulf, and seals inscribed in Indus Valley script, evidence of a trade network centered on that gulf. Resin found in Queen Puabi's tomb at Ur turned out to have traveled from as far away as Mozambique.

  Carnelian beads recovered from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, dated to between 2600 and 2450 BC, carried a white etched design made with an acid technique the Harappans of the Indus coast had developed. Gudea, ruler of Lagash's Neo-Sumerian Empire, recorded importing what he called translucent carnelian from Meluhha, generally identified with the Indus Valley region.

  The interest rate on Sumerian trade loans was fixed at one shekel per mina a month, a rate of 1/60, sometime before 2000 BC, and it held at that level for about two thousand years. Large institutions kept their books in barley and silver at a fixed exchange rate between the two, and temples extended this commercial credit, priced in silver, to finance trading expeditions. Loans to ordinary farmers ran on harsher terms, priced in barley, with interest as steep as 1/3 to 1/2 of the loan itself. Rulers periodically issued clean slate decrees, canceling this rural debt and freeing bondservants, typically at the start of a new reign or after a war or failed harvest. The earliest such decrees on record came from Enmetena and Urukagina of Lagash, around 2400 BC.

  Two thousand years of near-constant warfare between Sumerian city-states pushed their military technology forward. The earliest war depicted in detail, fought between Lagash and Umma around 2450 BC, appears on the Stele of the Vultures, which shows infantry in copper helmets carrying rectangular shields, arranged in a formation close to a phalanx, disciplined enough to suggest professional soldiers. Sumerian forces also fielded early chariots, two- or four-wheeled carts crewed by two men and harnessed to four onagers, who carried battle-axes and lances.

  Wheeled vehicles, evolved from the potter's wheel, appeared in Mesopotamia in the mid-4th millennium BC, at almost the same time as in the Maykop culture of the Northern Caucasus and in Central Europe. Sumerian cuneiform stands as the oldest deciphered writing system, or the second-oldest after Egyptian hieroglyphs. Sumerian astronomers mapped the stars into constellations that fed into the zodiac and were later adopted by the Greeks, and they tracked the five planets visible without instruments. Their sexagesimal counting system, mixing base ten and base six, became standard across Sumer and Babylonia, and they were the first known to calculate the area of a triangle and the volume of a cube. Around 2600 BC, centuries after cuneiform first appeared, writing itself expanded beyond debts and inventories into messages, history, legend, mathematics and astronomical record-keeping, alongside the first known formal schools, run under the wing of each city's main temple. Whether cuneiform truly was the world's first writing system remains an open question, since older, undeciphered marks such as the Jiahu symbols and the Tartaria tablets have never given up their meaning.