Sumer

Sumer

The Sumerians developed one of the earliest civilizations on earth (approximately 4500-1750 BCE). They invented the earliest writing system (so far there is no record of any earlier writing system). They developed mathematics that was hundreds of years earlier than other civilizations. Yet the existence of such a people and civilization was not even suspected until the middle of the 19th century. Even today, we don’t know where they originated and why they decided to migrate to a mountainous land with a desert-like hot and dry climate.

People had long known about the Babylonians because the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks had all come into contact with them and written about them. But no one knew that the Sumerians had preceded the Babylonians and had developed the writing, religious, and agricultural systems which the Babylonians adapted and modified later. In the early 19th century, British, German and French archeologists began to dig out the earthen mounds that are the remains of cities that once flourished thousands of years ago in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, a region called Mesopotamia ["between the rivers"] in the history books and called Iraq today. In the process of deciphering tablets written in the Babylonian language (called "Akkadian"), they came to suspect that the writing system was ill-suited for that language and thus must have been invented for an earlier, unknown tongue. Eventually, after a half-century of decipherment and excavation, the existence of the Sumerian language, people, and civilization was confirmed.

The Sumerians were never a major military power in Mesopotamia. At first, Sumer was divided into many independent city-states. Later, dynastic rulers arose. Powerful kings conquered other cities. Meanwhile Sumer’s neighbor at north, the Akkad, grew in power. Around 2330 BCE the Akkadian king conquered most of Sumer. The Akkadian dynasty was overthrown around 2150 BCE. This was followed by several short dynasties. Around 1750 BCE Sumer was conquered by Babylonia, which lasted, in one form or another, until 539 BCE.

Below is a map of Sumer and Akkad before the Akkadian dynasty:

The Sumerians developed a writing system which is considered the earliest in the world. The writing was inscribed on clay tokens and tablets. They were discovered during excavation of Mesopotamia sites.

The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BCE, the Sumerians used a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing by using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Below are examples:

(1) Clay seal and tokens

(2) Drawing of goat or sheep and a number above the animal

(3) Pictograph

By the 29th century BCE, wedge-shaped stylus were used to indicate logograms and phonetic elements, gradually replacing round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing. About 2600 BCE, cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language. This form of writing script is called “cuneiform” (Latin for wedge-shape is “cuneus”). Below is an example:

The Sumerians developed number and alphabetic systems. Note that their number system was not based on 10, instead it was based on 60 (i.e., a sexagesimal numbering system). Below are example of their number symbols:

Below are examples of their alphabets:

Below is a tablet showing Sumerian writing:

Using their writing system, the Sumerians wrote literary works. An example is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is an epic poem and is regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature and the second oldest religious text, after the Pyramid Texts. The story of Gilgamesh began with five Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (Sumerian for "Gilgamesh"), who was a king reigned approximately 2700 BCE. One of Gilgamesh's journey involved meeting a hero of the Great Flood, who told the story of the highest God decided to destroy the world with a flood. Below is one of the surviving segments of the Epic of Gilgamesh:

Another usage of the writing was to write legal code on tablets. The earliest know tablet has been dated to 2100-2050 BCE and the preface of the code on the tablet credited it to king Ur-Nammu (2112-2095 BCE). A discussion of the code (called the Code of Ur-Nammu) can be found on pages 91-95 of "History Begins at Sumer," available for download below.

The Sumerians were also good at arts. Below are two examples:

The Sumerians were good in mathematics. A mathematical tablet, named Plimpton 322 and is currently stored at Columbia University, was discovered in the Iraq desert. It contains column of numbers that corresponds to the Pythagorean Theorem. The tablet was dated to around 1800 BCE (in comparison, Pythagoras, who the theorem was named, was a Greek mathematician lived around 500 BCE, more than one thousand years after the Sumerians). The Sumerians left behind other mathematical tablets that showed that they had a high level of mathematical knowledge. Below is a picture of Plimpton 322:

Excavation of archaeological sites indicated that the Sumerians had developed complicated irrigation systems to deliver water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the hot and dry areas away from the rivers for farming. Wheels and plows were also found at the excavation sites. They may be the earliest civilizations to use such tools.

Below are publications on Sumer:

History Begins at Sumer (file size approximately 31 MB)