INTRODUCTION



Harriet Crawford

T

he heartland of the Sumerian world lay in what is today southern Iraq, an area of

parched but potentially fertile silt and marshland which lies between two great

rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Its first inhabitants were a group of people who

seem to have been of mixed origins and who were probably attracted to the region by

the rich reserves of game and fish, but we cannot tell what languages they spoke or

where they came from as they have left few archaeological traces and no written

records. By the end of the fourth millennium, when we have written records which can

be read with a degree of confidence, some of these people were writing in the Sumerian

language.

The initial settlers were constantly augmented by incomers, some of whom

apparently spoke Semitic dialects, the ancestors of modern Arabic. It is inaccurate to

describe this world as purely Sumerian. It is more accurate to say, as Cooper has

recently done (Cooper 2010 : 333 ), that we should think of southern Mesopotamia in

the third millennium, the period which concerns us, as a region ‘where Sumerian and

Semitic speakers together formed a remarkably unified culture’. Because of this, the

phrase ‘Sumerian world’ is used here as shorthand to describe the culture which was

developed in this region inhabited by a linguistically diverse group of people.

The region is a harsh one with a limited range of natural resources beyond the reeds

and wildlife in the southern marshes (but see Pournelle this volume), little rainfall, and

scorching summer heat. In spite of these conditions, the Sumerian plain saw major

achievements in almost every area of life from technology to social organisation and

Algaze (this volume) discusses some of these major innovations at the end of prehistory.

Arguably, the greatest of these was the invention of a writing system which when fully

developed was flexible enough to represent simple commercial transactions, historical

data and abstract thought. The script used small wedge-shaped signs, often impressed

onto clay tablets, to record a wide variety of languages and became the Sumerian

world’s most important export. (For example, diplomatic tablets found in Egypt

during the Amarna period, more than one thousand years later, are written in this

‘cuneiform’ script ). A complex mathematical system, using a base six as well as a base

ten, was also developed and traces of this can still be found today; for instance, in the

number of degrees in a circle. Both script and mathematical systems were used by what

became the first civil service, staffed by professional scribes (see Taylor this volume).

Almost equally important was the development of a complex irrigation system using