The ruler was seen as perhaps the most important conduit through which the gods
made their wishes known and he then had to implement their commands with the help
of the priests. Failure to do so in the appropriate way led to tragedy and devastation
such as that seen at the end of the Agade period.
The trades represented within the cities included those which relied on local raw
materials such as the potters and the weavers and the latter also produced textiles of
various qualities for export. Others such as the metalworkers used imported raw
materials, and the more valuable the materials, the tighter was the control exercised
by one of the two great public institutions generally referred to as the palace and the
temple. By the end of the third millennium, there is some evidence for the emergence
of private enterprise as well; merchants, for example, seem to have worked both on
behalf of the temple and for themselves (Crawford this volume). In spite of our lack
of information in some areas, it is obvious that the cities of the late third millennium
were among the most sophisticated and prosperous in their world and that they
marked a remarkable development from the small settlements of the earlier Ubaid.
The adjective ‘Sumerian’ is used in three different ways: to describe a language, a
culture, and a people, but these terms are not coterminous. The language is the easiest
to define, but it too probably came in part from the amalgamation of earlier languages
(see below) and was written and probably spoken by people of different ethnic back-
grounds. For example, texts written in Sumerian and dating from the middle of the
third millennium were signed by scribes with Akkadian names, suggesting that they
were Semites rather than Sumerians (Biggs 1967 ).
The Sumerian language has a number of very specific characteristics which dis-
tinguish it from any other known language ancient or modern (Cunningham this
volume). It also has a number of loan words which provide some of the strongest
evidence we have for the varied origins of the inhabitants of south Mesopotamia (Black
2007 : 6 , 12 ; for a classic exposition cf. Oppenheim 1964 : chapter 1 ).These words appear
in the earliest texts which we can decipher with any certainty and date to the late Uruk
period, that is to say, to the last quarter of the fourth millennium (Rubio 1999 : 2 ). It
has also been suggested that the decimal system found in some of these very early texts
is a pre-Sumerian substrate survival. Some profession names are also generally thought
to be pre-Sumerian, while the undoubtedly Sumerian ones tend to be for more
sophisticated urban-based professions such as that of scribe, perhaps suggesting that
society was not very well developed before the Sumerians immigrated to the area.
Attempts have been made by some scholars to identify one or possibly two pre-
Sumerian languages but their findings have been challenged in more recent times
(Rubio 1999 : 3 ff.). Some non-Sumerian place names may also be evidence for pre-
Sumerian inhabitants and it is clear that words associated with imported technologies
such as wine-making were brought in with the technology and suggest a patchwork of
languages and dialects throughout the greater region.
The question of when the Sumerian element of the population arrived in southern
Iraq has been much debated. Arguments have been made for their presence from the
time of the earliest inhabitants, based on the perceived continuity in the pottery styles
and of monumental architecture. Others would date their arrival to the beginning of
the fourth millennium in the early Uruk phase, or even to the beginning of the third.
There is no clear evidence from either the archaeological or the textual record in the
period of fourteen or so centuries from the late Uruk period to the advent of the first
–– Introduction ––