Sumer
The discovery of the treasures of ancient Ur put the Sumerians once
again in a prominent position on the world stage. They had been ab-
sent for more than 4,000 years. The Sumerians were the people who
in the fourth millennium BCEtransformed the vast and previously
sparsely inhabited valley between the Tigris and Euphrates into the
Fertile Crescent of the ancient world. Ancient Sumer, which roughly
corresponds to southern Iraq today, was not a unified nation.
Rather, it was made up of a dozen or so independent city-states.Each
was thought to be under the protection of a different Mesopotamian
deity (see “The Gods and Goddesses of Mesopotamia,” page 33). The
Sumerian rulers were the gods’ representatives on earth and the
stewards of their earthly treasure.
The rulers and priests directed all communal activities, includ-
ing canal construction, crop collection, and food distribution. The de-
velopment of agriculture to the point that only a portion of the pop-
ulation had to produce food meant that some members of the
community could specialize in other activities, including manufac-
turing, trade, and administration. Specialization of labor is a hall-
mark of the first complex urban societies. In the city-states of an-
cient Sumer, activities that once had been individually initiated
became institutionalized for the first time. The community, rather
than the family, assumed functions such as defense against enemies
and against the caprices of nature. Whether ruled by a single person
or a council chosen from among the leading families, these commu-
nities gained permanent identities as discrete cities. The city-state
was one of the great Sumerian inventions.
Another was writing. The oldest written documents known are
Sumerian records of administrative acts and commercial transac-
tions. At first, around 3400–3200 BCE, the Sumerians made invento-
ries of cattle, food, and other items by scratching pictographs (simpli-
fied pictures standing for words) into soft clay with a sharp tool, or
stylus.The clay plaques hardened into breakable, yet nearly inde-
structible, tablets. Thousands of these plaques dating back nearly five
millennia exist today. The Sumerians wrote their pictorial signs from
the top down and arranged them in boxes they read from right to left.
By 3000–2900 BCE, they had further simplified the pictographic signs
by reducing them to a group of wedge-shaped (cuneiform) signs
(FIG. 2-7is an early example; see also FIGS. 2-1, 2-16,and 2-17). The
development of cuneiform marked the beginning of writing, as histo-
rians strictly define it. The surviving cuneiform tablets testify to the
far-flung network of Sumerian contacts reaching from southern Meso-
potamia eastward to the Iranian plateau, northward to Assyria, and
westward to Syria. Trade was essential for the Sumerians, because de-
spite the fertility of their land, it was poor in such vital natural re-
sources as metal, stone, and wood.
The Sumerians also produced great literature.Their most famous
work, known from fragmentary cuneiform texts, is the late-third-
millennium Epic of Gilgamesh,which antedates Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey by some 1,500 years. It recounts the heroic story of Gilga-
mesh, legendary king of Uruk and slayer of the monster Huwawa.
Translations of the Sumerian epic into several other ancient Near
Eastern languages attest to the fame of the original version.MAP2-1The ancient Near East.Girsu
LagashSipparBishapurNineveh KalhuDur SharrukinSusaUrUrukAssur JarmoPersepolisBabylonHamadan
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KUWAITSYRIATURKEY0 150 300 miles
0 150 300 kilometers32 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST2-2White Temple
and ziggurat, Uruk
(modern Warka), Iraq,
ca. 3200–3000 bce.
Using only mud bricks,
the Sumerians erected
temple platforms called
ziggurats several
centuries before the
Egyptians built stone
pyramids. The most
famous ziggurat was the
biblical Tower of Babel.