Lecture 30: Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization
may have had 20,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. They lived in whitewashed mud-
brick houses along narrow streets. At the center, on an arti¿ cial mound 12
meters high, stood the “White Temple,” dedicated to the goddess Inanna, a
goddess of both love and war. Around the main part of the city was a massive
wall, more than 7 meters tall in some places. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the
world’s oldest recorded epic, includes a description of Uruk, which though
written down only around 1200 B.C.E., may capture something of the city’s
appearance in the reign of King Gilgamesh, at about 2750 B.C.E. Modern
archaeology also allows us to imagine
what life in ancient Uruk may have
been like. We have an ancient map of
nearby Nippur dating from about 1500
B.C.E. The map shows the city’s walls,
gardens, and canals, as well as a large
temple complex.Sumer’s ¿ rst cities were the densest
and most complex communities that
had ever existed. Uruk’s 20,000 to
50,000 people lived in just 2.5 square kilometers, an area that would barely
have supported a single individual using the foraging technologies of the
Paleolithic era. Unlike foraging communities or the villages of the early
Agrarian era, cities were not self-suf¿ cient, as many of their inhabitants were
not farmers. So cities had to control nearby “hinterlands” of peasant villages.
They also traded along Mesopotamia’s great rivers and across the seas.Now we discuss some of the distinctive “emergent” properties of the earliest
Agrarian civilizations. Many city dwellers were specialists, dependent on
markets for essential supplies. A document from about 2500 B.C.E., the
“Standard Professions List,” mentions many different professions, including
soldiers, farmers, priests, gardeners, cooks, scribes, bakers, coppersmiths,
jewelers, snake charmers, and even the profession of king! Markets were
also vital because southern Sumer lacked basic materials such as wood. So
rulers supported merchants who traded within a “world system” reaching to
Egypt, North India, Central Asia, and Anatolia. (A world system is a large
region uni¿ ed by extensive trade networks.)Indeed, in Sumer, the
earliest rulers may have
been priests of some kind,
as many of the earliest large
buildings seem to have been
temples rather than palaces.