The Sumerians: Inventors of Civilization
The Sumerians were the first people on earth to develop a literate, urban civilization. Living in the southern half of Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq, between roughly 4000 and 2000 BCE, they invented the city, the temple, the school, the law, the plow, the wheel, the sailboat, the bronze casting of metal, the seed drill, the surveyor’s transit, the 60-minute hour, the 12-month calendar, the cuneiform script, and almost every other essential technology of urban life. Their successor cultures preserved their inventions for a thousand years after the last Sumerian-speaking city fell, and the modern world still uses many of the things they first created.
This cluster page is a guided tour of the Sumerian world. It walks through their history, their cities, their religion, their writing, and their legacy. It links out to the Ancient Mesopotamia pillar, the Code of Hammurabi cluster, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Ziggurat of Ur.
Who Were the Sumerians?
The Sumerians called themselves “the black-headed people” (sag-gig-ga) and their land “the civilized land” (kengir). They lived in a dozen or more city-states in the southern half of Mesopotamia, including Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, Kish, and Umma. They were not, in the modern sense, a single nation; each city was a separate political unit, with its own king, its own patron god, and its own army.
The Sumerian language is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. It is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language, including the Semitic languages (Akkadian, Arabic, Hebrew) that surrounded it. The Sumerians were already living in Mesopotamia when the Semitic Akkadians began to arrive around 3000 BCE, and the two populations eventually merged. The Sumerian language, however, did not die; it remained the language of religion, literature, and scholarship throughout Mesopotamia for almost two thousand years after the last Sumerian-speaking city fell.
The Sumerian City-States
The Sumerian city-states were small, usually no more than a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of people, surrounded by a wall, watered by canals, and centered on a temple complex. The earliest cities date to the Uruk period (c. 4000–3100 BCE), and the canonical list of “antediluvian” cities — Eridu, Bad-tibira, Larak, Sippar, Shuruppak — suggests that the Sumerian cities had been founded long before written history began.
Each city was dominated by a temple complex called the e or ziqqurratu — the ziggurat, the stepped temple tower that became the characteristic monument of Mesopotamian religion. The patron god of the city was believed to live in the temple, and the temple staff — the priests, the scribes, the accountants, the craftsmen — were the largest single economic unit in the city.
The political leader of the city was the ensi (or, after Sargon, the lugal). The ensi was originally the head of the temple staff, and the office gradually became a secular, hereditary kingship. The lugal (literally, “great man”) was the king who ruled the city and led its army.
The Invention of Writing
The most famous of the Sumerian inventions is writing. The earliest writing was developed in the late Uruk period (c. 3300 BCE) as a way to keep accounts of the goods held in the temple warehouses. The earliest signs were pictographic representations of objects — a head of barley, a head of cattle, a jar of oil — pressed into wet clay with a stylus. Over the next few centuries, the pictures were simplified and rotated to a wedge-shaped script that we call cuneiform (from the Latin cuneus, “wedge”). The signs could represent whole words, syllables, or (in the latest stages) individual sounds.
Cuneiform was adapted to write many languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, and Old Persian. The last known cuneiform inscription dates to the first century CE, almost three thousand years after the script was invented.
The Sumerians also invented the school, the e-dub-ba (literally, “tablet house”). The e-dub-ba was a small institution in which young men learned the art of writing by copying lists of signs, then short formulas, then long literary works. The Sumerian school curriculum included mathematics, accounting, law, and literature. Many of the tablets excavated from the schools are student exercises, with the teacher’s corrections still visible on them.
Sumerian Mathematics and Astronomy
The Sumerians were the first great mathematicians. They developed a base-60 number system (the reason we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle). They solved quadratic equations, calculated square roots, developed methods of measurement and surveying, and used a sophisticated form of geometry to lay out their fields and canals.
The Sumerians were also the first astronomers. They divided the year into twelve months, each of thirty days, and invented the leap month to keep the calendar in step with the seasons. They observed the motions of the planets and the stars, and developed the first astronomical records. The constellations we know as the zodiac were first catalogued by the Sumerians and Babylonians.
Sumerian Religion
The Sumerian pantheon was large and complex. The most important gods were An (sky), Enlil (wind), Enki (water and wisdom), Ninhursag (earth and fertility), Utu (sun), Nanna (moon), and Inanna (love and war). Each major city had its own patron: An and Inanna at Uruk, Enlil at Nippur, Nanna at Ur, Enki at Eridu.
The Sumerian religion was pessimistic. The gods were powerful and largely indifferent to human suffering; the afterlife was a bleak, dusty underworld from which there was no return. The famous flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh — in which the god Enlil sends a flood to destroy humanity, and the hero Utnapishtim is saved for building a boat — is the oldest surviving version of the flood story that appears in the Hebrew Bible as the story of Noah.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving work of literature in the world. It tells the story of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, and his companion Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to distract Gilgamesh from his tyrannical behavior. After Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh sets out on a journey to find the secret of immortality. He fails, but he returns to Uruk with a new understanding of the human condition. The full story is told in Gilgamesh: The Oldest Story in the World.
The Decline of the Sumerians
The Sumerian city-states were united for the first time by Sargon of Akkad around 2334 BCE, and the Akkadian Empire gradually replaced Sumerian with Akkadian as the everyday spoken language. The Sumerian cities briefly regained their independence after the fall of Akkad, and the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112–2004 BCE) presided over a final flowering of Sumerian culture. The dynasty collapsed under the pressure of Amorite invasions, and the Amorites founded the First Dynasty of Babylon, which would eventually produce Hammurabi and the Code of Hammurabi.
The Sumerian language survived as the language of religion and scholarship for another thousand years, but the last surviving Sumerian literature dates to the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000–1600 BCE). After that, Sumerian was a learned language, like Latin in the medieval West.
The Legacy of the Sumerians
The list of Sumerian inventions is almost endless: writing, the wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the seed drill, the bronze axe, the brick, the arch, the vault, the ziggurat, the school, the library, the law, the calendar, the hour, the minute, the second, the 360-degree circle, the constellations of the zodiac, the first maps, the first recipes, the first proverbs, the first lullabies, the first love poems, the first funeral rites. The modern world, quite simply, is built on Sumerian foundations.