Sumeria: The Oldest Civilization - The Universal Story
The Sumerians - anything you think of - writing, government, temples, law - they did it first. Thousands of years before almost anyone else. Let's dive in.
By Aidan.Zellner / August 27, 2021 Sumeria: The Original Ancient Civilization The ancient Sumerians ruled ancient Iraq from 3,500 BC to 2000 BC. They were the original ancient civilization: anything you think of when you think of civilization – writing, government, temples, law – they did it first. And not just a bit earlier, hundreds even thousands of years earlier than most other ancient civilizations. They were formed from the first cities in the world joining together. About 500 years later Ancient Egypt came on the scene and joined them. But Sumeria is where human civilization really started. Let’s dive in, to ancient Sumer. The Ancient Sumarians This is the Ziggurat of Ur, a building in one of the major cities in Sumer. It was originally built around 2,100 BC by King Ur-Nammu, but had many later renovations. It was the central piece in a larger temple complex and was the administrative center of the city. It is a glorious piece of architecture and one of the oldest buildings in the world. It is made of mud – no trees really seem to grow around Sumeria, so they made very little out of wood, certainly not large buildings. Instead, they built their epic temple complexes out of mudbricks, the same material they used for their writing tablets (Image: Wikimedia). Ancient Sumeria was formed from a series of city-states banding together in roughly 4000 BC. The cities were all similar, they had a large temple complex at the center, bordered by a canal. Each had a population of roughly 50,000 people, with the total Sumerian population being between 800,000 and 1.5 million. Over time, they banded together, with one king invading the other surrounding cities and taking them over. The cities were in an almost constant state of war over the 2,000-year history of Sumeria. For different periods of Sumerian history, different cities dominated. The periods are named after the particular city that was in charge at that time (e.g. the Uruk period – where Uruk was in charge, the Jemdet Nars period – where Jemdet Nars was in charge). The thing that made Sumer different from the other random collections of city-states was its culture. The cities had a shared culture, shared gods and a shared language in a way that nowhere else in the world did. And this culture was sophisticated, they had a lot of knowledge about how the world worked. They had a complex system of metrology, using arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. They did a lot of large-scale agriculture, growing grains on some centralized state-owned fields and then distributing them out to the people. They also domesticated pigs, sheep, goats and cattle which they ate. They invented beer. Their children practiced multiplication tables. They had a wide variety of sophisticated crafts and trades – hammers, axes, chisels, nails, chariots, swords and scabbards, harpoons, and several types of boats. Really, they were probably equal or more advanced than the entirety of humanity up until about 4,500 years later, at the beginning of the Enlightenment (see our civilizations timeline here). The first written language: The beautiful cuneiform This is a cuneiform tablet. Cuneiform is the written language the Sumerians used to record things – like business transactions, how much grain a certain family would get – we even have examples of kids workbooks practicing their timestables. The tablets were made by taking clay from a riverbank. People would press the tablets into flat patties and then make marks in the wet tablet with a stick and let them dry. Once it was no longer needed, they’d throw it into a discarded pile and wet them again to re-use the tablet (Image: British Museum). The first-ever written language was cuneiform. We have a few random symbols carved into some bones from earlier sites, but nothing consistent and complex. Written language really first turned up in Sumeria roughly 4,000 years ago, the same time the first cities formed.This makes sense. Hunter-gatherer tribes don’t really need written language. Almost everyone you meet or interact with is someone you already know. All you need to do is talk to them – you don’t need to write anything down. You are constantly moving, so you don’t want to carry things with you, let alone heavy clay tablets. You don’t even have that many things you need to write about – like allocating grain, writing laws, or contracts. You only really need written language, laws, gods or even most of human culture when coordinating large groups of people, many of whom don’t know each other and can’t communicate verbally. This is why the emergence of cuneiform is such a big step. It shows people were starting to operate on a larger scale. Cuneiform is really a script, not a language. Cuneiform can be used to write a wide variety of different ancient languages, for example, Akkaidain, Hittite and Uratian. This is just the same way our Roman script can be used to write English, French, and German. Each character in cuneiform is formed through on...