A little Background

The Sumerians developed one of the earliest civilizations on earth (3500-1750 B.C.), but the existence of such a people and civilization was not even suspected until the middle of the 19th century.  People had long known about the Babylonians, since the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks had all come into contact with them and written about them. But no one knew that the Sumerians  had preceded the Babylonians and had developed the writing, religious, and agricultural systems which the Babylonians adapted and modified later.  In the early 19th century, British, German and French archeologists began to dig out the earthen mounds that are the remains of cities that once flourished thousands of years ago in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, a region called Mesopotamia ["between the rivers"] in the history books and called Iraq today. In the process of deciphering tablets written in the Babylonian language (called "Akkadian"), they came to suspect that the writing system was ill-suited for that language and thus must have been invented for an earlier, unknown tongue. Eventually, after a half-century of decipherment and excavation, the existence of the Sumerian language, people, and civilization was confirmed.


Sumerian civilization originated in what is now southern Iraq, just upriver from the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  "Civilization" in this context means a settled town or city-dwelling people who possess a stable agricultural technology (including domesticated animals) and have developed a hierarchical system of social classes (peasants, laborers, slaves, craftsmen [smiths, masons, carpenters, potters, etc.], farmers, fishermen, merchants, doctors, architects, priests and temple attendants, bureaucrats, scribes, advisers, priest-kings). Since the climate of southern Iraq is hot and dry, agriculture requires an extensive irrigation system of canals and dikes. Often, the Sumerians wrote as if their civilization (agricultural techniques, cities, classes of people) came first, and people later. (Why do you think they thought this way?)  In such a hot climate, we find some recurring images and motifs:  the tree of life, shade, the desert or steppe beyond the irrigated areas, the storehouse for grain and other agricultural products, bricks for building cities and temples, and the measuring rod of the priest-king.

Sumerian cities were close agglomerations of one or two story mud brick dwellings.  These low structures were overshadowed by the temple of the god, "a massive staged tower" (Kramer, Sumerians 73) called a ziggurat.  Each city was sacred to one god, and the priest-king of each city followed the god's instructions on how to run it.  Perhaps as much as ¼ of the land surrounding the city was owned by the god (the temple as an institution); the rest was owned by "nobles" (ruling princes, palace administrators, and priests) and ordinary citizens (Kramer, Sumerians 75-77).  The Sumerians developed a form of writing called cuneiform around 3000 BC  This script began as pictographic writing but eventually developed into a "purely phonetic system of writing in which each sign stood for one or more syllables" (Wolkstein and Kramer 125).  This writing is called cuneiform because it consists of wedge-shaped marks which were inscribed into wet clay tablets with a reed stylus.  The tablets were then baked, thus preserving a brittle and heavy, but rather permanent record of a very old civilization.  For more on the Sumerians, read S. N. Kramer's "Sumerian History, Culture, and Literature" (Wolkstein and Kramer 115-126).