Sumer (/ˈsuːmər/) is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, modern-day southern Iraq, during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze ages, and one of the first civilizations in the world along with Ancient Egypt, Norte Chico and the Indus Valley. Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian farmers
were able to grow an abundance of grain and other crops, the surplus of
which enabled them to settle in one place. Prehistoric proto-writing
dates back before 3000 BC. The earliest texts come from the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr and date to between roughly c. 3500 and c. 3000 BC.
Name
The term Sumerian is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic-speaking inhabitants of Mesopotamia by the East Semitic-speaking Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg ga (cuneiform: 𒌦 𒊕 𒈪 𒂵), phonetically /uŋ saŋ ɡi ɡa/, or sang-ngiga, literally meaning "the black-headed people", and to their land as ki-en-gi (-r) (cuneiform: 𒆠𒂗𒄀) ('place' + 'lords' + 'noble'), meaning "place of the noble lords". The Akkadians also called the Sumerians "black-headed people", or tsalmat-qaqqadi, in the Semitic Akkadian language.
The Akkadian word Shumer
may represent the geographical name in dialect, but the phonological
development leading to the Akkadian term šumerû is uncertain. Hebrew Shinar, Egyptian Sngr, and Hittite Šanhar(a), all referring to southern Mesopotamia, could be western variants of Shumer.
Origins
Most historians have suggested that Sumer was first permanently settled between c. 5500 and 4000 BC by a West Asian people who spoke the Sumerian language (pointing to the names of cities, rivers, basic occupations, etc., as evidence), a non-Semitic and non-Indo-European agglutinative language isolate. It was not an inflected language, contrary to its Semitic neighbours.
Others have suggested that the Sumerians were a North African people who migrated from the Green Sahara into the Middle East and were responsible for the spread of farming in the Middle East. Although not specifically discussing Sumerians, Lazaridis et al. 2016 have suggested a North African origin for the pre-Semitic cultures of the Middle East, particularly Natufians, after testing the genomes of Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture-bearers. Alternatively, recent genetic analysis of ancient Mesopotamian skeletal DNA tends to suggest an association of the Sumerians with India, possibly as a result of ancient Indus-Mesopotamia relations: Sumerians, or at least some of them, may have been related to the original Dravidian population of India.
These prehistoric people are now called "proto-Euphrateans" or "Ubaidians", and are theorized to have evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia. The Ubaidians, though never mentioned by the Sumerians themselves, are assumed by modern-day scholars to have been the first civilizing force in Sumer.
They drained the marshes for agriculture, developed trade, and
established industries, including weaving, leatherwork, metalwork,
masonry, and pottery.
Some scholars contest the idea of a Proto-Euphratean language or one substrate language; they think the Sumerian language may originally have been that of the hunting and fishing peoples who lived in the marshland and the Eastern Arabia littoral region and were part of the Arabian bifacial culture. Reliable historical records begin much later; there are none in Sumer of any kind that have been dated before Enmebaragesi (c. 26th century BC). Juris Zarins believes the Sumerians lived along the coast of Eastern Arabia, today's Persian Gulf region, before it was flooded at the end of the Ice Age.
Sumerian civilization took form in the Uruk period (4th millennium BC), continuing into the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic periods. During the 3rd millennium BC, a close cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians, who spoke a language isolate, and Akkadians, which gave rise to widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and
vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a
massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological
convergence. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the 3rd millennium BC as a Sprachbund.
The Sumerians progressively lost control to Semitic states from the northwest. Sumer was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BC (short chronology), but Sumerian continued as a sacred language. Native Sumerian rule re-emerged for about a century in the Third Dynasty of Ur at approximately 2100–2000 BC, but the Akkadian language also remained in use for some time.
The Sumerian city of Eridu, on the coast of the Persian Gulf, is considered to have been one of the oldest cities, where three separate cultures may have fused: that of peasant Ubaidian farmers, living in mud-brick huts and practicing irrigation; that of mobile nomadic Semitic pastoralists
living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats; and that
of fisher folk, living in reed huts in the marshlands, who may have been
the ancestors of the Sumerians.
City-states in Mesopotamia
In the late 4th millennium BC, Sumer
was divided into many independent city-states, which were divided by
canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a temple dedicated to
the particular patron god or goddess of the city and ruled over by a
priestly governor (ensi) or by a king (lugal) who was intimately tied to the city's religious rites.
Apart from Mari, which lies full 330 kilometres (205 miles) north-west of Agade, but which is credited in the king list as having "exercised kingship" in the Early Dynastic II period, and Nagar, an outpost, these cities are all in the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial plain, south of Baghdad in what are now the Bābil, Diyala, Wāsit, Dhi Qar, Basra, Al-Muthannā and Al-Qādisiyyah governorates of Iraq.
History
The Sumerian city-states rose to power during the prehistoric Ubaid and Uruk
periods. Sumerian written history reaches back to the 27th century BC
and before, but the historical record remains obscure until the Early Dynastic III
period, c. the 23rd century BC, when a now deciphered syllabary writing
system was developed, which has allowed archaeologists to read
contemporary records and inscriptions. Classical Sumer ends with the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 23rd century BC. Following the Gutian period, there was a brief Sumerian Renaissance in the 21st century BC, cut short in the 20th century BC by invasions by the Amorites. The Amorite "dynasty of Isin" persisted until c. 1700 BC, when Mesopotamia was united under Babylonian rule. The Sumerians were eventually absorbed into the Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) population.
Ubaid period
The Ubaid period is marked by a distinctive style of fine quality painted pottery which spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. During this time, the first settlement in southern Mesopotamia was established at Eridu (Cuneiform: nun.ki 𒉣 𒆠), c. 6500 BC, by farmers who brought with them the Hadji Muhammed culture, which first pioneered irrigation agriculture. It appears that this culture was derived from the Samarran culture from northern Mesopotamia. It is not known whether or not these were the actual Sumerians who are identified with the later Uruk culture. The rise of the city of Uruk may be reflected in the story of the passing of the gifts of civilization (me) to Inanna, goddess of Uruk and of love and war, by Enki, god of wisdom and chief god of Eridu, may reflect the transition from Eridu to Uruk.
Uruk period
The archaeological transition from the Ubaid period to the Uruk period
is marked by a gradual shift from painted pottery domestically produced
on a slow wheel to a great variety of unpainted pottery mass-produced
by specialists on fast wheels. The Uruk period is a continuation and an outgrowth of Ubaid with pottery being the main visible change.
By the time of the Uruk period (c. 4100–2900 BC calibrated), the volume of trade goods transported along the canals and rivers of southern Mesopotamia
facilitated the rise of many large, stratified, temple-centered cities
(with populations of over 10,000 people) where centralized
administrations employed specialized workers. It is fairly certain that
it was during the Uruk period that Sumerian cities began to make
use of slave labor captured from the hill country, and there is ample
evidence for captured slaves as workers in the earliest texts.
Artifacts, and even colonies of this Uruk civilization have been found over a wide area—from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey, to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and as far east as central Iran.
The Uruk period civilization, exported by Sumerian traders and colonists (like that found at Tell Brak),
had an effect on all surrounding peoples, who gradually evolved their
own comparable, competing economies and cultures. The cities of Sumer could not maintain remote, long-distance colonies by military force.
Sumerian cities during the Uruk period were probably theocratic and were most likely headed by a priest-king (ensi), assisted by a council of elders, including both men and women. It is quite possible that the later Sumerian pantheon
was modeled upon this political structure. There was little evidence of
organized warfare or professional soldiers during the Uruk period, and towns were generally unwalled. During this period Uruk became the most urbanized city in the world, surpassing for the first time 50,000 inhabitants.
The ancient Sumerian
king list includes the early dynasties of several prominent cities from
this period. The first set of names on the list is of kings said to
have reigned before a major flood occurred. These early names may be
fictional, and include some legendary and mythological figures, such as Alulim and Dumizid.
The end of the Uruk period coincided with the Piora
oscillation, a dry period from c. 3200–2900 BC that marked the end of a
long wetter, warmer climate period from about 9,000 to 5,000 years ago,
called the Holocene climatic optimum.
Early Dynastic Period
The
dynastic period begins c. 2900 BC and was associated with a shift from
the temple establishment headed by council of elders led by a priestly "En" (a male figure when it was a temple for a goddess, or a female figure when headed by a male god) towards a more secular Lugal (Lu = man, Gal = great) and includes such legendary patriarchal figures as Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh—who
reigned shortly before the historic record opens c. 2700 BC, when the
now deciphered syllabic writing started to develop from the early
pictograms. The center of Sumerian culture remained in southern Mesopotamia, even though rulers soon began expanding into neighboring areas, and neighboring Semitic groups adopted much of Sumerian culture for their own.
The earliest dynastic king on the Sumerian king list whose name is known from any other legendary source is Etana, 13th king of the first dynasty of Kish. The earliest king authenticated through archaeological evidence is Enmebaragesi of Kish (c. 26th century BC), whose name is also mentioned in the Gilgamesh epic—leading to the suggestion that Gilgamesh himself might have been a historical king of Uruk. As the Epic of Gilgamesh
shows, this period was associated with increased war. Cities became
walled, and increased in size as undefended villages in southern Mesopotamia disappeared. (Both Enmerkar and Gilgamesh are credited with having built the walls of Uruk).
1st Dynasty of Lagash
Although short-lived, one of the first empires known to history was that of Eannatum of Lagash, who annexed practically all of Sumer, including Kish, Uruk, Ur, and Larsa, and reduced to tribute the city-state of Umma, arch-rival of Lagash. In addition, his realm extended to parts of Elam and along the Persian Gulf. He seems to have used terror as a matter of policy. Eannatum's Stele of the Vultures
depicts vultures pecking at the severed heads and other body parts of
his enemies. His empire collapsed shortly after his death.
Later, Lugal-Zage-Si, the priest-king of Umma, overthrew the primacy of the Lagash dynasty in the area, then conquered Uruk, making it his capital, and claimed an empire extending from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He was the last ethnically Sumerian king before Sargon of Akkad.
Akkadian Empire
The Akkadian Empire
dates to c. 2270–2083 BC (short chronology). The Eastern Semitic
Akkadian language is first attested in proper names of the kings of Kish
c. 2800 BC preserved in later king lists. There are texts written
entirely in Old Akkadian dating from c. 2500 BC. Use of Old Akkadian was at its peak during the rule of Sargon the Great (c. 2270–2215 BC), but even then most administrative tablets continued to be written in Sumerian, the language used by the scribes. Gelb and Westenholz differentiate three stages of Old Akkadian: that of the pre-Sargonic
era, that of the Akkadian empire, and that of the "Neo-Sumerian
Renaissance" that followed it. Akkadian and Sumerian coexisted as
vernacular languages for about one thousand years, but by around 1800
BC, Sumerian was becoming more of a literary language familiar mainly
only to scholars and scribes. Thorkild Jacobsen has argued that there is
little break in historical continuity between the pre- and post-Sargon
periods, and that too much emphasis has been placed on the perception of
a "Semitic vs. Sumerian" conflict. However, it is certain that Akkadian
was also briefly imposed on neighboring parts of Elam that were
previously conquered, by Sargon.
Gutian period
Following
the downfall of the Akkadian Empire at the hands of Gutians, another
native Sumerian ruler, Gudea of Lagash, rose to local prominence and
continued the practices of the Sargonid kings' claims to divinity. The
previous Lagash dynasty, Gudea and his descendants also promoted
artistic development and left a large number of archaeological
artifacts.
Ur III period
c. 2047–1940 BC (short chronology)
Later,
the 3rd dynasty of Ur under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi, whose power extended
as far as southern Assyria, was the last great "Sumerian renaissance",
but already the region was becoming more Semitic than Sumerian, with the
resurgence of the Akkadian speaking Semites in Assyria and elsewhere,
and the influx of waves of Semitic Martu (Amorites) who were to found
several competing local powers in the south, including Isin, Larsa,
Eshnunna and sometime later Babylonia. The last of these eventually came
to briefly dominate the south of Mesopotamia as the Babylonian Empire,
just as the Old Assyrian Empire had already done so in the north from
the late 21st century BC. The Sumerian language continued as a
sacerdotal language taught in schools in Babylonia and Assyria, much as
Latin was used in the Medieval period, for as long as cuneiform was
utilized.
Fall and transmission
This
period is generally taken to coincide with a major shift in population
from southern Mesopotamia toward the north. Ecologically, the
agricultural productivity of the Sumerian lands was being compromised as
a result of rising salinity. Soil salinity in this region had been long
recognized as a major problem. Poorly drained irrigated soils, in an
arid climate with high levels of evaporation, led to the buildup of
dissolved salts in the soil, eventually reducing agricultural yields
severely. During the Akkadian and Ur III phases, there was a shift from
the cultivation of wheat to the more salt-tolerant barley, but this was
insufficient, and during the period from 2100 BC to 1700 BC, it is
estimated that the population in this area declined by nearly three
fifths. This greatly upset the balance of power within the region,
weakening the areas where Sumerian was spoken, and comparatively
strengthening those where Akkadian was the major language. Henceforth,
Sumerian would remain only a literary and liturgical language, similar
to the position occupied by Latin in medieval Europe.
Following
an Elamite invasion and sack of Ur during the rule of Ibbi-Sin (c. 1940
BC), Sumer came under Amorite rule (taken to introduce the Middle
Bronze Age). The independent Amorite states of the 20th to 18th
centuries are summarized as the "Dynasty of Isin" in the Sumerian king list, ending with the rise of Babylonia under Hammurabi c. 1700 BC.
Later rulers who dominated Assyria and Babylonia occasionally assumed the old Sargonic title "King of Sumer and Akkad", such as Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria after c. 1225 BC.
Population
The first farmers from Samarra migrated to Sumer, and built shrines and settlements at Eridu.
Uruk,
one of Sumer's largest cities, has been estimated to have had a
population of 50,000–80,000 at its height; given the other cities in
Sumer, and the large agricultural population, a rough estimate for
Sumer's population might be 0.8 million to 1.5 million. The world
population at this time has been estimated at about 27 million.
The
Sumerians spoke a language isolate, but a number of linguists have
claimed to be able to detect a substrate language of unknown
classification beneath Sumerian because names of some of Sumer's major
cities are not Sumerian, revealing influences of earlier inhabitants.
However, the archaeological record shows clear uninterrupted cultural
continuity from the time of the early Ubaid period (5300–4700 BC C-14)
settlements in southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerian people who settled
here farmed the lands in this region that were made fertile by silt
deposited by the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Some
archaeologists have speculated that the original speakers of ancient
Sumerian may have been farmers, who moved down from the north of
Mesopotamia after perfecting irrigation agriculture there. The Ubaid
period pottery of southern Mesopotamia has been connected via Choga Mami
transitional ware to the pottery of the Samarra period culture (c.
5700–4900 BC C-14) in the north, who were the first to practice a
primitive form of irrigation agriculture along the middle Tigris River
and its tributaries. The connection is most clearly seen at Tell Awayli
(Oueilli, Oueili) near Larsa, excavated by the French in the 1980s,
where eight levels yielded pre-Ubaid pottery resembling Samarran ware.
According to this theory, farming peoples spread down into southern
Mesopotamia because they had developed a temple-centered social
organization for mobilizing labor and technology for water control,
enabling them to survive and prosper in a difficult environment.
Others
have suggested a continuity of Sumerians, from the indigenous
hunter-fisherfolk traditions, associated with the bifacial assemblages
found on the Arabian littoral. Juris Zarins believes the Sumerians may
have been the people living in the Persian Gulf region before it flooded
at the end of the last Ice Age.
Culture
Social and family life
In the early Sumerian period, the primitive pictograms suggest that:
"Pottery was very plentiful, and the forms of the vases, bowls and
dishes were manifold; there were special jars for honey, butter, oil and
wine, which were probably made from dates. Some of the vases had
pointed feet, and stood on stands with crossed legs; others were
flat-bottomed, and were set on square or rectangular frames of wood. The
oil-jars, and probably others also, were sealed with clay, precisely as
in early Egypt. Vases and dishes of stone were made in imitation of
those of clay."
"A feathered
head-dress was worn. Beds, stools and chairs were used, with carved legs
resembling those of an ox. There were fire-places and fire-altars."
"Knives, drills, wedges and an instrument that looks like a saw were
all known. While spears, bows, arrows, and daggers (but not swords)
were employed in war."
"Tablets were
used for writing purposes. Daggers with metal blades and wooden handles
were worn, and copper was hammered into plates, while necklaces or
collars were made of gold."
"Time was reckoned in lunar months."
There
is considerable evidence concerning Sumerian music. Lyres and flutes
were played, among the best-known examples being the Lyres of Ur.
Inscriptions
describing the reforms of king Urukagina of Lagash (c. 2300 BC) say
that he abolished the former custom of polyandry in his country,
prescribing that a woman who took multiple husbands be stoned with rocks
upon which her crime had been written.
Sumerian princess (c.2150 BC)
Sumerian
culture was male-dominated and stratified. The Code of Ur-Nammu, the
oldest such codification yet discovered, dating to the Ur III, reveals a
glimpse at societal structure in late Sumerian law. Beneath the lu-gal ("great man" or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic strata: The "lu"
or free person, and the slave (male, arad; female geme). The son of a
Lu was called a dumu-nita until he married. A woman (munus) went from
being a daughter (dumu-mi), to a wife (dam), and then if she outlived
her husband, a widow (numasu) and she could then remarry another man who
was from the same tribe.
Marriages were usually
arranged by the parents of the bride and groom; engagements were
usually completed through the approval of contracts recorded on clay
tablets. These marriages became legal as soon as the groom delivered a
bridal gift to his bride's father. One Sumerian proverb describes the
ideal, happy marriage through the mouth of a husband who boasts that his
wife has borne him eight sons and is still eager to have sex.
The
Sumerians generally seem to have discouraged premarital sex] but it was
probably very commonly done in secret. The Sumerians, as well as the
later Akkadians, had no concept of virginity. When describing a woman's
sexual inexperience, instead of calling her a “virgin”, Sumerian text
describe which sex acts she had not yet performed. The Sumerians had no
knowledge of the existence of the hymen and whether or not a
prospective bride had engaged in sexual intercourse was entirely
determined by her own word.
From the earliest
records, the Sumerians had very relaxed attitudes toward sex and their
sexual mores were determined not by whether a sexual act was deemed
immoral, but rather by whether or not it made a person ritually unclean.
The Sumerians widely believed that masturbation enhanced sexual
potency, both for men and for women, and they frequently engaged in it,
both alone and with their partners. The Sumerians did not regard anal
sex as taboo either. Entu priestesses were forbidden from producing
offspring and frequently engaged in anal sex as a method of birth
control.
Prostitution existed but it is not clear if sacred prostitution did.
Language and writing
The
most important archaeological discoveries in Sumer are a large number
of clay tablets written in cuneiform script. Sumerian writing is
considered to be a great milestone in the development of humanity's
ability to not only create historical records but also in creating
pieces of literature, both in the form of poetic epics and stories as
well as prayers and laws. Although pictures—that is, hieroglyphs—were
used first, cuneiform and then ideograms (where symbols were made to
represent ideas) soon followed. Triangular or wedge-shaped reeds were
used to write on moist clay. Large bodies of hundreds of thousands of
texts in the Sumerian language have survived, such as personal and
business letters, receipts, lexical lists, laws, hymns, prayers,
stories, and daily records. Full libraries of clay tablets have been
found. Monumental inscriptions and texts on different objects, like
statues or bricks, are also very common. Many texts survive in multiple
copies because they were repeatedly transcribed by scribes in training.
Sumerian continued to be the language of religion and law in Mesopotamia
long after Semitic speakers had become dominant.
A
prime example of cuneiform writing would be a lengthy poem that was
discovered in the ruins of Uruk. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in
the standard Sumerian cuneiform. It tells of a king from the early
Dynastic II period named Gilgamesh or "Bilgamesh" in Sumerian.
The story is based around the fictional adventures of Gilgamesh and his
companion, Enkidu. It was laid out on several clay tablets and is
claimed to be the earliest example of a fictional, written piece of
literature discovered so far.
The Sumerian
language is generally regarded as a language isolate in linguistics
because it belongs to no known language family; Akkadian, by contrast,
belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. There have
been many failed attempts to connect Sumerian to other language
families. It is an agglutinative language; in other words, morphemes ("units of meaning")
are added together to create words, unlike analytic languages where
morphemes are purely added together to create sentences. Some authors
have proposed that there may be evidence of a substratum or adstratum
language for geographic features and various crafts and agricultural
activities, called variously Proto-Euphratean or Proto Tigrean, but this
is disputed by others.
Understanding Sumerian
texts today can be problematic. Most difficult are the earliest texts,
which in many cases do not give the full grammatical structure of the
language and seem to have been used as an "aide-mémoire" for
knowledgeable scribes.
During the 3rd millennium
BC a cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the
Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influences
between Sumerian on Akkadian are evident in all areas including lexical
borrowing on a massive scale—and syntactic, morphological, and
phonological convergence. This mutual influence has prompted scholars to
refer to Sumerian and Akkadian of the 3rd millennium BC as a
Sprachbund.
Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian
as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd
millennium BC, but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred,
ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Babylonia and Assyria
until the 1st century AD.
Religion
The
Sumerians credited their divinities for all matters pertaining to them
and exhibited humility in the face of cosmic forces, such as death and
divine wrath.
Sumerian religion seems to have
been founded upon two separate cosmogenic myths. The first saw creation
as the result of a series of hieroi gamoi or sacred marriages, involving
the reconciliation of opposites, postulated as a coming together of
male and female divine beings; the gods. This continued to influence the
whole Mesopotamian mythos. Thus, in the later Akkadian Enuma Elish, the
creation was seen as the union of fresh and salt water; as male Abzu,
and female Tiamat. The products of that union, Lahm and Lahmu, "the muddy ones",
were titles given to the gate keepers of the E-Abzu temple of Enki, in
Eridu, the first Sumerian city. Describing the way that muddy islands
emerge from the confluence of fresh and salty water at the mouth of the
Euphrates, where the river deposited its load of silt, a second hieros
gamos supposedly created Anshar and Kishar, the "sky-pivot" or axle, and the "earth pivot",
parents in turn of Anu (the sky) and Ki (the earth). Another important
Sumerian hieros gamos was that between Ki, here known as Ninhursag or
"Lady of the Mountains", and Enki of Eridu, the god of fresh water which
brought forth greenery and pasture.
At an early
stage, following the dawn of recorded history, Nippur, in central
Mesopotamia, replaced Eridu in the south as the primary temple city,
whose priests exercised political hegemony on the other city-states.
Nippur retained this status throughout the Sumerian period.
Deities
Sumerians
believed in an anthropomorphic polytheism, or the belief in many gods
in human form. There was no common set of gods; each city-state had its
own patrons, temples, and priest-kings. Nonetheless, these were not
exclusive; the gods of one city were often acknowledged elsewhere.
Sumerian speakers were among the earliest people to record their beliefs
in writing, and were a major inspiration in later Mesopotamian
mythology, religion, and astrology.
The Sumerians worshiped:
An as the full-time god equivalent to heaven; indeed, the word an in Sumerian means sky and his consort Ki, means earth.
Enki in the south at the temple in Eridu. Enki was the god of
beneficence and of wisdom, ruler of the freshwater depths beneath the
earth, a healer and friend to humanity who in Sumerian myth was thought
to have given humans the arts and sciences, the industries and manners
of civilization; the first law book was considered his creation,
Enlil was the god of storm, wind, and rain. He was the chief god of
the Sumerian pantheon and the patron god of Nippur. His consort was
Ninlil, the goddess of the south wind.
Inanna was the goddess of love, beauty, sexuality, prostitution, and
war; the deification of Venus, the morning (eastern) and evening
(western) star, at the temple (shared with An) at Uruk. Deified kings
may have re-enacted the marriage of Inanna and Dumuzid with priestesses.
The sun-god Utu at Larsa in the south and Sippar in the north,
The moon god Sin at Ur.
Sumero-early Akkadian pantheon
These
deities formed a core pantheon; there were additionally hundreds of
minor ones. Sumerian gods could thus have associations with different
cities, and their religious importance often waxed and waned with those
cities' political power. The gods were said to have created human beings
from clay for the purpose of serving them. The temples organized the
mass labour projects needed for irrigation agriculture. Citizens had a
labor duty to the temple, though they could avoid it by a payment of
silver.
Cosmology
Sumerians
believed that the universe consisted of a flat disk enclosed by a dome.
The Sumerian afterlife involved a descent into a gloomy netherworld to
spend eternity in a wretched existence as a Gidim (ghost).
The universe was divided into four quarters:
To the north were the hill-dwelling Subartu, who were periodically raided for slaves, timber, and other raw materials.
To the west were the tent-dwelling Martu, ancient Semitic-speaking
peoples living as pastoral nomads tending herds of sheep and goats.
To the south was the land of Dilmun, a trading state associated with the land of the dead and the place of creation.
To the east were the Elamites, a rival people with whom the Sumerians were frequently at war.
Their
known world extended from The Upper Sea or Mediterranean coastline, to
The Lower Sea, the Persian Gulf and the land of Meluhha (probably the
Indus Valley) and Magan (Oman), famed for its copper ores.
Temple and temple organization
Ziggurats
(Sumerian temples) each had an individual name and consisted of a
forecourt, with a central pond for purification. The temple itself had a
central nave with aisles along either side. Flanking the aisles would
be rooms for the priests. At one end would stand the podium and a
mudbrick table for animal and vegetable sacrifices. Granaries and
storehouses were usually located near the temples. After a time the
Sumerians began to place the temples on top of multi-layered square
constructions built as a series of rising terraces, giving rise to the
Ziggurat style.
Funerary practices
It
was believed that when people died, they would be confined to a gloomy
world of Ereshkigal, whose realm was guarded by gateways with various
monsters designed to prevent people entering or leaving. The dead were
buried outside the city walls in graveyards where a small mound covered
the corpse, along with offerings to monsters and a small amount of food.
Those who could afford it sought burial at Dilmun. Human sacrifice was
found in the death pits at the Ur royal cemetery where Queen Puabi was
accompanied in death by her servants.
Agriculture and hunting
The Sumerians adopted an agricultural lifestyle
perhaps as early as c. 5000 BC – 4500 BC. The region demonstrated a number of
core agricultural techniques, including organized irrigation, large-scale
intensive cultivation of land, mono-cropping involving the use of plough agriculture,
and the use of an agricultural specialized labour fo
force
under bureaucratic control. The necessity to manage temple accounts
with this organization led to the development of writing (c. 3500 BC).
In
the early Sumerian Uruk period, the primitive pictograms suggest that
sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs were domesticated. They used oxen as
their primary beasts of burden and donkeys or equids as their primary
transport animal and "woolen clothing as well as rugs were made from
the wool or hair of the animals. ... By the side of the house was an
enclosed garden planted with trees and other plants; wheat and probably
other cereals were sown in the fields, and the shaduf was already
employed for the purpose of irrigation. Plants were also grown in pots
or vases."
The Sumerians were one of the
first known beer drinking societies. Cereals were plentiful and were the
key ingredient in their early brew. They brewed multiple kinds of beer
consisting of wheat, barley, and mixed grain beers. Beer brewing was
very important to the Sumerians. It was referenced in the Epic of
Gilgamesh when Enkidu was introduced to the food and beer of Gilgamesh's
people: "Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land... He drank the beer-seven jugs! And became expansive and sang with joy!"
The
Sumerians practiced similar irrigation techniques as those used in
Egypt. American anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams says that
irrigation development was associated with urbanization, and that 89% of
the population lived in the cities.
They grew
barley, chickpeas, lentils, wheat, dates, onions, garlic, lettuce, leeks
and mustard. Sumerians caught many fish and hunted fowl and gazelle.
Sumerian
agriculture depended heavily on irrigation. The irrigation was
accomplished by the use of shaduf, canals, channels, dykes, weirs, and
reservoirs. The frequent violent floods of the Tigris, and less so, of
the Euphrates, meant that canals required frequent repair and continual
removal of silt, and survey markers and boundary stones needed to be
continually replaced. The government required individuals to work on the
canals in a corvee, although the rich were able to exempt themselves.
As is known from the "Sumerian Farmer's Almanac",
after the flood season and after the Spring Equinox and the Akitu or
New Year Festival, using the canals, farmers would flood their fields
and then drain the water. Next they made oxen stomp the ground and kill
weeds. They then dragged the fields with pickaxes. After drying, they
plowed, harrowed, and raked the ground three times, and pulverized it
with a mattock, before planting seed. Unfortunately, the high
evaporation rate resulted in a gradual increase in the salinity of the
fields. By the Ur III period, farmers had switched from wheat to the
more salt-tolerant barley as their principal crop.
Sumerians
harvested during the spring in three-person teams consisting of a
reaper, a binder, and a sheaf handler. The farmers would use threshing
wagons, driven by oxen, to separate the cereal heads from the stalks and
then use threshing sleds to disengage the grain. They then winnowed the
grain/chaff mixture.
Art
The
Sumerians were great creators, nothing proving this more than their
art. Sumerian artifacts show great detail and ornamentation, with fine
semi-precious stones imported from other lands, such as lapis lazuli,
marble, and diorite, and precious metals like hammered gold,
incorporated into the design. Since stone was rare it was reserved for
sculpture. The most widespread material in Sumer was clay; as a result
many Sumerina objects are made of clay. Metals such as gold, silver,
copper, and bronze, along with shells and gemstones, were used for the
finest sculpture and inlays. Small stones of all kinds, including more
precious stones such as lapis lazuli, alabaster, and serpentine, were
used for cylinder seals.
Some of the most famous
master pieces are the Lyres of Ur, which are considered to be the
world's oldest surviving stringed instruments. They have been discovered
by Leonard Woolley when the Royal Cemetery of Ur has been excavated
between from 1922 and 1934.
Architecture
The
Tigris-Euphrates plain lacked minerals and trees. Sumerian structures
were made of plano-convex mudbrick, not fixed with mortar or cement.
Mud-brick buildings eventually deteriorate, so they were periodically
destroyed, leveled, and rebuilt on the same spot. This constant
rebuilding gradually raised the level of cities, which thus came to be
elevated above the surrounding plain. The resultant hills, known as
tells, are found throughout the ancient Near East.
According to Archibald Sayce, the primitive pictograms of the early Sumerian (i.e. Uruk) era suggest that "Stone
was scarce, but was already cut into blocks and seals. Brick was the
ordinary building material, and with it cities, forts, temples and
houses were constructed. The city was provided with towers and stood on
an artificial platform; the house also had a tower-like appearance. It
was provided with a door which turned on a hinge, and could be opened
with a sort of key; the city gate was on a larger scale, and seems to
have been double. The foundation stones—or rather bricks—of a house were
consecrated by certain objects that were deposited under them."
The
most impressive and famous of Sumerian buildings are the ziggurats,
large layered platforms that supported temples. Sumerian cylinder seals
also depict houses built from reeds not unlike those built by the Marsh
Arabs of Southern Iraq until as recently as 400 CE. The Sumerians also
developed the arch, which enabled them to develop a strong type of dome.
They built this by constructing and linking several arches. Sumerian
temples and palaces made use of more advanced materials and techniques,
such as buttresses, recesses, half columns, and clay nails.
Mathematics
The
Sumerians developed a complex system of metrology c. 4000 BC. This
advanced metrology resulted in the creation of arithmetic, geometry, and
algebra. From c. 2600 BC onwards, the Sumerians wrote multiplication
tables on clay tablets and dealt with geometrical exercises and division
problems. The earliest traces of the Babylonian numerals also date back
to this period. The period c. 2700–2300 BC saw the first appearance of
the abacus, and a table of successive columns which delimited the
successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system. The
Sumerians were the first to use a place value numeral system. There is
also anecdotal evidence the Sumerians may have used a type of slide rule
in astronomical calculations. They were the first to find the area of a
triangle and the volume of a cube.
Economy and trade
Discoveries
of obsidian from far-away locations in Anatolia and lapis lazuli from
Badakhshan in northeastern Afghanistan, beads from Dilmun (modern
Bahrain), and several seals inscribed with the Indus Valley script
suggest a remarkably wide-ranging network of ancient trade centered on
the Persian Gulf. For example, Imports to Ur came from many parts of the
world. In particular, the metals of all types had to be imported.
The
Epic of Gilgamesh refers to trade with far lands for goods, such as
wood, that were scarce in Mesopotamia. In particular, cedar from Lebanon
was prized. The finding of resin in the tomb of Queen Puabi at Ur
indicates it was traded from as far away as Mozambique.
The
Sumerians used slaves, although they were not a major part of the
economy. Slave women worked as weavers, pressers, millers, and porters.
Sumerian
potters decorated pots with cedar oil paints. The potters used a bow
drill to produce the fire needed for baking the pottery. Sumerian masons
and jewelers knew and made use of alabaster (calcite), ivory, iron,
gold, silver, carnelian, and lapis lazuli.
Trade with the Indus valley
Some
of the beads in this necklace from the Royal Cemetery dating to the
First Dynasty of Ur are thought to have come from the Indus Valley.
British Museum.
The trade routes between
Mesopotamia and the Indus would have been significantly shorter due to
lower sea levels in the 3rd millennium BCE.
Evidence
for imports from the Indus to Ur can be found from around 2350 BCE.
Various objects made with shell species that are characteristic of the
Indus coast, particularly Trubinella Pyrum and Fasciolaria Trapezium,
have been found in the archaeological sites of Mesopotamia dating from
around 2500-2000 BCE. Carnelian beads from the Indus were found in the
Sumerian tombs of Ur, the Royal Cemetery at Ur, dating to 2600-2450. In
particular, carnelian beads with an etched design in white were probably
imported from the Indus Valley, and made according to a technique of
acid-etching developed by the Harappans. Lapis Lazuli was imported in
great quantity by Egypt, and already used in many tombs of the Naqada II
period (circa 3200 BCE). Lapis Lazuli probably originated in northern
Afghanistan, as no other sources are known, and had to be transported
across the Iranian plateau to Mesopotamia, and then Egypt.
Several Indus seals with Harappan script have also been found in Mesopotamia, particularly in Ur, Babylon and Kish.
Gudea, the ruler of the Neo-Summerian Empire at Lagash, is recorded as having imported "translucent carnelian" from
Meluhha, generally thought to be the Indus Valley area. Various
inscriptions also mention the presence of Meluhha traders and
interpreters in Mesopotamia. About twenty seals have been found from the
Akkadian and Ur III sites, which have connections with Harappa and
often use Harappan symbols or writing.
The Indus
Valley Civilization only flourished in its most developed form between
2400 and 1800 BC, but at the time of these exchanges, it was a much
larger entity than the Mesopotamian civilization, covering an area of
1.2 million square meters with thousands of settlements, compared to an
area of only about 65.000 square meters for the occupied area of
Mesopotamia, while the largest cities were comparable in size at about
30-40.000 inhabitants.
Money and credit
Large
institutions kept their accounts in barley and silver, often with a
fixed rate between them. The obligations, loans and prices in general
were usually denominated in one of them. Many transactions involved
debt, for example goods consigned to merchants by temple and beer
advanced by "ale women".
Commercial
credit and agricultural consumer loans were the main types of loans. The
trade credit was usually extended by temples in order to finance trade
expeditions and was nominated in silver. The interest rate was set at
1/60 a month (one shekel per mina) some time before 2000 BC and it
remained at that level for about two thousand years. Rural loans
commonly arose as a result of unpaid obligations due to an institution
(such as a temple); in this case the arrears were considered to be lent
to the debtor. They were denominated in barley or other crops and the
interest rate was typically much higher than for commercial loans and
could amount to 1/3 to 1/2 of the loan principal.
Periodically, rulers signed "clean slate"
decrees that cancelled all the rural (but not commercial) debt and
allowed bondservants to return to their homes. Customarily, rulers did
it at the beginning of the first full year of their reign, but they
could also be proclaimed at times of military conflict or crop failure.
The first known ones were made by Enmetena and Urukagina of Lagash in
2400–2350 BC. According to Hudson, the purpose of these decrees was to
prevent debts mounting to a degree that they threatened the fighting
force, which could happen if peasants lost the subsistence land or
became bondservants due to the inability to repay the debt.
Military
The
almost constant wars among the Sumerian city-states for 2000 years
helped to develop the military technology and techniques of Sumer to a
high level. The first war recorded in any detail was between Lagash and
Umma in c. 2525 BC on a stele called the Stele of the Vultures. It shows
the king of Lagash leading a Sumerian army consisting mostly of
infantry. The infantry carried spears, wore copper helmets, and carried
rectangular shields. The spearmen are shown arranged in what resembles
the phalanx formation, which requires training and discipline; this
implies that the Sumerians may have made use of professional soldiers.
The
Sumerian military used carts harnessed to onagers. These early chariots
functioned less effectively in combat than did later designs, and some
have suggested that these chariots served primarily as transports,
though the crew carried battle-axes and lances. The Sumerian chariot
comprised a four or two-wheeled device manned by a crew of two and
harnessed to four onagers. The cart was composed of a woven basket and
the wheels had a solid three-piece design.
Sumerian
cities were surrounded by defensive walls. The Sumerians engaged in
siege warfare between their cities, but the mudbrick walls were able to
deter some foes.
Technology
Examples
of Sumerian technology include: the wheel, cuneiform script, arithmetic
and geometry, irrigation systems, Sumerian boats, lunisolar calendar,
bronze, leather, saws, chisels, hammers, braces, bits, nails, pins,
rings, hoes, axes, knives, lancepoints, arrowheads, swords, glue,
daggers, waterskins, bags, harnesses, armor, quivers, war chariots,
scabbards, boots, sandals, harpoons and beer. The Sumerians had three
main types of boats:
clinker-built sailboats stitched together with hair, featuring bitumen waterproofing
skin boats constructed from animal skins and reeds
wooden-oared ships, sometimes pulled upstream by people and animals walking along the nearby banks
Legacy
Evidence
of wheeled vehicles appeared in the mid-4th millennium BC,
near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia, the Northern Caucasus (Maykop
culture) and Central Europe. The wheel initially took the form of the
potter's wheel. The new concept quickly led to wheeled vehicles and mill
wheels. The Sumerians' cuneiform script is the oldest (or second oldest
after the Egyptian hieroglyphs) which has been deciphered (the status
of even older inscriptions such as the Jiahu symbols and Tartaria
tablets is controversial). The Sumerians were among the first
astronomers, mapping the stars into sets of constellations, many of
which survived in the zodiac and were also recognized by the ancient
Greeks. They were also aware of the five planets that are easily visible
to the naked eye.
They invented and developed
arithmetic by using several different number systems including a mixed
radix system with an alternating base 10 and base 6. This sexagesimal
system became the standard number system in Sumer and Babylonia. They
may have invented military formations and introduced the basic divisions
between infantry, cavalry, and archers. They developed the first known
codified legal and administrative systems, complete with courts, jails,
and government records. The first true city-states arose in Sumer,
roughly contemporaneously with similar entities in what are now Syria
and Lebanon. Several centuries after the invention of cuneiform, the use
of writing expanded beyond debt/payment certificates and inventory
lists to be applied for the first time, about 2600 BC, to messages and
mail delivery, history, legend, mathematics, astronomical records, and
other pursuits. Conjointly with the spread of writing, the first formal
schools were established, usually under the auspices of a city-state's
primary temple.
Finally, the Sumerians ushered
in domestication with intensive agriculture and irrigation. Emmer wheat,
barley, sheep (starting as mouflon), and cattle (starting as aurochs)
were foremost among the species cultivated and raised for the first time
on a grand scale.
