The Sumerians were the first people to migrate to Mesopotamia, they created a great civilization. Beginning around 5, years ago, the Sumerians built cities along the rivers in Lower Mesopotamia, specialized, cooperated, and made many advances in technology. The wheel, plow, and writing a system which we call cuneiform are examples of their achievements.
The farmers in Sumer created levees to hold back the floods from their fields and cut canals to channel river water to the fields. The use of levees and canals is called irrigation, another Sumerian invention. You can play an irrigation simulation game at the British Museum Mesopotamia website by opening the link at the bottom of this page.
A typical Sumerian city-state, notice the ziggurat, the tallest building in the city. The Sumerians had a common language and believed in the same gods and goddesses. The belief in more than one god is called polytheism. There were seven great city-states, each with its own king and a building called a ziggurat, a large pyramid-shaped building with a temple at the top, dedicated to a Sumerian deity.
Although the Sumerian city-states had much in common, they fought for control of the river water, a valuable resource. Each city-state needed an army to protect itself from its neighbors.
Watch the video clip below from Discovery Education, as Nissaba, a young Sumerian girl, talks about her people's accomplishments. This clip is no longer available. By clicking on any links the user is leaving the Penfield School District website, the district is not responsible for any information associated with these links.
In , English archaeologist, C. Woolley learned archaeology from some of the best of his day, and now he was ready to strike off on his own. Many people felt that Ur was only a myth, but Woolley, the son of a clergyman , was fascinated by the stories his father told about Ur, which, according to the Bible, was the birth place of Abraham.
Abraham is a central figure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, three monotheistic religions. Woolley decided to excavate near the ruins of a ziggurat and began to dig two trenches. Here, Woolley confirmed that the site was the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur.
Woolley's discovery of Ur along with the artifacts and burials there give us a glimpse of life in Sumer 4, years ago. Woolley discovered graves of common people, but also royal graves, including that of a Sumerian queen named Pu-Abi.
At its height some 4, years ago, Uruk was the largest city in the world. Some estimates suggest the city held as many as 80, people at a time when the total human population was somewhere around 15 million.
And one of their most beneficial innovations was also among the simplest: the plow. The first plow appeared about B. And by B. All the efficiencies helped support a growing population, as well as a growing system of rulers and religion. And as their cities grew, so did their efforts in writing, math and religion. As far back as 5, years ago, the Sumerians had developed cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing.
Sumerian inscriptions on clay and stone tracked the trade and movement of grain and other goods, recorded Sumerian history, and even included cooking recipes and pornography. Thousands of Sumerian tablets still sit awaiting translation in museums around the world. The Sumerians also invented or utilized a wide-array of other more modern seeming innovations like wheeled chariots, the minute hour, and even possibly the first written work of literature — The Epic of Gilgamesh.
According to the tablets, it was the gods who first told humans to take up living in cities in Sumer. But eventually, the gods decided to wipe out the human race with a deluge.
According to the myth, one particular god, Enki, tipped off a Sumerian king named Ziusudra that he should build a boat to save his people. In modern times, Sumer has captivated everyone from archaeologists to ancient alien conspiracy theorists. But the fascination with Sumerian society goes back much further in human history.
Both the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, which rose to control parts of the Middle East as Sumer faded away, continued using the Sumerian language in their religious rituals for millennia.
Excavations of Babylonian homes have uncovered tablets inscribed with the Sumerian language from long after the civilization itself was gone. And the Babylonians, who created the first star maps, seem to have inherited some of their knowledge of astronomy from the Sumerians as well.
The Babylonian people had two sets of constellations — one for tracking farming dates and another to recognize the gods. Sargon ruled for 50 years, and after his death, his son Rimush faced widespread rebellion and was killed.
Naram-Sin considered himself divine and was leveled with charges of sacrilege. The Gutians invaded in B. Their era is marked by decentralized chaos and neglect.
It was during Gutian reign that the grand city of Agade decayed into wreckage and disappeared from history. The final gasp of Sumer leadership came in B. Ur-Nammu was known as a builder.
Figurines from the time depict him carrying building materials. During his reign, he started massive projects to build walls around his capital city, to create more irrigation canals, construct new temples and rebuild old ones. Ur-Nammu also did the considerable work of constructing an organized and complicated legal code that is considered the first in history.
Its purpose was to ensure that everyone in the kingdom, no matter what city they lived in, received the same justice and punishments, rather than rely on the whims of individual governors. Ur-Nammu also created an organized school system for state administrators. Called the Edubba, it kept an archive of clay tablets for learning.
Ziggurat and ruined walls of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur in modern-day Iraq. At the same time, Amorites had begun overtaking the Sumerian population. The ruling Elamites were eventually absorbed into Amorite culture, becoming the Babylonians and marking the end of the Sumerians as a distinct body from the rest of Mesopotamia.
The Sumerians. Samuel Noah Kramer. Ancient Mesopotamia: Leo Oppenheim. Sumer: Cities of Eden. Denise Dersin, Charles J. Hagner, Darcie Conner Johnston. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
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