Sumer (ancient region), Iraq

Sumer was a region in ancient Mesopotamia, the desert area of southern Iraq located between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The people later known as Sumerians first appeared in Mesopotamia between 4000 and 3500 BCE and established what is believed to be the first human civilization.

The Sumerians mastered skills in both building and farming, constructing massive city-states and cultivating crops such as barley and dates through expertly designed irrigation systems. The Sumerians also made numerous contributions to world culture. They invented the wheel, created the writing system known as cuneiform, and wrote one of the first works of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. A series of foreign occupations beginning in about 2000 BCE eventually destroyed Sumerian culture and spelled the end of the civilization of Sumer.

Background

The ancient region occupied by Sumer, in what would later become southern Iraq, is known as Mesopotamia, a Greek name meaning "land between two rivers." It was a crescent-shaped area located between the Euphrates River in the west and the Tigris River in the east. The river waters carried with them rich deposits of silt from mountains in the north. When the Euphrates and Tigris overflowed, as they often did, the waters spread silt across the floodplains, which fertilized the land for farming. The rich soil between the rivers earned Mesopotamia the nickname "Fertile Crescent."

The people who became known as the Sumerians are believed to have appeared in Mesopotamia in about 3500 BCE. They were not the first group of people in the region. Societies existed in the Fertile Crescent from at least 6000 BCE, and migrants from the Arabian Peninsula settled in the area in about 4000 BCE. The original Sumerians probably came from the area of the Caspian Sea farther north, at the boundaries of Europe and Asia. Some historians have asserted that the Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia well before 3500 BCE and that this year marked only a great increase in the region's population.

The Sumerians were a short people with almost uniformly black hair. Men wore wool kilts and had beards, while women wore gowns and braided their hair. The Mesopotamian land they adopted as their own was flat, sandy, and often marshy from frequent river flooding. The climate was sunny and hot, and rain was scarce. As a result, palm trees were one of the only forms of vegetation that naturally grew in Sumer.

Despite Mesopotamia's mostly arid conditions, the Sumerians developed ways to make the land flourish. They realized that silt from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers' floodwaters enriched their soil, but the region did not receive enough rain to sustain the growing of crops. To correct this, the Sumerians dug canals and dams to redirect water from the rivers to their farms. This allowed them to grow food such as dates and barley. Having mastered the land in this way, the Sumerians were free to focus on other aspects of building their society.

Impact

One of the principle features of the Sumerian civilization was its city-states. These were large, bustling cities usually surrounded by walls and boasting ziggurats as their tallest buildings. A ziggurat was a terraced, pyramid-like temple made of mud brick and used for religious worship and the storage of supplies. Most Sumerian city-states were home to between ten thousand and forty thousand people. The largest city-state in Sumer was Uruk, which may have held double these numbers.

Citizens' homes within the cities were made from mud bricks or marsh reeds that had been bundled together. The city-states were lively commercial centers. Trade was important to the Sumerians because it allowed them to acquire materials not native to Mesopotamia, such as wood and stone. The Sumerians also traveled for months to reach places such as Afghanistan, Turkey, and Lebanon to trade with merchants there.

Each city-state in Sumer was individually controlled by a king or another ruler. At no point did the Sumerian people as a whole peacefully attempt to form a unified political entity. Fertile land for farming in Sumer was always sparse, leading the monarchs of the city-states to fight almost continuously for ownership of territory. Over centuries of warfare, the Sumerians probably invented the phalanx formation of soldiers.

The Sumerians developed rich cultural traditions. They were a religious people who believed in many gods and goddesses. A deity was attached to almost every natural occurrence or other aspect of life. Anu was the god of heaven, while Enlil was the god of storms and wind. To Sumerians, the gods controlled human activity and needed to be regularly pleased through prayer and festivals. The people held many of these festivals in spring so the gods would grant them a bountiful harvest the following autumn by flooding the rivers with the ideal amount of water. The ziggurats of Sumer were used for some of this religious activity.

Another cultural creation of the Sumerians was the writing system known as cuneiform. This was not a language but a script of about one thousand characters used to spell words or parts of words. Sumerians used cuneiform to write the Sumerian language; any human language in the twenty-first century can be translated into the characters of cuneiform. The people used sharpened reeds to write cuneiform onto wet clay tablets and then hardened the tablets by setting them in the sun.

One of the most famous accomplishments of the Sumerians is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a narrative poem written in cuneiform in about 2500 BCE. The work tells of the fantastical adventures of Gilgamesh, a real king of the city of Uruk. In the story, Gilgamesh fights mythical beasts and seeks the secret to eternal life. The Epic of Gilgamesh is believed to be one of the oldest human stories ever written and is regarded as an important work of world literature.

Sumer gradually declined in influence beginning in about 2000 BCE with the land's invasion by the Amorite people. Centuries of war among the Sumerians themselves and between the Sumerians and foreign invaders proved to be Sumer's undoing. The infrastructure and culture of the once great civilization crumbled under conquest and was lost to history for thousands of years.

The existence of Sumer was rediscovered only in the nineteenth century by French and British archeologists who had been studying the ancient Assyrians in the Iraqi deserts. The history, art, literature, and other cultural creations of ancient Sumer became generally known around the world from that point.

Bibliography

Andrews, Evan. "8 Things You May Not Know about Hammurabi's Code." History, 17 Dec. 2013, www.history.com/news/history-lists/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-hammurabis-code. Accessed 29 Nov. 2016.

Andrews, Evan. "9 Things You May Not Know about the Ancient Sumerians." History, 16 Dec. 2015, www.history.com/news/history-lists/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-ancient-sumerians. Accessed 29 Nov. 2016.

"Dawn of Civilization (20,000 BC-4,100 BC)." Colorado State University, www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/iraq02-02enl.html. Accessed 29 Nov. 2016.

Finkel, Irving, and Jonathan Taylor. "Cuneiform: 6 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know about the World's Oldest Writing System." History Extra, 26 May 2015, www.historyextra.com/article/feature/cuneiform-6-facts-about-worlds-oldest-writing-system. Accessed 29 Nov. 2016.

Frazee, Charles A. World History Volume One: Ancient and Medieval Times to A.D. 1500. Barron's Educational Series, 1997, pp. 33–42.

Hall, Timothy C. The Complete Idiot's Guide to World History. 2nd ed., Alpha, 2012, p. 15.

"Life in Sumer." USHistory.org, www.ushistory.org/civ/4a.asp. Accessed 29 Nov. 2016.

Palermo, Elizabeth. "Lost 'Epic of Gilgamesh' Verse Depicts Cacophonous Abode of Gods." Live Science, 2 Oct. 2015, www.livescience.com/52372-new-tablet-gilgamesh-epic.html. Accessed 29 Nov. 2016.