The Universal Story
By / September 2, 2022

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 one of two shapes – a triangle wedge, formed from pressing the corner of a stick into the clay tablet and a long line, from pressing in the flat edge. It is also an incredibly difficult language to learn and read. A given character in Cuneiform can have several sounds and several meanings. Learning a cuneiform language generally takes even an expert linguist five to ten years.

Most excitingly, we still have enormous amounts of cuneiform that has not been translated. We have millions of cuneiform tablets sitting in museums that have not yet been translated by one of the very few researchers who still speak the language. You can actually buy one on ebay for about $100, if you want one in your home. We suggest you do. It’d be quite a conversation starter.

This is the oldest written story we have as a species – the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was written in cuneiform, more specifically Akkadian. It tells the story of a Sumerian king, Gilgamesh, slaying a giant beast with a “wild man”, from outside the city walls. The wildman then dies, and Gilgamesh essentially goes on a pilgrimage to find the meaning of life. It is a truly remarkable story, and echoes of it can still be felt in all western literature, from the Bible to the Great Gatsby. We are definitely going to do a post on it at some point. The total poem is written over twelve tablets of the size of the one in the image. It weighs over 100kg altogether. It really makes you appreciate smartphones (Image: British Museum).
This is the oldest written law we have as a species – the Code of Hammurabi. The code is written in Akkadian and named after Hammurabi, the sixth Babylonian king. The image at the top of the 7-foot sculpture is of Hammurabi himself with the Babylonian sun god. It is the origin of the phrase “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, as it set out the punishments a person should receive for particular crimes. It is considered the origin of the rule of law and is clearly one of the most important documents in human history. It was the first time we thought, “maybe, we shouldn’t just let powerful people punish whoever they wanted” and should instead have some consistent rules about what is or is not allowed. The punishments were harsh and unequal for people of different classes – slaves, freemen, women, so it certainly was not a treatise we would respect in the modern-day. But it is the seed from which many legal systems grew (Image: MBZT, Wikimedia).

Sumarians: Final notes

These are some statues from Sumeria, in particular from the Abu Temple from Tell Asmar, Iraq, from roughly 2700 – 2500 B.C. The figures are made from all sorts of different materials, including limestone, alabaster, and gypsum. The height of the tallest figure is approximately 30 inches (Image: theslideprojector.com).

The thing that strikes one immediately about Sumeria is just how advanced they were. If you were asked, how advanced the first civilization was, literally the first group of humans using written language – you would expect a people with a very rudimentary knowledge of the world. However, there are a fair few places on earth today, that are less advanced than Sumeria. Their maths and scientific understanding of the world was more sophisticated than almost anyone else for thousands of years. They had banks that had fixed exchange rates for silver and barley, who provided loans to businesses, with interest rates. Really, any modern system used to keep humans living together happily, the Sumerians had it. And they had it better than almost anyone else did for thousands of years.

Just imagine a different history. Sumer fell after being invaded by many other civilizations in the North in about 1,500 BC. But what if it didn’t? One could imagine some slight tweaks being made to history, and instead, Sumer could have continued to flourish. If this had happened, looking at the technology they had, and comparing it to the rate the modern English-speaking world progressed, they would probably be about on track to go through the industrial revolution in 1,500BC. Going forward from that point, if we assume they would have developed new technologies at a similar same rate, they would have landed on the moon before 500 BCE. It’s almost unfathomable. Sumeria – the high achievers of the ancient world. We should show them a bit more respect.

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