Ancient Mesopotamia Part 1: The Sumerians (4100 – 1750 BCE)

He knows a lot about all kinds of stuff, Professor David Splane. If we are going to study world history, then let's start our journey all the way at the beginning. But where, or rather when, is the beginning? We don't have a magic mirror to peer into the past. In order to learn about a historical period, we need something physical to examine. So we can start by discussing the earliest known civilization, meaning the first civilization to leave behind enough artifacts that we can know many things about them. The region that was called Kengir by its inhabitants, though we know of it today as Sumer, was one of the first agricultural civilizations, and one of the first civilizations in the world in general, in the literal sense of a culture of cities. The plains of southern Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, were occupied from the 5th millennium BCE and into the 4th by a group of city-states with names like Uruk, Kish, Lagash, and Ur, the last of which is mentioned in the Book of Genesis as the birthplace of Abraham. Though inhabitants of Mesopotamia in that time were Semitic in origin and spoke a language related to Hebrew, the Sumerian language was neither Semitic nor Indo-European. In fact, it was related to no other ancient language we know of. They are therefore assumed to have been immigrants to the region, and a number of places have been proposed as their original homeland, including Western Asia, North Africa, and the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea. Instead of living as nomads with flocks of animals, the Sumerians settled in walled towns surrounded by fields that were owned by the local temple and rented to farmers, where they had the ability to grow enough grain to support populations in the tens of thousands and to survive bad harvests. But because Mesopotamia did not have a lot of rainfall and relied on the river water that flooded the plain, the Sumerians had to use a sophisticated system of irrigation ditches that brought water to entire communities, which every citizen was obligated to help maintain. Modern scholars have connected this sort of interdependency with the fact that Mesopotamian cities tended to have authoritarian rulers who enforced the cooperation needed to build and repair their agricultural infrastructure. Uruk, the largest of these cities with a peak population of around 40,000, was initially founded around 4000 BCE and became a city a few centuries later. It was part of a network of independent cities, which for the next thousand years were centered around large temples and their rulers. These men, referred to as ensi, may have been both priests and kings. Each Sumerian city had its own identifying symbol, which was carved on the seals used to mark tablets or clay storage jars. Each also had a temple that was devoted to their patron god or goddess. While Sumerian cities sometimes established colonies and trading posts in Upper Mesopotamia, to the north in Asia Minor, and to the east in Iran, their way of life, settled agriculture, urbanization, and a centralized government for each city-state seems to have spread to entirely different cultures throughout the Near East. For their livelihood, the Sumerians relied on growing barley and dates, as well as raising sheep and goats, and the temple's control over important commodities like grain, oil, livestock, and slaves encouraged the development of written inventory lists, which began as simple pictures of the commodities themselves, and eventually developed into cuneiform script, which we will discuss in a moment. From their animals they spun wool, and from their grain they brewed beer, which was so fundamental to their culture that the Epic of Gilgamesh says it was part of the process, along with lovemaking, by which the temple prostitute Shamhat civilized the wild man Enkidu over the course of a week. Sumer traded with Lebanon for wood, which was scarce in Mesopotamia, and it imported obsidian from Asia Minor, as well as gold and precious stones from India and Afghanistan. Examples of the Sumerian style of pottery have been found across Mesopotamia and Iran, and there is evidence of a Sumerian influence on the Egyptian art of the time. It's also possible that hieroglyphics were invented only after the Egyptians had seen Sumerian cuneiform. Starting around 2900 BCE, there were some structural changes among the cities of Sumer. Power shifted in at least some cities from priests to secular kings called Lugals, or great men, who established family dynasties. The character of these rulers is disputed. Some of them may have inspired the sort of despotic and tyrannical behavior attributed to Gilgamesh, the mythical king of Uruk, who, according to the Epic, forces the city's young people to labor for him. At the same time, the Lugals may have had councils with whom they would make their decisions, and around this time, the kings of some cities issued the first known law codes, which were described as limiting the power of the elite over the poor, the widows, and the orphans. The cities of this period, such as Ur, Kish, and Uruk, grew larger and absorbed the villages around them. They built walls for the first time to defend themselves from each other and from more distant states. The city of Kish fought a war with the Iranian region of Elam around 2700 BCE, and a ruler of Lagash named Ionatum conquered Uruk and other Sumerian cities around 2500 BCE, as well as nations beyond Mesopotamia itself, but his empire did not last beyond his death. This is also the period when cuneiform became a common method of recording information. The name means wedge-shaped, due to the fact that this script used reeds cut at an angle to incise characters made up of wedges into soft clay. The clay could then be smoothed over and reused, or it could be baked for more permanent documents. Though the earliest Mesopotamian texts were lists of commodities that used pictures of the objects themselves rather than symbols, the script eventually developed to the point that it could record literature. Stories were written about a mythological figure named Gilgamesh, which inspired the well-known Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Akkadian centuries later. The epic tells the story of the ancient king of Uruk, who is so harsh a ruler that the gods send the wild man Enkidu against him, but the two men become friends and have several adventures together. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh goes on a quest to find eternal life. Though he is unsuccessful, in the end he realizes that his city, with its temple, its walls, and its gardens, is the monument to his eternal greatness. In addition to poetry like the epic, from this time we also have religious hymns, diplomatic letters, laws, and proclamations. As the Sumerian culture of Lower Mesopotamia became mixed with the Semitic culture of the Akkadians, who also lived in the area, cuneiform was adapted to write their language as well, even though it was completely unrelated to Sumerian. Many of our texts are lists of parallel words in the two languages, which were used as dictionaries by scribes, who had to know both. Writing cuneiform, like writing hieroglyphics, was a difficult skill that only a few people would learn, because it was based on syllables, meaning fixed combinations of consonants and vowels, rather than on individual letters, like we do now, there were many more characters to memorize than in a conventional alphabet. This was done in schools called edaba, where scribes in training would live while they were apprenticed, and many of the tablets they wrote as practice have survived, because like other unimportant texts, they were accidentally baked when the buildings they were stored in burned down. The sovereignty of the cities of Sumer was brought to an end around 2200 BCE by the rise of the Semitic city of Akkad, which under the leadership of its king Sargon the Great, established an empire throughout Mesopotamia. This empire reached west to the Mediterranean, north to the Taurus Mountains, and south to the Arabian Peninsula. When a number of Sumerian cities rebelled against Sargon's son and successor, Remush, he destroyed them, and his grandson, Naram-Sin, expanded the empire into Syria. But after about 200 years, it was invaded and taken over by the people called Gutians, who invaded from the Zagros Mountains to the north. Around the same time, a Sumerian ruler of Lagash named Gudia made his city a local power that developed trade relations throughout the area. He also initiated a building program and legal reforms. He is often singled out for the many stone statues that he had made of himself. About a hundred years later, in the late 2200 BCE, a new Sumerian dynasty appeared in the city of Ur, which we refer to as the Third Dynasty of Ur, where the term dynasty refers to a succession of people from the same family, in this case rulers. For another century, this dynasty established an empire that extended to Asia Minor and Iran, in which an ensi was appointed to administer each province. This empire was mainly the work of the dynasty's second king, Sholgi, who may also have been responsible for the earliest surviving code of law, although the prologue of this text attributes it to Sholgi's father, Ur-Namu. Like the later code of Hammurabi, it regulates property, the personal status of free people and slaves, marriage, and crimes like murder and injury. This Sumerian renaissance came to an end when a group of nomadic Semites from the coasts of Palestine and Syria, the Amorites, moved east to Mesopotamia following a major drought that hit the region around 2200 BCE. The Sumerians never regained their dominance over the area as the Amorites were displaced by the Babylonian Empire founded by Hammurabi around 1800 BCE, and Sumerian stopped existing as a spoken language by around 2000 BCE. But because it had been used to compose the important religious and literary texts of the region, it continued to be used for this purpose alongside Akkadian. It is from around the time of the Amorite kings that we find the texts of Sumerian king lists, which are one of our sources of information for the rulers of the 3rd millennium BCE. These lists actually go back much farther, but the first kings they mention are considered mythical because like the first human beings described in Genesis, their lifespans are given in the hundreds or even thousands of years, and some of them are said to have ruled before a worldwide flood. Even the later rulers on the lists are portrayed very anachronistically, in the sense that these texts assume the following. One, kingship was bestowed on one man by the gods. Two, it passed uninterrupted from one dynasty to the next. And three, it moved over time from one city to another. This meant that even though every city had kings, only one at a time was king over all of Mesopotamia. But even though, during the actual period in question, some cities were in fact more powerful than others, the idea of a single Sumerian king seems to be an attempt to reconcile the actual independence of the cities of Sumer with the situation when the list was compiled, since by that time there had been regimes like the Akkadian Empire that did control the entire region. The Sumerians disappeared entirely from historical awareness until their material remains were discovered by archaeologists in the 19th century, and their written records were deciphered. But their neighbors, the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians, were already familiar to modern scholars of the Bible as well as classical historians. Their beginnings were murky, but let's move forward and see what we can turn up about them next.