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mesopotamia - sumerian figure - courtesy rosemanios - CC-BY

First of all, “Sumerian” applies to all speakers of the Sumerian language. So when writing about ancient Sumerians I will be combining  information about more than one city state to summarize a culture. Sumerian Civilization was composed of about a dozen independent city-states, with limits defined by canals and boundary stones.  Sumerian Civilization was continuous from the early 6th millennium BC until the rise of Babylon in the early 2nd millennium BC, a run of almost four thousand years.

The social structure of the Sumerians was very different than other societies, then or later. The Sumerian city states were each organized around its own temple and ruled over by a priesthood. The temple community city states of Sumer did not form alliances until much later. With the endless wars of defense, the role of the priesthood declined relative to the role of the warriors. Eventually the increasing importance of the warriors resulted in the rule of kings.

The Sumerians disappeared about 2000 BC.  In about 2000 B.C. Sargon created an empire in Mesopotamia which included the area of Sumer. But long before Sargon’s conquest Semitic peoples had also been entering and living in the area of Sumer. The Sumerian Civilization was made known to the modern world because of references to Sumer in writings found in the ruins of Babylon and other cities. These Babylonian writings were about a civilization that was ancient even in Babylonian times.

The Sumerians appeared at the dawn of history as a fully developed society with a technology and organization that was superior to all other societies of the time. They grew wheat and barley and practiced irrigation by creating earthworks to divert river waters. They raised farm animals and manufactured pottery. There were weavers, leather and metal workers. Because of all this industry, a class of merchants evolved to trade with other societies, which led to the earliest known writing for their ledgers and accounts. In fact, the Sumerians built an extensive commercial network by land and sea. They had seaworthy ships, and they imported items of wood, stone, tin and copper not found locally. They improved their roads, over which their donkeys trod, pulling “wheeled” carts, the wheel being an invention, or introduction, that wouldn’t come about for some time yet in other civilizations. The Egyptians never did invent the wheel, it was introduced to them by the invading Hyksos.

Sumerian writing is the oldest full fledged writing that archaeologists have yet discovered. The Sumerians wrote arithmetic based on units of ten, the number of fingers on both hands. Because of their their star-gods, they mapped the heavens and divided the heavenly circle into sixty units, from which our own system of numbers, and seconds and minutes, is derived. We owe them our basic units of time, the 24 hour day and the 60 minute hour.

The Sumerians were the first to start using bronze, thus ushering in the great Bronze Age of human history.

For more information about ancient Mesopotamia