Sumerian Civilization Research Paper

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In about 3500 BCE, inland and seafaring networks converged in Sumer (today’s southern Iraq); the exchange of goods, information, and ideas gave rise to Earth’s first civilization. Sumerians invented writing in a script we call cuneiform, but other innovations were incalculably significant, such as a simplified concept of gods inhabiting statues sculpted in human form, and fulltime soldiers equipped and trained for battle.

The Earth’s first civilization arose in the land of Sumer beginning about 3500 BCE. Sumer was located in the southern part of modern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge and flow through desert landscapes to the Persian Gulf. Irrigation was necessary to make the desert fertile; but that was comparatively easy since both rivers accumulated silt in their beds when crossing the flat desert between higher banks of silt deposited in flood time. Consequently, during most of the year, the water levels of both rivers stayed above the plain, and by digging through the raised bank water would flow through irrigation canals and smaller ditches onto adjacent fields. When enough water reached the fields, wheat and barley grew luxuriantly in the fertile soil, allowing dense human populations to flourish as long as they maintained the irrigation channels by the cooperative effort of thousands of persons.

Connecting Seafaring and Inland Networks

Dependable and abundant harvests were essential for the support of the city dwellers who planned and supervised irrigation and the distribution of water to the fields. But the rise of Sumerian cities and civilization depended also on far-reaching exchanges of goods and information with peoples round about. Geography made Sumer a meeting place, where seafarers sailing along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and around Arabia into the Red Sea met overland donkey caravans and boats descending the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Shipping along Indian Ocean coastlands preceded the rise of Sumer by thousands of year, and Sumerian tradition affirmed that they arrived in the land of Sumer by sea from somewhere in the south, and then organized irrigation agriculture among “the black headed people” already living there. But when their distinctive civilization began to emerge, donkey caravans were still comparatively new, since donkeys were domesticated only about 1,500 years before Sumerian cities began to thrive. It took time to breed enough donkeys to carry goods across hundreds of miles and an even longer time to convince local inhabitants that it was profitable for them to permit caravans to travel cross-country without being robbed.

But when this was achieved by about 3500 BCE a new web of communication came on stream, connecting peoples along the shores of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea with inhabitants of west Asia as far west as the Mediterranean coast, north to the steppes and east into modern Afghanistan. Precious goods, as well as new ideas and skills, started to circulate throughout the whole region faster than ever before; and Sumer was the place where everything new and valued converged. No wonder then that this was where the world’s first civilization took form across the next five hundred years. Nowhere else did such a seafaring network interact with a comparable inland network. Like spiders at the center of a web, Sumerians were able to pick and choose whatever interested them; they began to invent new things, and some of their ideas and skills soon spread far and wide, influencing Egyptians, inhabitants of the Indus River valley and of the Eurasian steppe. A civilizing process thus set in, and all of humankind is now its heir.

Eventually the Sumerian style of irrigation, which allowed river water to evaporate in the fields year after year, made the soil so salty that grain could not grow and the land became a desert once more. (Egypt escaped such salting, for there the Nile flood brought a load of fresh silt to the fields each year; the water then drained away, carrying all the dissolved salt back to the Nile.) But until about 2350 BCE when Sargon of Akkad conquered the cities of Sumer and the Akkadian language began to supplant Sumerian as the common speech of southern Iraq, Sumerian priests, rulers, traders, soldiers, and farmers combined to create Sumerian civilization, and in due course transmitted that heritage to their successors in the land between the two rivers.

Cuneiform Script and Archaeological Finds

We know quite a lot about ancient Sumer because the Sumerians invented a durable form of writing, using a pointed reed to make marks on soft clay and then baking the resulting inscriptions. We call the script cuneiform. Akkadians wrote their language in the same way, and as familiarity with Sumerian speech decayed they made long lists of Sumerian words paired with their Akkadian equivalents. In the nineteenth century archaeologists dug up thousands of these clay tablets and soon learned to read Akkadian because it was a Semitic language resembling Hebrew and Arabic; then they used the word lists to learn how to read Sumerian, just as Akkadian schoolboys had done before them. Years of effort went into deciphering the Sumerian language, which has no known relatives. But by now experts can read Sumerian inscriptions with few uncertainties, and since thousands upon thousands of Sumerian texts have now been read we know a good deal about their society.

Other archaeological remains also tell their own story. Large mounds of mud bricks locate each of the dozen or so Sumerian cities, sheltering something like 10,000 to 30,000 persons, that arose along the banks of the two rivers between 3500 and 3000 BCE. But cuneiform inscriptions let us know how specialized priests played the key role in managing and elaborating everyday life in those cities, and it seems clear that priests from all the Sumerian cities exchanged ideas from the beginning. Their first great achievement was to simplify the spirit world, crowded by innumerable spirits inhabiting everything that moved, by deciding that seven great gods—earth, sun, moon, sky, storm, fresh water, and salt water— exerted overarching authority over everything and everyone, for each human body had a spirit of its own that wandered off in sleep (as dreams showed), and departed permanently at death. These seven gods, the priests decided, met on the first day of each year to determine what the next year would bring. And since melting snow in the mountains often raised the two rivers high enough to overflow their banks, erase irrigation channels and even, in extreme cases, change their path to the sea, Sumerians had much to worry about. Obviously they needed priestly experts to serve and please the high gods and persuade them, on each new year’s day, to preserve their civilization from disaster.

The way the priests set out to please the gods was to construct a home for one or more god in each city. They swiftly became monumental temples reaching toward the sky. In a magnificent room at the top they placed a statue in human form for each god to inhabit, and the priests made it their business to provide them with the most magnificent food, clothes, and amusement they could contrive, hoping that this would make the god eager and willing to reside permanently in the statue and protect the city. As the gods’ special servants, priests communicated daily with the resident god by prayer, and figured out his or her intentions by interpreting marks on the liver of sacrificed animals as well as by exact measurement of the movements of the sun, moon, and planets.

In fact, of course, disasters continued to occur, which only stimulated greater efforts to please the gods with rarer and more precious objects, grander temples and more elaborate worship. The process was unending, compelling the priests to expand the scale of irrigation agriculture to support the elaboration of temple rituals. They also managed flocks of sheep on grasslands and employed large numbers of persons to spin and weave fine woolen cloth to clothe the god and themselves. Temples also exported surplus cloth far and wide, exchanging it for timber, incense, metals, lapis lazuli and other valued objects lacking in the flood plain. Private families owned some of the irrigated land in Sumerian cities, but the temple estates were far larger than private holdings, and by endlessly seeking new rarities to please the gods, priests kept on expanding the range and scale of export and import.

It is probable that the priests modeled their ideas about the behavior of the seven great gods on the way Sumerian landowners in early times met to garner public support for a call to action, whether mounting a military expedition to cut timber, building a new canal, or erecting a wall to defend their city against rivals close at hand and/or raiders from afar. For as Sumerian wealth and population grew, cities began to quarrel over access to the life-giving water needed for irrigation, while pastoral raiders were tempted to seize grain and other goods by force instead relying on peaceable trade.

Military Might

By about 3000 BCE, the rising importance of defense against human enemies provoked the construction of massive city walls, and military commanders, initially appointed for a single campaign, gradually made their authority permanent. Eventually they commanded armies of professional soldiers, equipped with bronze weapons and armor, trained to keep in step and present a formidable shield wall to the enemy. Not surprisingly, military leaders sometimes clashed with priests over how to manage the cities. An uneasy alliance between priests and military men became normal. Over time military power predominated; but collaboration and occasional clashes of warriors with religious experts and devotees have continued to affect subsequent civilizations all the way down to our own time.

The enhanced role of military leadership in Sumer coincided with the rise of tribal and pastoral society on the grasslands of western Asia. Sheep and goats predominated on semi-arid fringes of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, but on the vast northern steppe, cattle and horses began to sustain a far more formidable military society. In the foothills independent agricultural villages soon found themselves caught between civilized armies and mounted steppe raiders, but to begin with the accomplishments of Sumer towered so high that Indo-European-speaking pastoralists on the steppes borrowed elements of Sumerian religion. As a result, Aryan, Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic gods of later times clearly resembled their Sumerian prototypes.

Beginning with Sargon of Akkad (c. 2350 BCE), military power tended to move north within the Tigris-Euphrates Valley as Semitic-speaking peoples mastered the arts of irrigation and other civilized capabilities. A long succession of territorial empires overran the once independent Sumerian cities until by slow degrees salt accumulated in the soil and their fields were abandoned. Thus the birthplace of civilization became a desert once again, yet the civilizing process initiated by the cities of Sumer continued to extend its range and power.

Significant Contributions

A brief list of Sumerian accomplishments will show how significant their contribution to subsequent human history turned out to be. Writing was Sumer’s greatest invention. It transformed record keeping and allowed accumulation of knowledge and coordination of effort beyond what unaided human memory permitted. In addition, copper and bronze tools and weapons, wheel-spun pottery, and cunningly incised cylinder seals used to imprint marks of ownership on jars for shipping and storage first appear, and may have originated, in Sumer.

Canals, dikes, plows, wheeled vehicles, and sailing ships also show up in Sumerian records for the first time, but some or all of them may have been invented elsewhere. Nevertheless, Sumerians spread these fundamental improvements far and wide. When new, Sumerian temples were by far the largest and most impressive buildings in the world, and the Egyptian pyramids, that eventually exceeded them in size, began with smaller structures modeled on the Sumerian example.

Finally, the Sumerian invention of a family of gods inhabiting statues sculpted in human form, each in charge of an aspect of nature and accessible to priestly experts through ritual and prayer, was an immensely persuasive notion that spread very widely and dominated the religions of Europe and west Asia until Judaism, Christianity, and Islam eventually superceded it. Moreover, full-time soldiers, systematically equipped and trained for battle were another Sumerian invention of incalculable importance in later times. Our world, in short, would not be as it is without the pioneering achievements of ancient Sumer.

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