Sumer

← Encyclopedia

Sumer is the earliest known civilization of southern Mesopotamia, the flat alluvial land between the lower Tigris and Euphrates in what is now southern Iraq. From roughly the fourth millennium BCE its people built the first cities the world records — Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Nippur, Lagash — and with them the apparatus that cities require: monumental architecture, centralized storehouses, kingship, and the earliest writing yet found. This is the upstream layer of the whole region’s history, the ground floor on which Babylon and Assyria, and through them the wider ancient Near East, would build.

The land itself made the civilization improbable. The southern plain has almost no stone, no timber, and no metal ore; it has too little rain to farm and two unruly rivers that flood late, after the grain is sown. What it has is silt and water that can be led where it is wanted. To live there at all demanded canals, dikes, and the coordinated labor to dig and maintain them, and that coordination — the surplus it produced and the institutions that managed it — is the seed of the city. By the late fourth millennium, in the phase archaeologists name the Uruk period after its greatest site, the city of Uruk had swelled to something on the order of tens of thousands of people behind a wall; it has a fair claim to be the first city in the world. Eridu, on the southern edge of the marshes, was remembered by the Sumerians themselves as older still — the place where, in their reckoning, kingship first came down from heaven.

These were not villages grown large but a new kind of settlement: a dense core of perhaps several hundred to several thousand acres, ringed by a wall, fed by a hinterland of canals and dependent towns, and governed from a temple precinct that towered over everything around it. Within that core arose every institution the word city still implies — a ruler and his retinue, a professional priesthood, scribes and surveyors, potters and metalworkers and weavers gathered into something like industry, markets, courts, and a hierarchy of rank from the palace household down to the dependent laborer. The plain held a dozen and more such centers within a few days’ walk of one another, each its own kingdom, each jealous of its god, its fields, and its share of the river. Sumer is less a country than this constellation of rival cities, and its history is largely the history of which of them held the upper hand.

A people without a prologue

The Sumerians are not a people scholars can trace to an origin. Their language is an isolate, related to no other known tongue, living or dead, and it is unclear whether they migrated into the region or emerged there; the evidence begins already with cities in place and the question of a before unanswered. What is certain is what they left. Cuneiform — wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay with a cut reed — began as accounting. Its ancestors are small clay tokens used to count sheep, grain, and jars, sealed inside clay envelopes and then, more economically, impressed on the outside; the earliest tablets from Uruk, dating to around 3300 BCE, are ledgers of commodities named by little pictures and tallied with numerals. Over centuries the pictures abstracted into stylized wedge-clusters, the signs took on sound values as well as meanings, and a system built to count beer rations grew into a script that could carry law, hymn, lament, contract, omen, and story. Because the clay was so well suited to the language, the script later proved portable: Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, and others borrowed the wedges to write tongues utterly unlike Sumerian, so that a southern Mesopotamian accounting habit became the writing of half the ancient Near East.

Mastering it was a profession in itself. A scribe trained for years in the school the Sumerians called the é-dub-ba-a, the “tablet house,” copying sign-lists, proverbs, and the classics until the dead language and its thousands of signs were second nature; the school texts that survive — a boy complaining of his caning, a father lecturing an idle son — are among the most human documents the ancient world has left. Through these scribes the literary canon was fixed, recopied, and handed on. And because clay survives where papyrus rots — the more so when a city burns and bakes its own archive — an enormous record came down intact, from a king’s annual harvest down to a single goat sold between neighbors. Much of the first millennium of human writing is Sumerian.

The city belonged to a god

Religion organized the city, because the city was, in the local understanding, the estate of a god. Each town was the property and dwelling of its own deity, housed in a temple whose stepped tower — the ziggurat — raised the sanctuary toward the sky so that the god might descend to it. The temple was not only a sanctuary but a landholder: it held fields, herds, orchards, and labor, and the priesthood administered them, so that worship and economy were a single operation. The household was the governing metaphor for everything, the cosmos included. The chief gods were imagined as a great family and a divine assembly: An, the remote sky-father; Enlil of the air and of Nippur, who held the supreme working authority and whose word fixed destinies; Enki of the sweet underground waters and of wisdom, the crafty arranger; and Inanna, the volatile goddess of love and war and of the planet Venus, whose later Akkadian continuation is Ishtar. Beside them stood the astral powers who would matter enormously downstream — Nanna the moon at Ur, Utu the sun, the same Inanna as the morning and evening star.

Sumerian thought gave this order a distinctive name. The me were the fixed decrees or offices that made civilization run — kingship, priesthood, truth and falsehood, craft and weaving, music, war, even the procedures of sex and of strife — each conceived as a real thing the gods had set in place and that could be held, granted, or stolen. In the poem of Inanna’s journey to Eridu she carries the me off from Enki to her own city of Uruk; the order of the world is portable, and possessing it is power. The literature that frames these ideas is the oldest readable poetry on earth: the cycle of Inanna and her descent to the underworld, the disputes and debate-poems, the laments over fallen cities, and the Sumerian tales of the hero-king of Uruk that would be gathered and recast in Akkadian as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The flood that drowns the world, later famous from the Hebrew Bible and from comparative study, is told here first. The fuller pantheon, its cult, and its theology pass downstream to the combined Sumerian-Akkadian religion of Mesopotamia; the city kept what mattered to it — the god in his house, fed and clothed and carried in procession, and the assurance that the canals would fill.

How far the sovereign shared in that sacred order, the ground itself records. In the mid-third-millennium Royal Cemetery at Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s, a handful of deep shaft-tombs held their occupants — among them the woman named in her seal as Puabi — laid out with gold and lapis vessels, headdresses, lyres, and chariots, and, in the most elaborate pits, with rows of attendants who went down into the grave with their lord. The dead of Sumer did not pass into nothing but descended to a dim land below where, in the local understanding, the shade had to be fed and named by the living or it would return hungry. The provisioning that fills these tombs — cups and bowls outnumbering every other thing — is that obligation made monumental: the sovereign departs as a household departs, and the rite of feeding the ancestor scales from a king’s cortège down to a jar of water poured at a family threshold.

Eclipse and afterlife

Sumer was never a single state but a quarrelsome patchwork of city-kingdoms — Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish, Umma — that warred over land and water and took turns claiming a fragile overlordship the King List remembers as kingship passing from city to city. That patchwork was first welded into an empire from outside. Around 2334 BCE Sargon of Akkad, a Semitic-speaking ruler from the north, defeated the Sumerian kings and built the first empire the region had seen, ruling from Sumer to the upper rivers in the Akkadian language. After the Akkadian empire fell there was a last brilliant Sumerian recovery under the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2112 to 2004 BCE — the period that produced the great ziggurat at Ur, an enormous bureaucratic archive, and the codification of Sumerian literature itself. When Ur fell to Elamite attack and the encroaching Amorites, power passed to Akkadian-speaking dynasties at Isin, Larsa, and at last Babylon, and Sumer as a political force was gone by the early second millennium BCE.

Its language did not go with it. Sumerian had ceased to be anyone’s mother tongue by about 2000 BCE, displaced in the street and the field by Akkadian, and yet it survived for two thousand years more as a learned and liturgical language — copied, parsed, and recited by scribes in their schools, the prestige tongue of temple ritual and scholarship, much as Latin outlived Rome. A priest reciting a Sumerian lament in the temple of Babylon under the Persians, or a scribe ruling a clay grammar of a dead language for his pupils, was performing a culture a thousand and more years older than himself.

Through that long afterlife the Sumerian inheritance reached far beyond the plain. The gods, the omens, and above all the star-lore — the conviction that the night sky was a script the gods had written and that a trained reader could parse it — passed through Babylon and Assyria, were refined into the great celestial-omen series and at last into horoscopy, and from there entered the Hellenistic world as the technical core of what the Greeks and Romans called the wisdom of the “Chaldeans.” The astral deities were already in place in the south: the moon at Ur, the sun at Sippar, Inanna as the planet Venus. On that footing the later Babylonian scholars built the longest continuous observational tradition the ancient world produced — a canonical series of omens cataloguing eclipses, planetary risings, haloes, and the stations of the stars, each phenomenon read as a sign sent down to the king, and finally, by the late fifth century BCE, the casting of an individual’s fortune from the sky at the hour of birth. Specific elements of that apparatus — the zodiac of twelve equal signs, schemes for computing where a planet would stand — crossed into Greek hands and became the spine of Western astrology. The later “Chaldean” prestige is in part a Greek and Roman invention, a label more than an ethnicity; but the technical content under it is genuinely Mesopotamian, and the conception of an inscribed and legible heaven that underwrites the whole enterprise was first articulated in the cities of the south. The divinatory and astrological traditions that later esoteric writers, down to the Renaissance and beyond, traced to a fabled Chaldea rest, at their root, on foundations laid here. So too do the curious medieval and early Islamic compilations that claimed to recover an antediluvian Babylonian wisdom — the pseudo-Babylonian Nabataean material and the figure of Berossus, the priest of Bel who carried Babylonian cosmogony into Greek — which trade on a prestige that begins with Sumer even where the texts themselves are far later.

The texts and their recovery

The recovery is recent. Sumer was wholly unknown to the modern world until nineteenth-century excavation in Iraq and the decipherment of cuneiform revealed, beneath the better-remembered Babylonians and Assyrians, an older civilization that had named the gods and written the first stories the others retold. The foundational popular synthesis remains Samuel Noah Kramer’s The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character (University of Chicago Press, 1963), whose author did more than any single scholar to give the Sumerian literature to a general readership; a free scan is hosted by Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at isac.uchicago.edu. The standard one-volume political history is Marc Van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC (Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd ed. 2016). Jean Bottéro’s Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Francesca Rochberg’s The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004) carry the religion and the celestial sciences respectively, Rochberg arguing that the Babylonian phrase for the sky as the writing of heaven encodes a whole conception of an inscribed cosmos legible to the learned.

The primary texts are unusually open. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), founded by Jeremy Black at the University of Oxford in 1997, presents over four hundred Sumerian compositions in transliteration with English prose translation at etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk; the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) catalogs and images the tablets themselves, the proto-cuneiform ledgers of Uruk among them. The earliest English readers met Sumer obliquely, through the Babylonian and Assyrian filter, in George Smith’s announcement of the flood tablet in 1872 and his The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876); the clay that Smith was reading had been pressed in a tradition already two thousand years old when his Assyrian scribes copied it. What lay under the mounds of southern Iraq was not the beginning of one nation’s story but the first chapter the written world has of itself, dug out of the very ground on which it was first set down.

→ Related: Mesopotamia · Deity · Divination · Uruk · Ur · Nippur · Babylon · Babylonia · Ishtar · Marduk · Gilgamesh · Astrology · Mesopotamian Religion Sumerian Akkadian · Berossus · Comparative Flood Myth · Pseudo Babylonian Nabataean Hermetica