Sumer: A Visual History

Sumer was the civilisation of the city-states of southern Mesopotamia from about 4500 to 1900 BC. Uruk, the world's first city, had perhaps 40,000 people by 3200 BC and invented cuneiform writing to record temple accounts. In the Early Dynastic period (about 2900-2350 BC) Kish, Ur, Uruk, Lagash and Umma fought under kings (lugals) for hegemony while sharing a religion, a language unrelated to any other, and technologies from irrigation and the potter's wheel to bronze and the sailing boat. Sargon of Akkad conquered them around 2334; the Third Dynasty of Ur revived Sumerian rule; after 2004 BC Amorite dynasties took over and Sumerian survived only as a language of learning.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Sumer. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Estimated population of Uruk

Timeline of the Sumer

1. 5,400 BC
   Eridu foundedUbaid period.
2. 3,500 BC
   Uruk the first city
3. 3,200 BC
   Cuneiform writing
4. 2,900 BC
   Early Dynastic period begins
5. 2,500 BC
   Royal Cemetery of Ur
6. 2,334 BC
   Sargon conquers Sumer
7. 2,112 BC
   Ur III; Sumerian renaissance
8. 2,004 BC
   Fall of Ur
9. 1,900 BC
   Sumerian dies as a spoken language

Uruk

Farmers had settled the Tigris-Euphrates delta from about 5500 BC (the Ubaid culture, with Eridu as the first temple town). Uruk grew into a city of monumental temples with a 9-km wall; its scribes developed pictographs into cuneiform on clay, first for accounting, then for lists, myths and laws. Uruk-style pottery and colonies spread as far as Syria and Iran in the 'Uruk expansion'. Gilgamesh, its legendary king, is said to have built the walls.

The city-states

In the Early Dynastic period a dozen city-states, each the estate of a god managed by a temple and a palace, competed for land and water. The Sumerian King List records kingship 'descending from heaven' to Kish and passing city to city; the Royal Cemetery of Ur (about 2500 BC) yielded gold helmets, lyres, the Standard of Ur and dozens of retainers killed to accompany their queen. Lagash's kings left the first war memorial and reforms; Lugalzagesi of Umma briefly united the south before Sargon.

Akkad, Ur III and the end

Sargon's Akkadian Empire absorbed Sumer around 2334 but Sumerian culture continued; after the Gutian interlude Ur-Nammu's Third Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004) presided over the Sumerian renaissance of ziggurats, law codes and archives. Elam and the Amorites destroyed Ur in 2004; Isin and Larsa's Amorite kings still wrote in Sumerian, but by 1900 BC it was a dead language, kept alive in scribal schools for another 1,500 years like Latin in medieval Europe.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Lagash (2,500 BC to 2,270 BC)
• Akkadian Empire (2,334 BC to 2,154 BC)
• Neo-Sumerian Empire (Ur III) (2,112 BC to 2,004 BC)
• Elamite Empire (2,700 BC to 539 BC)
• Larsa (2,025 BC to 1,763 BC)
• Old Kingdom of Egypt (2,686 BC to 2,181 BC)
• Indus Valley Civilisation (3,300 BC to 1,300 BC)
• First Babylonian Empire (1,894 BC to 1,595 BC)

8 surprising things about the Sumer

1. The Sumerians invented writing, the wheel, the plough, the sailboat, the arch, bronze, beer, schools and the 60-minute hour.
2. Their language is a linguistic isolate; no relative has ever been found.
3. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest epic, was written in Sumerian and later Akkadian about a king of Uruk.
4. The Sumerians reckoned in base 60, which is why we have 60 seconds, 60 minutes and 360 degrees.
5. The 'Standard of Ur' is a mosaic box showing war and peace, found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s.
6. The oldest known written recipe is Sumerian: for beer, in a hymn to the goddess Ninkasi.
7. About 90 percent of the earliest tablets are accounts of sheep, grain and beer rations; literature came later.
8. The Sumerian flood story with the hero Ziusudra is the ancestor of the Babylonian and biblical flood narratives.

Sources

• Sumer Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Sumer Wikipedia
• Sumer World History Encyclopedia
• Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (1963) University of Chicago Press

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