CIVILIZATION

TNDL: Civilization in Mesopotamia
Class, Power and War among the Sumerians | Sumerian Polytheism, Sin and a Flood | Sargon, Sumerians and Babylon | Sumerian Culture and Hammurabi at Babylon | Arrival of Hittites, Hurrians and Kassites | Hittites, Asyrians and Aramaens | Babylonian Science and the Gods | Babylonian Myths of Creation and a Great Flood
Map of Ancient Mesopotamia, to 2500 BCE
Class, Power and War among the Sumerians
In that part of the Middle East called the Fertile Crescent, hunter-gatherers began planting gardens. By 7000 BCE there was farming that required permanent settlement. By 4500 BCE those archaeologists call Ubaidians were living in towns near where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers emptied into the Persian Gulf. This was in Mesopotamia (Greek for "between two rivers"). The Ubaidians drained marshes. They grew wheat and barley and irrigated their crops by digging ditches to river waters. They kept farm animals. Some manufactured pottery. They did weaving, leather or metal work, and some were involved in trade with other societies.
Map of Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent, 9000 to 4500 BCE.
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Where there had been small hunter-gatherer societies getting food for themselves, the producers of food were now able to support many who worked at other occupations – such as the priesthood, pottery making, weaving, carpentry and smithing. There were also traders, and the Sumerians developed an extensive commerce by land and sea. They built seaworthy ships, and they imported from afar items made from the wood, stone, tin and copper not found nearby.
There was ownership of property. Some people were more wealthy than others, and political power was unevenly distributed. Sumerian society around 3000 BCE was not as sharing or as egalitarian as hunter-gatherer societies had been or were. The Sumerians appear "to have been the first people to commandeer the agricultural surplus grown by the community and create a privileged ruling class." note3
Around 4000 BCE a people called Sumerians moved into Mesopotamia, perhaps from around the Caspian Sea. By 3800 BCE the Sumerians had supplanted the Ubaidians and Semites in southern Mesopotamia. They built better canals for irrigating crops and for transporting crops by boat to village centers. They improved their roads over which their donkeys trod, with some of their donkeys pulling wheeled carts.
Writing
Sumerian writing is the oldest full-fledged writing that archaeologists have discovered. The Ubaidians may have introduced the Sumerians to the rudiments of writing and numerical calculation, which the Sumerians used for calculating and to keep records of supplies and goods exchanged. The Sumerians wrote arithmetic based on units of ten – the number of fingers on both hands. Concerned about their star-gods, they mapped the stars and divided a circle into units of sixty.
Sample Sumerian characters
Sample Sumerian characters
circa 3200 BCE
The Sumerians wrote poetically, describing events as the work of their gods, and they wrote to please their gods. The Sumerians wrote by pressing picture representations into wet clay with a pen, and they dried the clay to form tablets. Instead of developing their writing all at once (as one might expect with divine revelation) they developed their writing across centuries. They streamlined their pictures into symbols called ideograms, and they added symbols for spoken sounds – phonetic letters – forming what is called cuneiform.
Cities, Power and Politics
Sumerian cities grew from what had been the place where a temple was located. At least twelve cities arose among the Sumerians. Among them were Ur, Uruk, Kish and Lagash – Ur, for example, becoming a city of about 24,000 people. In the center of each city was a temple that housed the city's gods, and around each city were fields of grain, orchards of date palms, and land for herding. According to Samuel Noah Kramer, early in Sumerian civilization a temple corporation owned "some of the land, which it rented to sharecroppers; the remainder was the private property of individual citizens. note4
Sumerian priests had once worked the fields alongside others, but now they were separated from commoners. A corporation run by priests became the greatest landowners among the Sumerians. The priests hired the poor to work their land and claimed that land was really owned by the gods. Priests had become skilled as scribes, and in some cities they sat with the city's council of elders. These councils wielded great influence, sometimes in conflict with a city's king. And the priests told commoners that their drudgery was necessary to allow the gods their just leisure.
Hunter-gatherer societies have been described as matrilineal – families traced through the mother. Scholars are not describing Sumerian society as having been matrilineal, but Sumerian society has been described as patrimonial – property traced through the father. note5 And patrimonial societies in ancient times tended to treat women as property and to give authority to males. The tribal societies that followed the smaller hunter-gatherer societies tended to be warrior societies, and it was the warriors who got together and made decisions for their entire society. Presumably before the time of the Sumerians, kings were chosen by the warriors, with the king as the leading warrior. Kings are described as working in conjunction with the priesthood. "The ruler needed the endorsement of the gods as delivered by the priests, and if they withdrew their support his rule was in grave danger