The document provides an overview of the Sumerian civilization that originated in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq. The Sumerians developed the first extensive urban civilization, supported by irrigation farming. They created many cultural innovations, including the first system of writing, monumental architecture, irrigation systems, schools, use of bronze, and the wheel. Their achievements laid the foundations for later Mesopotamian empires like Akkad and Babylon. The document also discusses Sumerian religion, social structure, law, and their eventual decline after conquest by successive empires.

1. MESOPOTAMIA
“If a physician performs a major operation…
and has caused the freeman’s death, or he
opens the eye-socket and has destroyed the
freeman’s eye, they shall cut off his hand.”
- The Code of Hammurabi

2. Introduction
• The land the Ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia (“land between
the rivers”) is now the eastern half of Iraq.
• The rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates, which originate in
present-day Turkey and parallel one another for about 400 miles
before joining together to flow into the head of the Persian Gulf.
• In the lower courses of the rivers, in the third millennium B.C.,
originated the first extensive urban civilization of the world.
• This civilization was supported by extensive irrigation farming, pioneered by
a people called Sumerians, who came into lower Mesopotamia from
somewhere to the east about 5,000 B.C.

5. Introduction
• Gradually, the Sumerians created a series of small competing
kingdoms, each of which was centered on a good-sized town.
• Here they developed a series of ideas and techniques that would
provide the foundation of a distinct and highly influential
civilization.

6. The Ancient
Sumerians
The term
“Sumerian” is the
common name
given to the
ancient non-
Semitic
inhabitants of
southern
Mesopotamia
and literally
means “the
black-headed
people.”

7. Sumerian Civilization
• The Sumerians were the first people to do an enormous number
of highly significant things:
• They built the first larges cities, as distinct from towns (the largest apparently
containing upward of 100,000 people).
• They developed the first sophisticated system of writing.
• They built the first monumental buildings, using as the basic principle of
support the post-and-lintel system, which is still the normal way of piercing
walls for light and air.
• They were the first to design and build a gravity-flow irrigation system.
• They had the first school system known to history.
• They were the first to use sunbaked brick.
• They were among the first to make bronze metal.
• They probably invented the wheel.
• They were possibly the first to use the plow.

8. Sumerian Civilization
• The Sumerians were not the only settlers of the broad plain on
either side of the two rivers.
• In fact, they were not the first people in those regions.
• Unlike most of their neighboring tribes, the Sumerians were not
members of the Semitic language family.
• A language group or family is related by its grammar and sometimes by its
vocabulary and alphabet.
• By somewhere about 3,000 B.C., the Sumerians had extended their
domain upriver into the Semite-inhabited places.
• Either by coercion or peaceably, they began to civilize these
barbarians.
• Barbarian is a Greek word meaning people who speak a different language
and are supposedly inferior.

9. Sumerian Civilization
• The early history of Mesopotamia under the Sumerians is a tale of
great technological and cultural advances, marred by strife,
disunion, and unceasing warfare.
• Conflicts seem to have been the order of the day.
• Trade wars and disputes over water assured that no centralized
governing power was possible.
• Whenever a city managed to seize control of substantial supplies of water
and trade, the others upstream or downstream would band together against
it or its subjects would rebel.
• Not until about 2,300 B.C. was the land between the rivers brought
under one effective rule and that was imposed by a Semitic
invader known as Sargon the Great, who conquered the entire
plain.

10. Sargon
ofAkkad
According to
legend, Sargon
was the
illegitimate son
of a lowly
priestess. In
secret, she
placed him in a
basket of reeds
on the river
where he was
found by Akki the
Irrigator, who
raised him as his
own.

11. Sumerian Civilization
• Sargon established his capital in the new town of Akkad, near
modern-day Baghdad, capital of Iraq.
• Although the Akkadian empire lasted less than a century, its
influence was great, for it spread Sumerian culture and methods
far and wide in the Near and Middle East.
• The wide belt of land reaching from Mesopotamia to Egypt is called the
Fertile Crescent.
• The Sumerian city-states never united until they were
overwhelmed by outsiders; however, their cultural and religious
achievements and beliefs would be picked up by their conquerors
and essentially retained by all their successors in Mesopotamia.
• Perhaps the most important of all the Sumerian accomplishments was the
gradual invention of a system of writing.

13. The Evolution of Writing
• Some type of marks on some type of medium (clay, paper, wood,
stone) had been in use long, long before 3,500 B.C.
• The Sumerians can justify their claim of having invented writing
because they moved beyond pictorial writing, or symbols derived
from pictures, into a further phase of conveying meaning through
abstract marks.
• All writing derives from a picture originally.
• This is called pictography and it has been used from one end of the Earth to
the other.
• Pictography has several obvious disadvantages:
• It could not convey the meaning of abstractions (things that have no
material, tangible existence).
• Nor could it communicate the tense of a verb, or the degree of an adjective
or adverb, or many other things that language has to handle well.

15. The Evolution of Writing
• The way that the Sumerians got around these difficulties was to
gradually expand their pictorial writing to a much more
sophisticated level.
• Special signs were included for abstractions and tenses – signs
which had nothing to do with tangible objects.
• These are called conventional signs and may be invented for any meaning
desired by their uses.
• Gradually, the Sumerians expanded their pictographs while
simultaneously simplifying and standardizing their pictures, so that
they could be written more rapidly and recognized more easily by
strangers.

16. The Evolution of Writing
• A big breakthrough came sometime in the third millennium, when
a series of clever scribes began to use written signs to indicate the
sounds of the spoken language.
• This was the beginning of the phonetic written language, in which the
signs had a direct connection with the oral language.
• Although the Sumerians did not progress as far as an alphabet, they started
down the path that would culminate in one about 2,000 years later.

17. The Evolution of Writing
• The basic format of the written language after about 3,500 B.C.
was a script written in wedge-shaped characters, the cuneiform,
on clay tablets about the size of your hand.
• Tens of thousands of these tablets contained prayers of all sorts,
proclamations by officials, law codes and judgments, and some letters and
poetry.
• Sumerian cuneiform remained the basic script of most Near and
Middle Eastern languages until about 1,000 B.C., when its use
began to fade out.

18. Cuneiform
The name
cuneiform itself
simply means
“wedge shaped,”
from the Latin
cuneus “wedge,”
and came into
English usage
from Old French
cuneiforme.

20. Mathematics and Chronology
• After the invention of writing, perhaps the most dramatic advance
made by these early inhabitants of Mesopotamia was in
mathematics and chronology.
• Sumerian math was based on units of sixty, and this, of course, is
the reason that we still measure time in intervals of sixty seconds
and sixty minutes.
• Much of our basic geometry and trigonometry also stems from the
Sumerians.
• Their calendar was based on the movement of the moon and was
thus a lunar calendar.
• The year was based on the passage of seasons and the position of
the stars.
• It was subdivided into lunar months, corresponding to the period between
one full moon and the next.

21. Mathematics and Chronology
• In calculating the year’s length, the Sumerians arrived at a figure
very close to our own.
• All in all, Sumerian math, including its further development by the
Babylonians and Persians, has held up very well and has been
influential in all later Western theory of science, including that of
the Greeks.

23. Religion and the Afterlife
• Our knowledge of the Sumerians’ religion is sketchy and unsure.
• Apparently, they believed in a host of gods of various ranks.
• Polytheism is the worship or belief in multiple deities/gods.
• There were many male and female deities, each with specific
competencies in human affairs.
• The gods were much like super-humans, with all the faults and
weaknesses of men and women.
• Some of them lived forever, others died just as humans did.
• Some were immensely powerful, others rather insignificant.
• Each major city developed its own set of powerful gods and
attempted to please its chief gods by building enormous temples,
called ziggurats.
• The best known ziggurat was erected by the powerful city of Babylon long
after the Sumerian epoch – it was the Tower of Babel of biblical fame.

25. Religion and the Afterlife
• The gods were frequently cruel toward their human creatures and
highly unpredictable.
• There is no trace of a loving relationship between deity and man.
• The demands of the gods had no intrinsic connection with doing
good or avoiding evil on Earth.
• The gods often punished humans but not for what we would call
sin.
• The reasons for punishment were petty and unworthy, but generally, they
were simply unknowable.
• The punishments often took the form of natural catastrophes such as
droughts or floods.
• To avert punishment, the gods had to be appeased with frequent,
costly rituals and ceremonies, which were the responsibility of the
hereditary priesthood.

26. Religion and the Afterlife
• The priests used their power as interpreters of the will of the
gods to create large and wealthy temple communities, supported
by the offerings of the citizens.
• In some Sumerian cities, the priests seem to have been the true
rulers for a time.
• This practice ended with the conquest by Sargon the Great, who made the
royal throne the undisputed center of authority.
• Much of what is known about Mesopotamian religious belief
derives from their literature – particularly important is the creation
myth embraced in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first epic poem in
world literature.
• Gilgamesh is a man, a king of one of the city-states, who desires the secret
of immortal life but the gods, jealous of his power, defeat him.

27. Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh was
the fifth king of
Uruk, modern
day Iraq, placing
his reign circa
2500 B.C.
According to the
Sumerian king
list, he reigned
for 126 years.

28. The Epic of
Gilgamesh
The Epic of
Gilgamesh
comes to us from
ancient Sumeria
and was
originally written
on twelve clay
tablets in
cuneiform script.

29. Law and Government
• One of the earliest known complete code of laws originated in
post-Sumerian Mesopotamia, in the 1,700s B.C. during the reign of
the emperor Hammurabi.
• He is the first of the historic lawgivers whose work has survived into our
times.
• The code is based on two distinctive principles:
• Punishment depended on the social rank of the violator.
• Offenders were subjected to the same damages or injury that they caused to
others.
• A commoner would get a different, more severe punishment than
a noble or official would receive for the same offense and a slave
would be treated more harshly still.

30. Hammurabi
Hammurabi,
from Ammurapi
meaning “the
kinsman is a
healer,” is said to
have been
Amraphel, the
King of Shinar in
the Book of
Genesis 14:1.

31. Law and Government
• If in the same social class as the victim, the offender would have
to give “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
• Another basic principle of Mesopotamia law was that the
government should act as an impartial referee among its subject
citizens, seeing to it that the wronged party got satisfaction from
the evildoer.
• People were not equal before the law:
• Husbands over wives.
• Fathers over children.
• Rich over poor.
• Free citizens over slaves.
• Nevertheless, a definite attempt was made to protect the
defenseless and to see that all received justice.

32. Code of
Hammurabi
stele
The Code of
Hammurabi was
inscribed on a
stele and placed
in a public venue
so that all could
see, although it is
thought that few
were literate.
The stele was
discovered in
1902 and resides
in the Louvre
Museum in Paris.

33. Law and Government
• Government in Mesopotamia can be divided into two types:
• The theocracy (rule by gods or their priests) of the early city-states of the
Sumerians.
• The kingdom-empires of their successors, starting with Sargon the Great of
Akkad.
• The cities were ruled by a king, assisted by noble officials and
priests.

34. Social Structure
• Mesopotamia had three social classes:
Nobility and
Priests
Freemen
Slaves

35. Social Structure
• The first class was a small group of nobles and priests.
• They were great landlords and had a monopoly on the higher offices of the
city.
• The second class, the freemen, were the most numerous class.
• They did the bulk of the city’s work and trading and owned and worked
most of the outlying farmlands.
• Finally, the slaves, who at times were very numerous, often
possessed considerable skills and were given some responsible
positions.
• Freemen had some political rights but slaves had none.

36. Social Structure
• Slaves were common in most ancient societies and enslavement
was by no means the morally contemptible and personally
humiliating condition it would frequently become later.
• Slavery had nothing much to do with race or ethnicity and
everything to do with bad luck, such as being on the losing side of
a war or falling into debt.
• It was not at all uncommon to become someone’s slave for a few years and
then resume your freedom when you had paid off what you owed.
• Hereditary slaves was rare: many owners routinely freed their slaves in their
wills as a mark of piety and benevolence.
• Maltreatment of slaves did occur but mostly to field workers,
miners, or criminals who had been enslaved as punishment.

37. Successors to Sumeria
• After the conquest by Sargon of Akkad, Mesopotamia was
subjected to a long series of foreign invasions and conquests by
nomadic peoples eager to enjoy the fruits of civilized life.
• The Amorites or Old Babylonians, a Semitic people who conquered
the plains under their great emperor Hammurabi in the 1,700s B.C.
• The Hittites, an Indo-European group of tribes who took over
the river plain about 1,500 B.C.
• The Hittites were the first to smelt iron.
• They were skilled administrators and established the first example of a
multinational state.

38. Successors to Sumeria
• After the Hittites fell to the unknown invaders about 1,200 B.C.,
the Assyrians gradually established themselves.
• Finally, after a very brief period under the New Babylonians, the
plains fell to the mighty Persian Empire in the 500s B.C. and stayed
under Persian (Iranian) rule for most of the
next 1,000 years.
• The Old Testament refers to the Persians as the Chaldees.

39. The Decline of Mesopotamia
• The valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers ceased to be of
central importance in the ancient world after the Persian conquest.
• The Persians did not choose to make their capital there, nor did
they adopt the ideas and the cultural models of their new
province, as all previous conquerors had.
• The Persians were already far advanced beyond barbarism when they
conquered Mesopotamia and perhaps were not so easily impressed.