2 Sumer and the first civilizations

Cities and Civilization

The first civilizations formed on the banks of rivers. Cities, a new and transformational human environment, grew on the Nile, the Indus, the Yellow River in China, and on the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia. Rivers provided a steady supply of drinking water, rich sources of fish and good hunting spots. Rivers were also the most important ‘highways’ of the ancient world. Transport over land was slow, difficult and expensive even with pack animals, whereas riverboats could carry huge loads with relative ease. Sites on navigable rivers and near coasts were connected to a much wider world, for better and for worse; inland sites were by comparison isolated and inaccessible. Most importantly, soil eroded from inland was washed downstream and deposited into rich, fertile plains that supported dense crops. The first cities were founded on the bounty of these floodplains.

Archeologists and historians do not agree on what causes to credit for the emergence of these first cities: we will consider several. Cities could only emerge where there was productive enough agriculture to support them, and technological advances such as the plough may have enabled this. Shrines or sacred sites could have provided the kernel around which the first urban settlements coalesced, drawing together people from wide areas for festivals and rituals that increasingly evoked permanent occupations. The first cities were hubs of bureaucracy and administration, and centralised government works best in central locations. We have already seen how towns such as Çatalhöyük were early centres of crafts and trade. Seasonal or permanent markets also could draw people long distances and encourage craftsmen and others to settle nearby for the convenience of easy access to diverse wares. Finally, cities acted as refuges and protection from raids and warfare, even before but certainly after they erected fortresses and walls.

Cities were new environments, and human culture naturally adapts to new environments. Since cities themselves are culturally produced spaces, urban cultures reshape and in turn are reshaped by their urban environments. This process is transformative: urban cultures can change rapidly as cities grow, diversify, and become increasingly, intricately complex. Although every urban culture is unique, the similarities of their circumstances tend to produce some similar cultural traits. Historians classify a civilization as a culture with various key traits, all of which tend to or only ever emerge in urban cultures. These include:

Governments and states: civilizations develop institutions which exercise power over the community. This authority may be invested in kings, priests, councils, bureaucrats or popular assemblies, but regardless of the identity of the authorities, they govern with some degree of legitimacy — popular acceptance of their right to lead and make decisions — supported by some ability to mobilize force and violence. When a single government develops the ability to compel obedience to its decisions over a geographical area, we have a state. State authorities govern via a network of agents, often organised into a bureaucratic hierarchy. This underpins the ability of civilizations to act collectively at a large scale: to mobilize and coordinate thousands of people for important tasks such as public works and warfare.

Specialization: civilizations develop a complex set of interlocking social roles, many of which involved special skills that become vocations for people. The non-food producing roles are supported by  redistributing food from farmers and other producers. Specialized roles that are found in even the earliest civilizations include craftspeople, merchants, priests, kings, bureaucrats, entertainers, teachers, soldiers, manual laborers, builders, and intellectuals.

Writing: civilizations consistently develop writing independently, and no other cultures develop writing without at least getting the idea from civilizations. Writing is a crucial technology, both for the civilizations themselves and for our understanding of them. Writing provides the main window through which we can see the past, and for this reason we know much more about ancient civilizations than their non-literate neighbours. But more importantly, writing fundamentally transformed civilizations themselves, allowing knowledge to be transmitted across time and space without having to be passed on through learning and memory. This formed the basis of new culture in a plethora of areas, from poetry and literature, to record-keeping and administration, to philosophy, religion, and eventually science. All of these aspects of culture are very different or entirely impossible without the invention of writing.

Warfare: the large-scale organized violence we call warfare originated with civilization and was intimately intertwined with it. Warfare mobilizes large numbers of people into organised groups that succeed of fail together in violent struggle with other groups. The stakes of warfare are the highest possible. Defeat risks death, rape, impoverishment, enslavement or exile. Victory offers, along with status and wealth, the prospect of capturing land or subjugating nearby groups so as to exploit them and their land. Civilizations therefore organise themselves to generate military power for defence and, usually, aggression. Military power is based on the number of people that can be mobilized to fight, their motivation, and the organisation and equipment of the military forces. Over time, civilizations collectively adapt to generate increasing amounts of military power, in ways that deeply shape their culture. The role of the state in civilized societies is intimately entwined with warfare, with the state mobilizing armies and building fortifications, and the state government making decisions of war and peace.

The first Eurasian civilizations to emerge were those of Sumer and Egypt, followed somewhat later by the Harappans and Chinese. These early civilizations shared certain further characteristics that were strongly associated with civilizations up until modern times.

Monarchy: The government was in the hands of a single ruler, usually male, who controlled the military and almost always had important religious duties and authority. Kings served as lawgivers and bolstered their legitimacy by claiming to protect the weak, feed the hungry, and do other good works for society. Kingly legitimacy was supported by religion, tradition, propaganda, large-scale building projects, and the enforcement of justice and order. But the most distinctive aspect of kingly authority was their leadership of the military and their control over foreign policy and foreign relations: they served as the ‘head’ of their people, acting as the voice and face of the collective group.  Rulership was hereditary and passed down from father to a chosen son when possible. Women sometimes took on kingly power, either as regents or reigning queens. It is possible that the Harappans were not ruled by kings, and some Sumerian city states early on may have been ruled by councils or priests; priests of major temples also ruled parts of Egypt when central government fractured. We will also see some important later civilizations that were not ruled by kings, such as Rome, Carthage and Athens. But monarchies were the standard type of government in premodern civilizations.

Hereditary Stratification: The population was divided into groups that had different social statuses that they inherited from their family, which was normally bolstered by inherited wealth. The term for the privileged hereditary group is aristocracy; the exact nature of the aristocracy and the gradations of status within a civilization were very diverse. Sometimes very complex and formal hereditary systems developed with multiple different groups, most famously the caste systems of India; in other cases there was little formal distinction between aristocrats and other free people and the main difference was one of wealth and informal status barriers, such as we find in later Rome.

Slavery: We find the first clear evidence of slavery emerging with civilization, and most civilizations in premodern times engaged in slavery. The status, economic importance and treatment of slaves varied, but there were generally two main ways people could become enslaved: capture and debt. The losers in wars were often enslaved, and people who could not pay off their debts were sometimes forced to work those debts off via temporary or permanent enslavement, or by selling family members into slavery. Slavery was in premodern times not generally connected with race. The historical development of racialized slavery happened in early modern times as a result of overseas colonization and plantation economics.

Empire: states eventually developed the ability to subjugate and administer increasingly large areas whose populations were not willingly obedient, forming empires. This rule was imposed by force and maintained by bureaucracy, garrisons and propaganda. The growth of empires also extended the cultural and political reach of civilizations, bringing their language, laws, and religion to their imperial subjects. Given time, some empires managed to integrate their subject populations, while others ruled large populations of indifferent or hostile people.  We will discuss empires further in the next chapter.

Mesopotamia

Between two rivers

Mesopotamia is a region in present-day Iraq. The word Mesopotamia is Greek, meaning “between the rivers,” and it names the area between the Tigris and Euphrates, two major rivers that flow from the southwest Asian highlands down to the Persian gulf. Mesopotamia’s climate six thousand years ago was much more temperate and moist than it is today.  Mesopotamia was once a grassland that could support both large herds of animals and abundant crops. It was therefore well suited to support dense populations once farming and irrigation became established.

While the Tigris and Euphrates provided abundant water, they were highly unpredictable and sometimes swelled into huge floods, with disastrous consequences for people nearby. The southern region of Mesopotamia, Sumer, has an elevation decline of only 50 meters over about 500 kilometers of distance, meaning the riverbeds of both rivers  could easily shift and meander. Over time, the inhabitants of villages worked together to build levees, canals, and dikes to protect against the floods and to channel water to their crops. The first governments in Sumer might have begun partly to organise, mobilize and feed the workers needed for these increasingly huge projects.

The first settlements that straddled the line between “towns” and real “cities” existed around 4000 BCE, but a truly urban society in Mesopotamia was in place closer 3000 BCE, when a few dozen city-states managed the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Remember that the town of Çatal Höyük discussed in chapter 1 existed over four thousand years before the first great cities in Mesopotamia. When considering ancient history it can seem like it everything happened quite rapidly, that people discovered agriculture and soon they were building massive cities and developing advanced technology. That is an understandable illusion: compared to the hundreds of thousands of years preceding the discovery of agriculture, things moved “quickly,” but from a human perspective these developments were very gradual indeed.

Sumerian City-States

1.1 The “Urukean expansion,” a period in the fourth millennium BCE in which Sumerian material culture (and presumably Sumerian people) spread hundreds of miles from Sumer itself.

Social stratification is further evident as some Sumerians and even institutions, including temples, owned slaves. Slaves performed a variety of tasks like construction, weaving, agricultural and domestic labor, tending animals, and even administrative work as scribes. Some slaves were chattel slaves, meaning that society treated them as property with no rights. Usually, chattel slaves were prisoners of war or slaves bought from outside communities. They were branded by barbers or tattoo artists and forced to work at the will of their masters. If they tried to run away, the law required slaves to be returned. The more widespread type of servitude in Sumerian cities was likely debt slavery, which was generally temporary until a debtor paid off a loan and its interest. Over the past century or so, archaeologists have added a great deal to our understanding of Sumerian social distinctions through their work at numerous excavation sites, but many gaps in our knowledge still exist.

Legal documents and tax records show that people owned property in both the cities and the countryside. Some Sumerians owned fairly large chunks of land, while others had much smaller plots or no land at all. Wills, court proceedings, and temple documents show that land and temple offices were usually bought or else acquired through military or other service to the state. A man inherited land, property, offices, and their attendant obligations to the state (like reoccurring military service) from his father. The eldest son seems to have frequently inherited a larger share than younger brothers and have been given control over the family home. He was tasked with performing regular rituals to honor dead ancestors, who were usually buried underneath the home. From the written documents, we also get glimpses into other aspects of Sumerian life, like marriage and divorce.

Sumerians viewed marriage as a contract between two families and, as a result, the male heads of the two families arranged a couple’s marriage. Documents show that both families contributed resources to seal the union or complete the marriage contract. The man’s family gave gifts or money and hosted a feast, while the woman’s family amassed a dowry, wealth that was given to the couple for their household use. Although a woman did not automatically receive an inheritance upon the death of her father, she could expect (and use the court system to make sure she got) to receive a dowry, even if it came from her father’s estate after his death. Divorce was possible but sometimes led to social ostracism or even punishment if there were accusations of misconduct, such consequences being especially the case for the woman. Records indicate that polygamy was not common, but wealthier men did keep slave-girls as concubines. Overall, Sumerians considered marriage an essential institution in that it brought families together and ensured the continuation of the family lineage.

The Sumerian cities’ location on huge, navigable rivers facilitated trade. Sumer had abundant food, cloth and mud (which they baked into bricks and built with), but lacked wood, stone and metals such as copper. Traders were able to use the rivers to bring in these resources from Assyria, Anatolia, the Levant, and the Persian Gulf coast. Early Mesopotamians also obtained goods from the Harappan civilization that emerged on the banks of the Indus river. Merchants used overland routes that crossed the Iranian Plateau and sea routes, exchanging Mesopotamian products like grains and textiles for luxury goods from the east. Royal cemeteries show that by 2500 BCE Mesopotamian elites were buried with a variety of imports, including beads brought from the Indus River Valley. The rivers and the overland trade routes also facilitated communication and, with it, the sharing of ideas and technologies.

The letters of Sumerian merchants offer our first written evidence of long-distance trade, the networks of which spanned thousands of kilometers in Sumer’s day and which eventually expanded to encompass first the Eurasian continent, and eventually the globe. Their concerns and interests are very relatable to our modern, commercial civilization, discussing prices, debts, taxes and even schemes to evade customs duties. Writing again was a key technology, allowing merchants to write letters to co-ordinate shipments and sales via trusted agents in far-off cities, often relying on ties of blood or marriage to discourage fraud and theft. Sumerian merchants provided essential services because of Sumer’s lack of vital raw materials: while they dealt in high value luxuries such as semi-precious stones, their core business was trading food and textiles for wood, stone, and metal. Transport relied on rafts, barges, donkey teams, and ocean-going sailing ships built from bushels of reeds.

Writing and Learning

The Mesopotamians invented the first systems of writing, developed in order to keep track of tax records sometime around 3000 BCE. Their style of writing is called cuneiform; it started out as a pictographic system in which each word or idea was represented by a symbol, but it eventually changed to include both pictographs and syllabic symbols (i.e. symbols that represent a sound instead of a word). While it was originally used just for record-keeping, writing soon evolved into the creation of true forms of literature. As the importance of writing in the society grew, a new social role, the scribe, emerged. Scribes studied in schools to master reading and writing, and some of the worksheets that they completed for their teachers have survived to this day. An education could open doors to a job in the temple bureaucracy, whether as a lowly record keeper or as a powerful overseer. And while most of the writings of scribe were utilitarian records of taxes and debts, the new technology opened the possibility of written literature.

1.3 An example of cuneiform script, carved into a stone tablet, dating from c. 2400 BCE.

The first known author in history whose name and some of whose works survive was a Sumerian high priestess, Enheduanna. Daughter of the great conqueror Sargon of Akkad (described below), Enheduanna served as the high priestess of the goddess Innana and the god of the moon, Nanna, in the city of Ur after its conquest by Sargon’s forces. Enheduanna wrote a series of hymns to the gods that established her as the earliest poet in recorded history, praising Innana and, at one point, asking for the aid of the gods during a period of political turmoil.

Enheduanna did not record the first known work of prose, however, whose author or authors remain unknown. Remembered as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest surviving work of literature, it is the best known of the surviving Mesopotamian stories. The Epic describes the adventures of a partly-divine king of the city of Uruk, Gilgamesh, who is joined by his friend Enkidu as they fight monsters, build great works, and celebrate their own power and greatness. Enkidu is punished by the gods for their arrogance and he dies. Gilgamesh, grief-stricken, goes in search of immortality when he realizes that he, too, will someday die. In the end, immortality is taken from him by a serpent, and humbled, he returns to Uruk a wiser, better king.

Like Enheduanna’s hymns, which reveal at times her own personality and concerns, The Epic of Gilgamesh is a fascinating story in that it speaks to a very sophisticated and recognizable set of issues: the qualities that make a good leader, human failings and frailty, the power and importance of friendship, and the unfairness of fate. Likewise, a central focus of the epic is Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality when he confronts the absurdity of death. Death’s seeming unfairness is a distinctly philosophical concern that demonstrates a sophisticated engagement with the human condition present in Mesopotamian society.

The Mesopotamians were the first great astronomers, accurately mapping the movement of the stars and recording them in star charts. As seen in the case of both ziggurats and irrigation systems, they were excellent engineers. They also invented the 360 degrees used to measure angles in geometry and they were the first to divide a system of timekeeping that used a 60-second minute, both relics of their number system that was based around multiples of 60. Finally, they developed a complex and accurate system of arithmetic that would go on to form the basis of mathematics as it was used and understood throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.

At the same time, the Mesopotamians employed many “magical” practices. The priests did not just conduct sacrifices to the gods, they developed techniques of divination to predict future events. The modern distinction between magic and science does not often apply well to the practices of the premodern past. The sophisticated understanding of the planets and seasons used by Sumerian astronomers were intertwined with their beliefs about the world and the gods. In trying to learn about how the universe functioned so that human beings could influence it more effectively, ancient ‘scientists’ did not conceive of nature as a material machine or as governed by unchangeable laws. From the perspective of the ancient Mesopotamians, there was little that distinguished religious and magical practices from “real” science in the modern sense. Their observations and accomplishments that we see as scientific were embedded in and motivated by a belief system that included religious and magical ideas.

War and Empire

Mesopotamia represents the earliest indications of large-scale warfare. Mesopotamian cities had walls from very early on – some of which were 30 feet high and 60 feet wide, enormous ramparts of earth strengthened by brick. The evidence (based on pictures and inscriptions) suggests that most soldiers were peasant militia armed with shields and spears or bows. Militia are ordinary citizens who have a social responsibility to fight for their state during wars. They are therefore part-time soldiers, whose effectiveness depends on their cultural willingness to fight and on how often they get experience training and fighting. Some militia armies are amateurish and unreliable, but some of the most effective premodern armies were motivated and experienced militias, such as those of the Roman republic or of the Greek city-states in the classical period. One advantage of militia armies is that they can mobilize very large numbers of fighting men, but only for short periods before their absence cripples the economy. For short wars between neighbours within a few days walk such as those of the Sumerian city-states, militia can be very effective, so long as they are motivated to fight hard for their leaders.

Sumerian kings may have had bodyguards of more professional ‘companions’, and popular councils may have played a role in authorizing or mobilizing the men for war. If so, such popular involvement in warmaking decisions would help ensure that the militia making up the army were motivated and supportive of the conflict, and therefore reliable on the battlefield.

While little evidence survives, Sumerian warfare likely revolved around the two constants of conflict between city states: field battles to steal or destroy the enemy’s harvest, and sieges and assaults on the enemy’s fortified city. Cities during the third millenium BCE warred on one another for territory, captives, and riches, but they rarely succeeded in conquering other cities outright, and when they did, the dominance did not typically last. Kings, after all, could not be in two places at once, and sooner or later a city would find an opportunity to close its gates and rid itself of hated foreign governors. The situation may have been similar to the much better documented world of the classical Greek city states, which we look at in chapter 4.

The first time that a single military leader managed to conquer and unite many of the Mesopotamian cities was in about 2340 BCE, when the king Sargon the Great, also known as Sargon of Akkad (father of Enheduanna, described above), conquered almost all of the major Mesopotamian cities and forged the region’s first empire, in the process uniting the regions of Akkad and Sumer. His empire appears to have held together for about another century, until somewhere around 2200 BCE. Sargon also may have created the world’s first standing army, a group of soldiers employed by the state who did not have other jobs or duties. One inscription claims that “5,400 soldiers ate daily in his palace,” and there are pictures not only of soldiers, but of siege weapons and mining (digging under the walls of enemy fortifications to cause them to collapse). As we will discuss in the next chapter, long-distance campaigns of conquest are difficult to conduct with militia armies, so Sargon’s success in creating the first Mesopotamian empire may have been connected to the use of professional soldiers. We will discuss empires and conquest in more detail in the next chapter.

1.4 The expansion of Sargon’s empire, which eventually stretched from present-day Lebanon to Sumer.

Sargon himself was born an illegitimate child who, according to the tale that survives, was abandoned in a basket that was floated down the river until the baby was rescued by a welcoming family. He eventually became a royal gardener who worked his way up in the palace, eventually seizing power in a coup. He boasted about his lowly origins and claimed to protect and aid common people and merchants. Sargon appointed governors in his conquered cities, and his whole empire was designed to extract wealth from all of its cities and farmlands and pump it back to the capital of Akkad, which he built somewhere near present-day Baghdad. While his descendants did their best to hold on to power, the resentment of the subject cities eventually resulted in the empire’s collapse.

The next major Mesopotamian empire was the “Ur III” dynasty, named after the city-state of Ur which served as its capital and founded in about 2112 BCE. Just as Sargon had, the king Ur-Nammu conquered and united most of the city-states of Mesopotamia. The most important historical legacy of the Ur III dynasty was its complex system of bureaucracy, which was more effective in governing the conquered cities than Sargon’s rule had been.

The Ur III dynasty is an example of an early bureaucratic empire. Historians have more records of this dynasty than any other from this period of ancient Mesopotamia thanks to its focus on codifying its regulations. The kings of Ur III were very adept at playing off their civic and military leaders against each other, appointing generals to direct troops in other cities and making sure that each governor’s power relied on his loyalty to the king. The administration of the Ur III dynasty divided the empire into three distinct tax regions, and its tax bureaucracy collected wealth without alienating the conquered peoples as much as Sargon and his descendants had (despite its relative success, Ur III, too, eventually collapsed, although it was due to a foreign invasion rather than an internal revolt).

While empires succeeded one another in Mesopotamia, another empire had arisen to the west, along the fertile banks of the sinuous Nile river. In the next chapter we will look at what empires are in more detail, using Egypt as our main example.

This chapter contains material from

Western Civilization: A Concise History by Christopher Brooks and is used under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

World History: Cultures, States and Societies to 1500 by Berger et. al. and is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

World History to 1700 by Rene L. M. Paredes and is used under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Media Attributions

1.1 Urukean Expansion Map by Sémhur, CC BY-SA 3.0

1.2 Maritime and Land Trade Routes in Sumer, from Ancient Mesapotamia: Uruk Period, copyright Penn Museum

1.3 Cuneiform by Salvor, in the public domain

1.4 Sargon Map by Nareklm is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

“A Letter from a Slave Girl” and “A Complaint Letter from a Merchant” are excerpted from Letters from Mesopotamia: Official Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia by A. Leo Oppenheim, copyright University of Chicago Press