Sumer

It is customary to refer to Mesopotamia, ‘the land between the rivers’, as Sumer when discussing any society that resided there prior to the advent of the Babylonians, but the people responsible for the construction of Sumer’s ziggurats and walled cities likely did not arrive until the fourth millennium B.C. During the previous few thousand years, as proto-cities in Palestine and Anatolia such as Jericho and Catal Huyuk experimented with trade and accustomed men to the rise of chalcolithic technology, there were people residing along the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. These earlier inhabitants emerged from the Neolithic and embraced copper age technology over the centuries. The actual arrival of the mass of people classified racially as Sumerian took place sometime around the advent of the Bronze Age, when smiths finally discovered how to combine copper and tin to make a metal alloy that was harder than cooper and took an edge better. The latter quality proved most valuable in making ploughshares and in making blades for weapons.

The history of Sumer is a history of rival cities vying for power on the banks of two long, meandering rivers. Hegemony passed from city to city up and down the riverbanks. Kish, Ur, Eridu, Uruk – each of these cities and others enjoyed temporary prominence and influence over the others during the third millennium before Christ. None of these cities ever achieved an empire. Each city retained its own culture and king, as well as the cult of its own particular deity.

Within each city the archaeological data that survives suggests that there was already a distinction between church and state, though sometimes the lines were blurred. The kings employed the priests in service to the secular state but the temple also employed laymen and received tribute from them. The temples employed many scribes, priests and servants. Some of the latter would have been temple prostitutes and other women. The priests received tribute in the form of barley and other agricultural gifts.

While the Sumerians had a varied diet that consisted of grains, vegetables and fish as well as meat for the elite classes, barley was the staple crop. It was crushed and ground to make the daily bread for every working Sumerian. However, most of each barley crop was fermented to make beer. The Sumerian urban landscape was alive with breweries. Just as American settlers in the 18^th and 19^th century used whiskey as currency, so did the Sumerians use beer. Surviving records indicate that the temples paid their servants in beer. Already, poetry and songs lamented the damage of alcohol on social order.

Sumer also leaves the first really coherent use of writing in the archaeological record. The earliest known pieces of literature, the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh, exist now in copies made in the 1^st millennium before Christ. However, they were certainly composed in the third millennium and regard the deeds of heroes and deities going all the way back to the beginning of time.

Durant, Will (1954). Our Oriental Heritage, New York: Simon and Schuster

TimeFrame (1990). The Age of God-Kings, Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sumer