History’s first empire rose
out of a hot, dry landscape, without rainfall to nourish crops,
without trees or stones for building. In spite of all this, its inhabitants
built the world’s first cities, with monumental architecture
and large populations— and they built them
entirely out of mud. Sumer occupied the southern part
of modern Iraq in the region called Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia means “between two rivers”— the Tigris and the Euphrates. Around 5000 BCE, early Sumerians used
irrigation channels, dams, and reservoirs to redirect river water and farm
large areas of previously bone-dry land. Agricultural communities like this
were slowly springing up around the world. But Sumerians were the first
to take the next step. Using clay bricks made from river mud, they began to build multi-storied
homes and temples. They invented the wheel— a potter’s wheel, for turning mud
into household goods and tools. Those clay bricks gave rise
to the world’s first cities, probably around 4500 BCE. At the top of the city’s social ladder
were priests and priestesses, who were considered nobility, then merchants, craftspeople,
farmers, and enslaved people. The Sumerian empire
consisted of distinct city-states that operated like small nations. They were loosely linked
by language and spiritual belief but lacked centralized control. The earliest cities were Uruk,
Ur, and Eridu, and eventually there were a dozen cities. Each had a king who served a role
somewhere between a priest and a ruler. Sometimes they fought against
each other to conquer new territories. Each city was dedicated to a patron deity,
considered the city’s founder. The largest and most important building
in the city was this patron god’s home: the ziggurat, a temple designed
as a stepped pyramid. Around 3200 BCE, Sumerians began
to expand their reach. The potter’s wheel found a new home
on chariots and wagons. They built boats out of reeds
and date palm leaves, with linen sails that carried
them vast distances by river and sea. To supplement scarce resources,
they built a trade network with the rising kingdoms in Egypt,
Anatolia, and Ethiopia, importing gold, silver,
lapis lazuli, and cedar wood. Trade was the unlikely impetus for the invention
of the world’s first writing system. It started as a system of accounting
for Sumerian merchants conducting business with traders abroad. After a few hundred years,
the early pictogram system called cuneiform turned into a script. The Sumerians drafted up the first
written laws and created the first school system,
designed to teach the craft of writing— and pioneered some less exciting
innovations, like bureaucracy and taxes. In the schools, scribes studying
from dawn to dusk, from childhood well into adulthood. They learned accounting, mathematics,
and copied works of literature— hymns, myths, proverbs, animal fables,
magic spells, and the first epics on clay tablets. Some of those tablets told
the story of Gilgamesh, a king of the city of Uruk who was
also the subject of mythical tales. But by the third millennium BCE, Sumer
was no longer the only empire around, or even in Mesopotamia. Waves of nomadic tribes poured
into the region from the north and east. Some newcomers looked up to the Sumerians,
adopting their way of life and using the cuneiform script
to express their own languages. In 2300 BCE, the Akkadian king Sargon
conquered the Sumerian city-states. But Sargon respected Sumerian culture, and Akkadians and Sumerians
existed side-by-side for centuries. Other invading groups focused
only on looting and destruction. Even as Sumerian culture spread, a steady onslaught of invasions killed
off the Sumerian people by 1750 BCE. Afterward, Sumer disappeared
back into the desert dirt, not to be rediscovered
until the 19th century. But Sumerian culture lived
on for thousands of years— first through the Akkadians,
then the Assyrians, then the Babylonians. The Babylonians passed Sumerian
inventions and traditions through along Hebrew, Greek, and Roman cultures. Some persist today.
