Sumer

Sumer is where writing, cities and the state first appear together, in the southern floodplain of Mesopotamia from around 3500 BC. It was never a single country but a set of rival city-states - Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish, Umma, Eridu - each centred on a temple to its own god, each governed by a ruler who was that god's steward, and each fighting the others over water and border land. The conditions were unpromising and decisive: a hot plain with almost no rain, no stone, no timber and no metal, but two rivers whose silt was extraordinarily fertile if it could be channelled. Irrigation on that scale required organised labour and records of who had contributed what, and cuneiform begins as accountancy - pictographic tokens pressed into clay to count grain and sheep, becoming a script capable of law, letters and the Epic of Gilgamesh only afterwards. Uruk may have held forty thousand people by 3000 BC, which had no precedent anywhere. The Sumerians also produced the wheel in its earliest attested form, the sexagesimal arithmetic behind the sixty-minute hour and the 360-degree circle, and the first written law codes. Political independence ended with Sargon of Akkad's conquest around 2334 BC; there was a last Sumerian revival under the Third Dynasty of Ur, which fell to Elamite invasion and Amorite migration around 2000 BC. The language survived as a liturgical and scholarly one for two thousand years after nobody spoke it, and the region was absorbed into Babylonia. The land itself was called Sumer only by its neighbours; its people called themselves the black-headed ones. Nothing of the Sumerian language's family has ever been identified, and it appears to be related to nothing else known.

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