Sumerian City-States

Where the state was invented, along with writing, the wheel and the written contract. Sumer occupied the southern Mesopotamian floodplain from around 4500 BCE, and the problem it solved was that the land was fertile only if irrigated and irrigation only worked if organised - which required a permanent institution with authority over labour. That institution was the temple, and cuneiform began around 3200 BCE as an accounting system to record what the temple held and who owed it, only later becoming capable of literature. Uruk may have held forty thousand people, the largest settlement on earth at the time. The cities - Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish, Nippur - were independent and fought each other constantly over water and boundaries, and the Stele of the Vultures records one such dispute in text and image. Sumerians produced the earliest known law codes, the wheel, the sexagesimal system that still divides the hour, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest substantial work of literature. Sumerian died as a spoken language but was studied in scribal schools for two thousand years afterwards, like Latin in Europe. Ziggurats survive at Ur and Uruk. The region lay between the lower Tigris and Euphrates in what is now southern Iraq. Cuneiform was written by pressing a reed stylus into wet clay, which is why the tablets survive when papyrus would not. Hundreds of thousands of tablets have been excavated and many remain untranslated. The Sumerian King List mixes reigns of tens of thousands of years with historically attested rulers. Beer and bread were the staple wages.

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