Sumer: The First Cities on Earth

Sumer is the civilization that invented city living. Between about 4000 and 2000 BC, in a swampy corner of southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates meet the Persian Gulf, a people we call the Sumerians built the first true cities the world had ever seen — and then invented most of the tools urban life still runs on. Writing. Wheels. Standardised weights and measures. Law codes. Schools. Beer.

Everything downstream of Sumer — Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, and eventually us — inherited some part of what they figured out first. For context see our Mesopotamia post.

Who the Sumerians were

Almost every important detail about the Sumerians’ origins is still argued about. Their language is a genuine isolate — not related to any other known human tongue, ancient or modern. Their physical remains suggest a mixed population, mostly Middle Eastern. Their own myths describe them as coming from a mountainous land to the east, but nothing in the archaeology confirms this.

What is clear is that by 3500 BC they were building the largest and most sophisticated settlements on Earth. Their neighbours (Semitic-speaking peoples like the later Akkadians) lived alongside them, spoke different languages, and gradually merged with them. Sumerian died out as a spoken language around 2000 BC but survived as the classical/religious language of Mesopotamia for another 2,000 years — like Latin in medieval Europe.

The great Sumerian cities

The Sumerian political shape was the city-state: about a dozen independent cities, each with its own king and patron god, spread across roughly 40,000 square kilometres of southern Iraq. The most important were:

• Uruk — the largest, home to Gilgamesh. Peaked at 50,000-80,000 people around 2900 BC. Its ruins near modern Warka still show the giant Eanna temple complex.
• Ur — home to the great ziggurat and Abraham’s traditional birthplace. Excavated spectacularly by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, whose royal tombs turned up gold jewellery, harps and 74 human sacrifices.
• Eridu — the Sumerians said Eridu was the very first city, founded when kingship first descended from heaven. The archaeology backs this up in broad strokes; a village existed here by 5000 BC.
• Lagash — a middle-sized city whose extensive records give us most of what we know about Sumerian daily economy.
• Nippur — the religious capital, home of Enlil, king of the gods. Kings needed Nippur’s blessing to be considered legitimate rulers of all Sumer.

The invention of writing

Sumerian writing began around 3200 BC as accountancy — tokens that stood for jars of oil, sheep, sacks of barley, pressed into clay tablets. Over about 400 years, the tokens developed into abstract wedge-shaped marks that could represent syllables and eventually full sentences. This is cuneiform, and it stayed in use for over 3,000 years.

The oldest datable Sumerian texts (around 3200 BC) are receipts. The oldest literary text (the Instructions of Shuruppak) dates to about 2600 BC. By 2000 BC the Sumerians had produced myths, laws, love poetry, medical texts, mathematical problems, king lists and school exercises. The Epic of Gilgamesh — the world’s oldest surviving long poem — is Sumerian in origin, later reworked in Akkadian.

Because clay tablets survive fire and burial almost indefinitely, we now have hundreds of thousands of Sumerian tablets. It is one of the largest bodies of ancient writing in existence, and much of it is still untranslated.

Kings, gods and ziggurats

Every Sumerian city was built around its temple to the patron god. The temple sat on a raised platform, and over centuries these platforms grew into ziggurats — the multi-tiered pyramids that are Mesopotamia’s signature architecture.

The Great Ziggurat of Ur, built by Ur-Nammu around 2100 BC, is the best-preserved of them all. Its lower stage was reconstructed by Saddam Hussein’s government in the 1980s (accurately, based on surviving fragments) and you can climb it. The scale is smaller than an Egyptian pyramid but the surface is packed brick, not stone — every course laid by hand.

Kings were not gods themselves (unlike Egyptian pharaohs) but were chosen by the gods, and the annual rituals of the city required their participation. A Sumerian king who failed his ritual duties was in serious political trouble.

Daily life

Sumerians ate mostly barley — as bread, as porridge, as beer. Beer was so central that some tablets refer to a person’s daily wage as “so many jars of beer”. The goddess of beer, Ninkasi, has one of the oldest surviving hymns dedicated to her, which is essentially a brewing recipe.

They kept sheep, goats, cattle and pigs; ate onions, garlic, cucumbers, lentils, chickpeas, figs and dates. Fish from the Gulf was smoked or salted. Salt itself was mined nearby. Sesame oil was the main cooking fat.

Houses were mud brick, one or two stories, built around a central courtyard. Streets were narrow and unpaved. Sanitation was primitive — waste often just went into the street or the canal. Life expectancy was in the 30s, mainly because of high infant mortality; those who survived childhood often lived to 60 or 70.

The end of Sumer

Around 2334 BC, Sargon of Akkad conquered all the Sumerian city-states and founded the world’s first true empire. Sumerian culture continued underneath, but political leadership passed to Semitic-speaking Akkadians. When the Akkadian empire collapsed around 2154 BC, a brief Sumerian revival under the Third Dynasty of Ur produced the greatest ziggurats and the earliest surviving law code (Ur-Nammu’s, older than Hammurabi’s by 300 years).

Ur fell around 2000 BC to invasions from the east, and Sumerian ended as a spoken language soon afterwards. The written language survived in temples and schools until the early Christian era. By then, no one had spoken Sumerian at home for 2,000 years.

Where Sumer survives

• Ur — the ziggurat and royal cemetery, southern Iraq
• Uruk / Warka — extensive ruins including the Eanna temple, city walls
• Eridu — mostly rubble but the layered temple mound is walkable
• Nippur — sacred to Enlil, extensive excavations
• Iraq Museum, Baghdad — the surviving Ur royal tomb gold, Sumerian statues, tablets
• British Museum, London — Sumerian sculpture, cuneiform tablets, the Ur royal harps
• Penn Museum, Philadelphia — the other half of the Ur excavations from Woolley’s 1920s dig

See our Iraq travel guide for logistics.

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