Sumer invented city life in southern Mesopotamia
Sumer arose in the south of modern Iraq during the fifth to fourth millennium BC as the earliest known civilization—one cradle beside Egypt, the Indus, China’s Erligang horizon, and Andean Caral-Supe. Its speakers called the land Kengir and their tongue Emegir.
Sumer grew along the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now south-central Iraq between the fifth and fourth millennia BC. Grain surpluses let farmers build towns, and the world’s earliest known texts come from Uruk and Jemdet Nasr, dated about 3350 to 2500 BC after a long stretch of proto-writing. Its people called their land Kengir, country of the noble lords, and their speech Emegir; the name Sumer comes from their later Akkadian conquerors. Hebrew Shinar and Egyptian Sngr may be western echoes of it.
Most historians think a West Asian people speaking Sumerian—a language isolate unrelated to Semitic or Indo-European tongues—settled the region permanently between about 5500 and 3300 BC. Rival theories abound: a migration from a green Sahara, a Caucasian homeland, Dilmun (possibly Bahrain) as named in legend, or Anatole Klyosov’s Y-chromosome idea, which he concedes lacks any Sumerian genetic data. None has won acceptance. Before them came the Ubaidians, who drained marshes and began weaving, metalwork, and pottery; Eridu, on the Gulf coast, may have fused farmers, herders, and marsh fishers into one of the oldest cities.
In the Uruk period, about 4100 to 2900 BC, canal trade fed temple-centred cities of more than 10,000 people, with specialist workers and captive slaves from the hills. Uruk artefacts and colonies reached from Turkey’s Taurus Mountains to western Iran. By the late fourth millennium, independent city-states marked their borders with canals and boundary stones, each ruled by a priestly ensi or a king called lugal.
Akkadian kings conquered Sumer around 2270 BC, though Sumerian lived on as a sacred language, and native rule briefly returned under the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100–2000 BC. Modern scholarship forgot the Sumerians entirely until Jules Oppert used the name in a lecture on 17 January 1869; excavations began at Girsu in 1877.
Source: Sumer
