Sumerian civilisation and the birth of writing

This edited article about the Sumerians originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 115 published on 28 March 1964.

A clay tablet maker and cuneiform scribe recording a cattle sale in a Sumerian market place about 3000 B.C.. The clay tablets are depicted larger than in reality in order to show their appearance more clearly. Picture by Neville Dear

Civilization – the ordered, communal state of living – is something we have all experienced. We may all sometimes dream of an idyllic desert-island life, but most of us would prefer the benefits that centuries of civilization have bestowed upon our world to a Robinson Crusoe existence.

Yet during the 100,000 years – perhaps more – of his life on earth, man has lived in a civilized state for not much more than five thousand of them.

Five thousand years. . . . How did it happen, this transition from savagery to civilization? How and where did it all begin?

The answer to these questions belongs to a land which today is confined within the boundaries of Iraq. It is a land which lies between the Tigris and Euphrates, two rivers which run down in a south-easterly direction to the Persian Gulf. Between these two rivers, in an area as large as Wales, arose what could have been the first civilization of which we know anything – the Sumerian civilization. Certainly this civilization, which we can trace back to the year 3,000 B.C., was one of the first.

Within this area, which is loosely known as Mesopotamia, all those centuries ago, the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian civilizations rose and fell. And of course because all this happened at the dawn of history, our knowledge of it is scanty.

What we know of the Sumerians comes from the archaeologists’ spade. As archaeologists dug between the two rivers they uncovered evidence which linked with the wonderful stories of the Old Testament so that, piece by piece, but alas, with many missing fragments, we have built up a picture of what was perhaps man’s first attempt to live a civilized community life.

Through the stream of the Mesopotamian civilizations lived Ashurbanipal, whose lion hunt was sculptured on stones that are now among the greatest possessions of the British Museum; here lived Nebuchadnezzar, who, according to the story in the Bible, sent Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to the fiery furnace; and here, too, lived Sennacherib, who “came down like a wolf on the fold” of ancient Judea; and King Hammurabi, the great law-giver, who some authorities believe is the same King Amraphel mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis.

But of these men and their fascinating stories, more later.

If we could have seen the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers 5,000 years ago we would have seen river valleys filled with rich soil washed down and replenished from the mountains by the regular rainfall. The grass was lushly green and the sun shone the year round. This was a most inviting land.

Wandering hunters who had passed by some time before must have noticed it, too. They must have noticed the abundant wild life and the proximity of elementary building materials: reeds from the rivers and mud by their banks. The hunters looked – and decided to stay.

More and more hunters came to join them and steadily the communities grew into villages. Soon the plain between the two rivers, which the Bible calls Shinar, became busy with people. Then – but no one knows exactly when – the primitive hunters-turned-farmers of the plain were joined by a race of people called the Sumerians, who gave the name of Sumer to the southern half of the plain, where they first settled.

Not only do we not know when the Sumerians arrived in the land of Sumer, but we do not even know from where they came. They had probably already developed a culture, and this culture they quickly imposed upon the hunter-farmers who had settled in Shinar before them.

Still more settlers arrived and the villages grew into towns and then into cities that eventually became city-kingdoms. Each new group of settlers brought new ideas and new ways with them, and in the fertile Plain of Shinar the ideas were mixed together for the common good. At Eridu, probably the first of the Sumerian cities, the reed and mud huts of earlier times were displaced by gracious buildings made of mud bricks tastefully decorated with painted patterns.

As other cities were built – Ur, near ancient Eridu, Uruk, Larsa, Lagash and Babylon – the Sumerians were trading with each other. And trading led to a need for communication other than the spoken word. So the Sumerians invented writing – the first people, we believe, ever to do so – and thus gave to man a possession upon which his civilized way of life has depended ever since.

The Sumerians, we know, were great temple builders and their city trade centred upon their temple. It was simply in order to keep the temple’s accounts accurately that the people invented writing. At the same time they invented numbers, too, for the first tablets on which they wrote include numerals.

The Sumerian writing system began with pictures representing their ideas and objects. For their “paper” they used soft clay tablets which, when finished, were sun-dried to make them virtually indestructible; for their “pens” they used reeds with the ends blunted to form a stylus. The reed was pressed into the wet clay point first and then it was pushed out to make a line in the required direction. The tendency was for this wedge-shaped pen to form lines with a small triangular wedge at one end, which caused the name cuneiform (“wedge-like”) to be given to the writing.

The very first Sumerian writing, then, was no more than a crude picture writing, representing an object with a numeral by its side. Thus if a Sumerian city temple wanted to record the sale of three oxen, the temple accountant would simply draw the head of an ox with three strokes beside it.

In time these pictographs and numerals were modified. Then the scope of the pictograph was widened (for instance, the sign for “a foot” was included to mean also “to go”), and then they combined with each other to form complete ideas, or sentences, expressed in word signs. A system of writing in downward columns was evolved, which in time was abandoned for writing in horizontal lines from left to right with the ideographs, now scarcely resembling their original idea, turned on their sides.

We can see that as writing became more complicated it had to be learned. Many Sumerians did learn it, in fact, and cuneiform tablets that are 5,000 years old include educational tablets which are text books on learning to write, which proves that the writing must have originated even earlier than 5,000 years ago.

You may ask, if cuneiform writing became so complicated, how did we ever learn to read it? Many learned men laboured at the task. Some struggled a little way to understanding, but for a long time little real progress was made.

Then in 1835 an Englishman, Sir Henry Rawlinson, saw for the first time a great cuneiform inscription high up on a terrace of the rocks at Behistun. He copied it carefully and then, using the knowledge he had acquired of the work of how others had struggled with the script, and adding his own, he correctly guessed that the inscription was in three languages.

Rawlinson puzzled it out, studying everything that was known, and in 1846 he published a nearly complete text of the inscription in the first of the three languages. Then, on the foundations he had laid, the second and the third languages were deciphered, and the cuneiform key, the wedge that split open the gates of ancient history, was discovered.

From their cuneiform tablets we know that the Sumerians gave considerable thought to religious matter. They believed that there was a life after death – in a mountain land which the dead reached by crossing an evil river.

They had a number of gods (for the Earth, the Sky, and the Sea, for instance), and in addition each city had its own important local god. All the inhabitants then had their own personal deity, a sort of “guardian angel,” who acted as an intermediary between them and the greater gods.

From the mud-brick palaces the city-states were ruled by Kings whose title was hereditary but whose will must be subjugated to the city’s god.

A fascinating and macabre insight into what might have been Sumerian ideas about life after death came to light when an Englishman, Sir Leonard Woolley, discovered a Sumerian cemetery at Ur in 1926. Altogether there were about 450 graves, and in one part of the cemetery was two square tombs with domed roofs. In these tombs were the bodies of a man and woman dressed in a rich finery of gold and jewels. Around the tombs, in two huge pits, were the bodies of seventy people, lying as if asleep and very carefully arranged.

Some of the human skeletons wore helmets and held spears – indicating that they must have been armed guards; others were lined up in an orderly row and wore fine jewels, while others held harps, their bony fingers stretched across the strings. There were, too, the skeletons of oxen and the remains of wooden chariots.

Most fascinating of all, each human skeleton had its hands held up to its mouth, and beside everyone lay a little clay pot.

All the evidence points to a ritual sacrifice of servants, soldiers, musicians, oxen and chariots, with the victims having taken poison after the bodies of their lord and lady had been entombed. But there was no sign of violence, so that clearly the victims went willingly to their grim death, convinced that they were about to make the journey to a life after death with their great ones.

But this extraordinary scene brings us back to the point where our knowledge of the Sumerians is so incomplete. We just do not know what happened in the death pits at Ur. The mass burials there are, so far, unique, and there is only a single possible allusion to such a custom in the entire cuneiform literature, so that we should not believe that these burials were a common practice.