LOCATION OF SUMER

Sumer was an ancient civilisation that flourished in the Fertile Crescent's Mesopotamia area, between
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now Iraq and Syria. Sumerians are credited with founding
civilisation as we know it today, thanks to their advancements in language, administration, building, and
other fields. Before the Babylonians acquired control of the region around 2004 B.C., (that will be
discuss later by Kuya Redeemer and Kuya Rosbert, Sumerian they ruled for less than 2,000 years.

Who Were the Ancient Sumerians?

Sumer was humanity's first great civilization. Even in today’s society you can still find traces of Sumerian
inventions in agriculture, language, mathematics, religion and astronomy.

In the Fertile Crescent, a tiny, crescent-shaped sliver of Mesopotamia frequently linked to the birth of
farming, writing, mathematics, and astronomy, the Sumerians learnt to farm on a massive scale.

Although the ancient Middle Eastern landscapes may not appear to be the most obvious place for an
agricultural breakthrough, Sumer had a significant edge. The Sumerians profited from rich floodplain soil
and plenty of water to irrigate crops by settling between two huge rivers.

So brief history about the Sumerian

During the 5th millennium BCE, a people known as Obeyidians settled in the region later known as
Sumer; These settlements gradually developed in the important Sumerian cities of Adab, Eridu, Isin, Kis,
Lagash, Larsa, Nippur, and Ur. A few centuries later, when the Persian settlers prospered, Semites from
the deserts of Syria and Arabia infiltrated In the area, both as peaceful immigrants and invaders in
search of loot. After approximately 3250 BC, another people migrated from a region perhaps to the
northeast of Mesopotamia, and its inhabitants began to marry with the native population.

The newcomers, who became known as Sumerians, spoke an agglutinating language with no apparent
relation to any other known language.

During the centuries following the emigration of the Sumerians, the country grew in wealth and power.
Art, architecture, craftsmanship and religious and ethical thinking flourished.

Sumerian became the main language of the earth and its inhabitants invented the cuneiform system of
writing, originally pictographic, which gradually became stylized. This writing became the basic means of
written communication of the Middle East for about 2,000 years.

Emergence of Sumerian Cities

Villages began to appear in Mesopotamia some 10,000 years ago. Even while they continued to hunt
and gather, the people who lived in the area kept animals and farmed crops. Those communities grew in
size throughout time, and their inhabitants became increasingly reliant on agriculture.

Meanwhile, people started constructing a series of temples using mud bricks at a place called Eridu.
Around 5400 B.C., the city appears to have been founded. It was populated for thousands of years until
being abandoned permanently about 600 B.C.

One Sumerian record states, "After kinship descended from heaven, Eridu became (the seat) of
kingship." Between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century, the region around Eridu was
explored a few times, revealing the ruins of a formerly metropolis where successive buildings were built
on the foundations of temples and other structures that had come before.

As Sumerian cities exploded in size, Sumer emerged as one of the world’s first great agricultural
societies. In time, Eridu would fade in influence and Uruk would take on an outsized role. Uruk was the
largest city in the world. Some estimates suggest the city held as many as 80,000 people at a time when
the total human population was somewhere around 15 million.

Sumerian Technological Innovations

The ancient Sumerians, who flourished thousands of years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
in what today is southern Iraq, built a civilization that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon
Valley. As the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, “The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for
technological invention.”

“They had few trees, almost no stone or metal,” he explains. That forced them to make ingenious use of
materials such as clay—the plastic of the ancient world. They used it to make everything from bricks to
pottery to tablets for writing.

Sumerians’ real genius may have been organizational. They had the ability to take inventions that had
been developed elsewhere and apply them on a much bigger scale. This way they could mass-produce
goods such as textiles and pottery that they could then trade with other people.

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Innovation was one of the key factors in the Sumerians’ efforts to turn the desert into an oasis. And
one of their most beneficial innovations was also among the simplest: the plow.

The plow is very important in the world today! In Circa 3100 BC the Sumerians invented the plow. The
plow is very helpful in the world today.

The first plow appeared about 3500 B.C. And by 1500 B.C., the Sumerians had also invented a seeder
plow, which let farmers use beasts of burden to till and plant at the same time. This devices even came
with instructions, courtesy of the Sumerian Farmer’s Almanac, which told farmers how to boost their
crop yields thanks to tilling and irrigation.

the Sumerians invented the plow, a vital technology in farming. They even produced a manual that gave
farmers detailed instructions on how to use various types of plows. And they specified the prayer that
should be recited to pay homage to Ninkilim, the goddess of field rodents, in order to protect the grain
from being eaten.

SECOND invention was the cuneiform

Decoding Cuneiform, One of the Earliest Forms of Writing

The ancient Sumerians developed this writing system more than 5,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of
cuneiform tablets still await translation.

The ancient system of writing is one of, if not the, this is the oldest.

It was invented around 3,500–3,000 B.C. by the Sumerians and used in the region for more than 3,000
years. Writing wasn’t this culture’s only innovation.

They needed a system to record their financial transactions, and cuneiform did the job. So,
unsurprisingly, the earliest examples of cuneiform show sales or the transfer of goods, such as grains or
textiles, or the allocation of supplies.

So, while the Sumerians may have disappeared thousands of years ago, their influence and intrigue has
continued on into the present, shaping aspects of modern society we all take for granted today.

We also have here some Sumerian Inventions and Discoveries that will be discussed by Ms. Pia Gonzales