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Sumer....
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formed the southern part of Mesopotamia from the time of settlement
by the Sumerians until the time of Babylonia. Sumerian cuneiform script
may pre-date any other form of writing, and dates to no later than about
3500 BC. The Sumerians called their country ken.gi(r) 'civilized land',
their language eme.gir and themselves 'the black-headed ones'.
Sumer may
very well be the first civilization in the world although long term
settlements at Jericho and Catal Huyuk predate Sumer and examples of
writing from Egypt and the Harappa, Indus valley sites may predate those
from Sumer.
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Thousands of years ago people lived in tribal societies
where live was about survival - food - clothing and shelter. These were
not easy times. Most of what is understood about the ancient of ancient
Sumer is based on archaeological findings in current times. By 7,000 BCE,
in what is called the Fertile Crescent, in West Asia, where
hunter-gatherers had roamed, planting had grown into the major source of
food. There, true farming had begun, with the growing of wheat and barley,
the domestication of animals and people permanently settled. By 4500 BCE?
a people archaeologists call Ubaidians were living in towns in southern
Mesopotamia near where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers emptied into the
Persian Gulf.?
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The Ubaidian people knew how to drained marshes. They
grew wheat and barley and irrigated their crops by digging ditches to
river waters. They kept farm animals. Some of them? manufactured pottery.
They did weaving, leather or metal work, and some of them were involved in
trade with other societies. By 4000 BCE in the area that is now Syria, we
find a society with regional centers and a complex government evolving.
There were huge ovens for baking bread for numerous people, and people
manufactured fine pottery. |
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In the year 2000 AD at Tell Hamoukar, archaeologists
discovered a protective city wall, and they described the place of their
digging as more than a town they described it as a city. And they found
what they call primitive hieroglyphics: markings for record keeping of
trade transactions.
Around 4000 BCE people called Sumerians moved into
Mesopotamia, perhaps
migrating from the Caspian Sea. They found among the Ubaidians a race of
people who spoke a Semitic language - who had moved in among the Ubaidians. |
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