The Sumerian civilization is considered the most ancient on Earth. However, for a long time its very existence remained nothing more than an assumption, since until the end of the 19th century it was not confirmed by archaeological finds.
Mysterious people
There are many cases when archaeologists and historians have found traces of ancient civilizations by studying ancient texts and even the Bible. This is how they discovered Troy, the Egyptian pyramids, the cities of the Cretan-Mycenaean culture and many other ancient monuments hidden from human eyes underground or by water.
But the Sumerians were not mentioned either by ancient authors, or by the Hebrew chronicles, which formed the basis of the biblical stories. Many cities were buried under a multi-meter layer of sand between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and other civilizations took their place. So, historians have long considered Assyria to be the most ancient state of Mesopotamia, and the Semitic tribes were the indigenous population of this region.
However, the Europeans also learned about Assyria only when they deciphered the ancient Persian cuneiform texts found in Persepolis. In the same place, around 1700, other clay tablets were found, speckled with incomprehensible symbols, clearly not related to the Persian language. However, scientists considered them not as examples of writing, but as a meaningless ornament.
Following this, the remains of the ancient cities of the Assyrian-Babylonian culture were found and the records related to it were deciphered (starting with the Laws of Hammurabi). Approximately since then, the opinion has taken root that the biblical texts contain not myths, but indications of quite real ancient countries. Then the history of Mesopotamia "aged" for another thousand years - thanks to the Babylonian records in Akkadian.
But scholars were confused by incomprehensible insertions in Babylonian texts. For a long time linguists believed that we are talking about priestly cryptography, which the best minds of the 19th century tried in vain to decipher. In addition, historians have paid attention to the title that the Assyrian rulers bore: the king of Sumer and Akkad.
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With traces of Akkadian culture, everything was more or less clear. Its existence was confirmed by numerous archaeological finds, the language was deciphered quite quickly, and the creators were absolutely rightly attributed to the Semitic population of the Middle East. But who the Sumerians are, scientists could not understand in any way.
Matryoshka principle
In the middle of the 19th century, the famous orientalist Henry Rawlinson found during the excavations of the ancient capital of Assyria, Nineveh, a kind of dictionaries that indicated that Akkadian (the Babylonians and Assyrians called their language Akkadian) words of Semitic origin explain the words of another, mysterious language. He assumed that we are talking about the attempts of the Assyrians to translate some more ancient writing, known to them, but later forgotten. He called it Chaldean.
A little later, the linguist Julius Oppert drew attention to the fact that the structure of these inscriptions does not correspond at all to the Semitic languages, although identical symbols are used. He came to the conclusion that he was confronted with the legacy of the creators of cuneiform as a communication system. Based on the ancient title of the Assyrian kings, Oppert suggested that another period preceded the Akkadian culture, and called the mysterious people Sumerians.
All these armchair discoveries for a long time remained nothing more than theory. Until, in 1877-1901, the French consul in Basra, Ernst de Sarzek, during excavations, discovered the remains of the ancient city of Girsu.
So the theoretical guess of Oppert was brilliantly confirmed, who, according to the principle of matryoshka, seemed to get one secret from another and eventually got to the bottom of the most ancient layer. Ultimately, however, this discovery, which largely explained the origin of the Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian cultures, posed the so-called Sumerian question to scientists.
Garden City
The Sumerians appeared in the south of Mesopotamia somewhere in the middle of the 6th millennium BC. They never identified themselves as a single people and did not separate themselves and the rest of the population between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The very word "Sumer" in their language means "black-headed". However, the Akkadians who lived to the north called themselves exactly the same.
Each city with a small territory around it was an independent principality. They could feud, trade, or enter into military alliances. The Sumerians called themselves by the name of their principalities: "the man of Uruk", "the man of Lagash" and so on. The appearance of the Sumerians was strikingly different from the appearance of people from neighboring Semitic tribes. They were pale-skinned, tall, men rarely wore beards and mustaches, women were often fair-haired.
The main occupation of the Sumerians was agriculture, and it is quite technologically complex. They knew how to build locks, pumps, irrigation canals, which were also used as transport arteries. Pottery and metallurgy were highly developed. They even knew how to concentrate ore.
All cities were surrounded by fortress walls 10-12 meters high, built of fired bricks and reinforced watchtowers. The townspeople built their dwellings from raw bricks or clay, some of them reaching four to five floors. In the Sumerian cities there were many reservoirs, gardens, squares. In the III millennium BC, some of them had 80-100 thousand inhabitants.
The most interesting buildings of the Sumerians were ziggurats. These are a kind of towers, consisting of truncated pyramids and parallelepipeds stacked on top of each other. Each ziggurat is crowned with a flat platform on which the sanctuary is located. However, the purpose of these buildings is not fully understood. Perhaps the construction itself was a sacrifice to the gods, a kind of invitation to descend to earth. However, no tombs or places of worship have been found inside the ziggurats, so their religious purpose is questioned.
First Parliament
Each Sumerian city was ruled by two kings. One was in charge of religious rituals, court, change of laws. The second was in charge of the economy, construction, tax collection, spending of the treasury.
There are suggestions that a certain council of the most respected citizens elected by the people acted at each. Some researchers consider such a system a harbinger of a modern bicameral parliament. In the event of a military threat, the inhabitants of the city-state elected a third king - Lugal, or a military leader.
It is known for certain that the Sumerians invented the first money in history. They also began to divide property into private and state. The property of the city consisted mainly of large farms, which were managed by special officials. The income from them went to the city treasury. In addition, land plots could be rented.
Private land belonged to either wealthy families or territorial communities. It was cultivated either by hired workers or by the peasants themselves. The Sumerians had slaves, but they belonged to the state and were used in construction. The city levied taxes from private owners - income taxes, profits and even some duties and excise taxes. Trade was also taxed.
The population of the Sumerian cities was very well trained in reading and writing, as evidenced by the clay tablets that have come down to us. Many of them were compiled by completely different people and represent private correspondence, promissory notes, a list of goods or granary books.
But archaeologists have also found depositories of tablets that resemble our archives and clearly belonged to the state. Many Sumerians also left technical records telling about their skills in construction, medicine, and craft. There are also tablets containing fragments of the biography of kings, the history of entire dynasties, epics, and the like.
Quite a lot of medical records have come down to us, from which it can be concluded that the Sumerians knew how to carry out complex operations, treat dangerous diseases, and were versed in prevention and hygiene.
Lost heaven
It is quite clear that the Sumerians in the south of Mesopotamia were an alien people, because without their skills in irrigation agriculture, no one could live in these parts. And they appeared immediately, with all their technologies, and as if out of nowhere. Alas, scientists still have not been able to find their traces.
Through individual elements, the Sumerian language is associated with many others, but with none is truly related. In many places (Bahrain, Iranian Highlands), the remains of settlements, buildings and ceramics similar to the Sumerian ones were found. But they are all younger than the Meso-Potamian cities of Ur, Ummah, Girsu, Uruk, Nippur and others. This means that it was not the Sumerians who sailed from there to the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates, but on the contrary, they spread their culture to overseas countries.
By the way, they themselves believed that they had arrived in Mesopotamia from a huge island in the southern seas, submerged in the water. They called him Dilmun and endowed with all the attributes of a "lost paradise". Some researchers associate the tradition of building ziggurats with the legends of the ancient flood. Like, if the elements again take up arms against the Sumerians, they will hide from the water on the upper platforms of their pyramids.
Distant homeland
At the end of the last century, the hypothesis was very popular, according to which the Sumerians generally arrived on Earth from another planet. The unusual astronomical knowledge of this ancient people was cited in her favor. The Sumerians knew how to accurately calculate the length of the year, the deviation of the earth's axis, they knew about the existence of constellations invisible to the naked eye, and many more things about which even in the 19th century Europeans had the most vague idea.
The Akkadians believed that their southern neighbors received their unusual knowledge from the gods who descended from heaven, or even flew to Earth from the stars themselves. One of the bas-reliefs of Nippur depicts a scene of communication between the Sumerian kings and these gods. I must say that the inhabitants of heaven are dressed in costumes that are surprisingly reminiscent of space suits.
The Sumerians themselves, although they built their cities conscientiously, always believed that their stay in Mesopotamia was temporary, and one day they could return to their lost homeland.
But time has decreed otherwise. The Sumerian cities were conquered by the more primitive but warlike Akkadians. Many of them died in the fires, but the two peoples gradually mixed and gave rise to all the ancient civilizations of the Middle East.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №21. Author: Mark Altshuler