With settlement at the beginning of the 4th millennium BC. e. on the territory of Lower Mesopotamia of the alien Sumerians, the archaeological culture of Ubeid was replaced here by the culture of Uruk. Judging by the later recollections of the Sumerians, the original center of their settlement here was the city of Eredu, that is, an area in the very lower reaches of the Euphrates. Then it was far from the most profitable of the habitats in the south of Mesopotamia.
The Sumerians did not oust the Lower Mesopotamian ubeids, but mixed with them and assimilated them, adopting many crafts and arts. This is evidenced by the non-Sumerian terms of the corresponding meaning, which have passed into the Sumerian language. Urban settlements and temple buildings from the Uruk period continue the construction of the previous Ubeid era, so the arrival of the Sumerians was peaceful. One of the traditional mysteries of oriental studies is the question of the ancestral home of the Sumerians. It has not yet been resolved, since the Sumerian language has not yet been reliably associated with any of the currently known linguistic groups. Parallels were sought even among the Tibeto-Burmese and Polynesian languages - and for all the seeming fantasticness of the latest version, it is better than others supported by linguistic material.
There is a Sumerian myth about the origin of all mankind from the island of Dilmun (modern Bahrain). According to this myth, here "at the beginning of time" there was something like a biblical paradise and the ancestors of all living beings, including humans, lived. At one time, scientists wanted to see in this myth a trace of the deaf memories of the Sumerians that they moved to Mesopotamia from the Bahrain region. However, a more thorough analysis showed that there are no grounds for such an interpretation: Sumerian mythology sees in Dilmun the ancestral home of all living beings, and not only the Sumerians, and this plot belongs to the number of general cosmogonic myths about the beginning of the world and time, and not to the Sumerian historical memories proper. about their appearance in Mesopotamia.
More reliable information is given to us by the Sumerian texts of the 3rd millennium BC. BC, telling about the contacts of Sumer with the distant Central Iranian country of Aratta (area of the modern city of Yazd). These texts testify that in Aratta the Sumerian gods were revered and bore Sumerian names, and perhaps they spoke Sumerian. Is it not here that we need to look for a trace of the Sumerian migration to Mesopotamia from the east, through Iran? Then one of the areas where the Sumerian-speaking population settled on this path would be Aratta. This assumption brings us back to the old hypotheses of scientists of the late 19th century, who considered the version of the "Iranian" route of the Sumerians to be the most probable.
The formation of the Sumerian community on the territory of Lower Mesopotamia limited the Subarean oecumene to a strip of land along the Upper Tigris, Northern and Central Zagros. All this vast space was later called the "Subar country" (Akkad. "Subartu", "Shubartu"). After violent political and military upheavals at the turn of the III-II millennium BC. e. local Subareans were assimilated by their northeastern neighbors, the Hurri mountaineers. Since then, the name "subarea" or "shubarei" has been transferred to them in the Mesopotamian sources.
The Sumerians of the Uruk era united in a large communal-tribal union, covering almost all of Lower Mesopotamia. The center of the union was Nippur (the modern village of Niffer, Iraq) - a proto-city that lay just in the middle part of Lower Mesopotamia. In Nippur, the cult of the supreme all-Sumerian god Enlil ("Lord of the Air" or "breath" in Sumerian) was supported - the main cult of the entire union, which held it together.
Each individual community or group of communities that was part of the union occupied a small area of the Southern Mesopotamia basin centered in a relatively larger urban settlement, to which the nearest small points gravitated. Their inhabitants were part of the same community formation with the inhabitants of the central settlement. Such communal-territorial associations in science are usually called nomes (gr. Nom - region, administrative-territorial unit). It was in the central settlement that the main "institution" of the entire nome was located - the temple of the main patron god. In each nome, this role was played by one of the deities of the Sumerian pantheon, which included the Subarean gods who entered it. There was a storehouse of nomad stocks of grain and handicrafts at the temple. The community members also gathered here and the representatives of the nomal elders and leaders lived. Temples sent special trade agents of the community - tamkars - to foreign countries, to conduct foreign trade, exchanging part of the community's stocks for metals and timber, and at the same time for slaves.
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The unity and power of the Sumerian union can be judged by the striking fact of the so-called colonial expansion of the Sumerians in the Uruk era. In the middle - the 2nd half of the 4th millennium BC. e. Sumerian colonies of the same type appeared on the territory of foreign tribes in the valley of the Upper - Middle Euphrates and in Southwestern Iran (in Susa), on vast spaces for that time, and served there as military and trade centers of the Sumerians. As you can see, the warriors came on the trail of the Tamkars. The creation and defense of such colonies at long distances from Sumer would be completely overwhelming for individual primitive communities and even for their primitive alliances. This required the presence of an all-Sumerian political unity and an independent political elite, which had already separated from the ordinary members of the community and had considerable power.
Indeed, judging by the burials, in the era of the Uruk, the Sumerians had a powerful and wealthy ruling elite. There were also slaves from among the prisoners of war or bought in foreign lands. Finally, a developed pictographic writing system arose, serving primarily the purposes of economic accounting; her documents have also been found in the Sumerian colonies. All this became possible and necessary only thanks to the economic flourishing of the Sumerian state in the Uruk era, based on the highly developed irrigation that was first carried out at that time.
As you can see, the Sumerian unification of this time was a powerful entity comparable in terms of the level of state development with the early Central American powers founded by tribal unions (Aztec, etc.). There was practically no internal exploitation in the Sumerian communities. Irrigation works were carried out on duty by free community members; these works were organized by the nominee elite, which, of course, strengthened its influence and powers in the same measure as the scale and importance of irrigation grew. The elite of the nome community (chief judge, senior priestess, foreman of tamkar trade agents and especially the high priest-diviner) were endowed with much larger plots of land than ordinary communes, and were freed from any communal work, since their work was considered to be the leadership of the community and the implementation of rituals …It was the high priest - en (lit. "lord") who supervised the service in the temple, temple building, was considered the head of communal self-government in the nome and the council of elders of the community. The temple staff consisted not only of priests, but also of artisans and warriors. All of them were supported by the community, and en commanded them. In the course of time, the Aeneas became hereditary rulers.