60 Fun Facts About Sumer

Sumer, the earliest known civilization, lay in the south of which modern country?

Its city-states sat on the alluvial plain south of what is now Baghdad, in provinces such as Dhi Qar and Al-Muthanna.

Sumerian farmers lived along the valleys of which two rivers?

Grain surpluses from the river valleys are what let the Sumerians build the world's first urban settlements.

What was the Sumerian writing system called?

Hundreds of thousands of texts survive, from receipts to hymns, partly because scribes in training copied them again and again.

What material did Sumerian scribes write on?

Because clay tablets survive fire and burial far better than paper, whole libraries of Sumerian texts have been recovered.

Which poem, discovered in the ruins of Uruk, is considered the earliest surviving example of fictional literature?

Its hero, called Bilgamesh in Sumerian, is a king of Uruk who may have been a real ruler of the Early Dynastic period.

What name is given to the large layered temple platforms that are the most famous Sumerian buildings?

They grew out of the habit of rebuilding temples on ever-higher terraces above the flood plain.

Which Sumerian city is estimated to have been the first in the world to pass 50,000 inhabitants?

During the Uruk period the city was probably ruled by a priest-king and its towns were still unwalled.

Which Sumerian city is traditionally regarded, on the basis of the Sumerian King List, as the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia?

Eridu lay only 24 kilometres from Ur, and its god Enki was believed to live in the Abzu, the freshwater aquifer beneath the earth.

What was the Sumerian word for a king, literally meaning 'great man'?

The rise of the lugal marked a shift from temple councils led by priests to more secular rule in the Early Dynastic period.

What did the Sumerians call their own land in their inscriptions?

The name means 'Country of the noble lords'; the familiar 'Sumer' is actually the Akkadian name for them.

The word 'Sumer' comes from the name for the Sumerians used by which people who later conquered them?

Sumerian and Akkadian coexisted as spoken languages for about a thousand years before Akkadian won out.

Linguists generally classify Sumerian as which of the following?

Many attempts to link it to other families have failed; it is agglutinative, building words by gluing units of meaning together.

Which scholar was the first to publish the word 'Sumer', in a lecture in January 1869?

The Sumerians were completely unknown to early modern archaeology, which was focused on the Assyrians and Babylonians.

The first major excavation of a Sumerian city took place in 1877 at Girsu under which French archaeologist?

Girsu (modern Tello) belonged to the state of Lagash, whose dynasty is missing from the Sumerian King List despite being richly documented.

Which Sumerian city replaced Eridu at an early stage as the primary temple city whose priests held sway over the other city-states?

It was the seat of Enlil, chief god of the pantheon, and kept its religious primacy for the whole Sumerian period.

Which storm god was the chief of the Sumerian pantheon?

He ruled storm, wind and rain, and his consort Ninlil was goddess of the south wind.

Inanna, goddess of love and war worshipped at Uruk, was the deification of which heavenly body?

She was honoured as both the morning and the evening star, and kings may have re-enacted her marriage to Dumuzid with priestesses.

Which Sumerian city was the cult centre of the moon god Sin (Nanna)?

Its Great Ziggurat, dedicated to the moon god, was later restored by the last king of Babylon.

According to Sumerian belief, from what material had the gods created human beings?

Humans were made specifically to serve the gods, and citizens owed the temple a labour duty they could buy out with silver.

What shape did the Sumerians believe the Earth to be?

Their known world stretched from the Upper Sea (Mediterranean) to the Lower Sea (Persian Gulf) and on to Meluhha and Magan.

In the Sumerian afterlife, the dead were confined to the gloomy world of which goddess?

Her realm was guarded by gateways with monsters, and the dead spent eternity as a gidim, or ghost.

The Sumerian counting system, later adopted throughout Babylonia, alternated ten with which other number?

The resulting sexagesimal system is why we still have 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle.

From roughly which date onwards did the Sumerians write multiplication tables on clay tablets?

They were also the first to use a place-value numeral system and to find the area of a triangle.

Which set of laws, the oldest such codification yet discovered, dates to the Ur III period?

Beneath the king, everyone was either a free person (lu) or a slave (arad for men, geme for women).

Which drink, brewed from cereals, made the Sumerians one of the first known societies to enjoy it?

In the oldest surviving epic, Enkidu drinks seven jugs of it and becomes expansive and sings with joy.

By the Ur III period, Sumerian farmers had switched from wheat to which more salt-tolerant crop as their principal cereal?

Rising soil salinity from irrigation slowly wrecked yields, and the population fell by nearly three-fifths between 2100 and 1700 BC.

What device, also used in Egypt, did the Sumerians employ to lift water for irrigation?

Canals needed constant repair and desilting, and the government drafted people to work on them in a corvée.

The Lyres of Ur, thought to be the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments, were discovered by which archaeologist?

They came out of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, excavated between 1922 and 1934 for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.

Which queen was buried in the Ur royal cemetery accompanied in death by her servants?

Resin found in her tomb appears to have been traded from as far away as Mozambique.

Roughly how many bodies were found in Ur's so-called Great Death Pit, PG-1237?

Sixty-eight of them were women, and CT scans later showed they died from blows to the head, not the willing poison Woolley imagined.

Which famous inlaid artefact was among the finds in the sixteen 'royal tombs' at Ur dated to about 2600 BC?

Woolley uncovered about 1,850 burials in total during the joint British Museum and Penn expedition.

Which building material, not fixed with mortar or cement, was used for Sumerian structures?

Constant rebuilding on the same spot raised cities into the mounds called tells that dot the Near East today.

The Stele of the Vultures records a war of c. 2450 BC between Lagash and which arch-rival city?

It is the first war recorded in any detail, and shows spearmen in something like a phalanx formation.

Which king of Lagash built one of the first empires known to history, annexing practically all of Sumer?

He seems to have used terror as policy, and his empire collapsed shortly after his death.

Which animals were harnessed to the early Sumerian war carts?

These four-wheeled carts with solid wheels were manned by two and probably served more as transports than shock weapons.

Which Sumerian ruler abolished the custom of polyandry in reforms around 2350 BC?

He also issued one of the earliest known 'clean slate' decrees cancelling rural debts.

Who was the last ethnically Sumerian king before Sargon of Akkad, ruling from Uruk and claiming an empire from the Gulf to the Mediterranean?

He was the priest-king of Umma who first overthrew the primacy of Lagash before taking Uruk as his capital.

According to the Sumerian King List, what job did Sargon of Akkad hold under King Ur-Zababa of Kish before becoming king?

He is often called the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire, though his capital Akkad has never been found.

Enheduanna, celebrated as the earliest known named author, was high priestess of the moon god in which city?

She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, who probably installed her to bind his Akkadian religion to native Sumerian worship.

Enheduanna's existence was rediscovered in 1927 when Woolley found her name inscribed on what object at Ur?

Later finds of Sumerian literature naming her prompted the debate over whether she really composed the Exaltation of Inanna.

Which semi-nomadic people from the Zagros Mountains took over after the fall of the Akkadian Empire, in what is often called a Sumerian dark age?

Their rule ended when Utu-hengal of Uruk defeated their last king Tirigan around 2119 BC.

Which king founded the Third Dynasty of Ur in 2112 BC after overthrowing Utu-hengal of Uruk?

He also built the Great Ziggurat of Ur, dedicated to the moon god Nanna, which his son Shulgi finished.

To win the allegiance of the cities during his 48-year reign, King Shulgi of Ur proclaimed himself what?

Under Shulgi the city of Ur became the capital of a state controlling much of Mesopotamia.

Which Neo-Babylonian king, the empire's last, restored the crumbling Ziggurat of Ur in seven stages rather than three?

He found little left but the last stage and nothing to tell him what the original had looked like.

An Elamite invasion and the sack of Ur brought Sumer under Amorite rule during the reign of which last king of Ur III?

The Amorite states that followed are lumped together as the 'Dynasty of Isin' until Hammurabi's Babylon rose around 1800 BC.

Sumerian survived as a sacred and scholarly language in Babylonia and Assyria until roughly when?

Its role was much like Latin in medieval Europe, spoken by nobody but taught in schools for as long as the wedge script itself remained in use.

Which modern people are the closest genetically to the ancient Sumerians?

Sumerian cylinder seals show reed houses much like those the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq were still building millennia later.

Which Sumerian city's canal network has been described as 'Venice in the desert'?

The city formed when two Ubaid settlements, Unug and Kullaba, merged around their temple districts of Eanna and Anu.

Enmebaragesi, the earliest Sumerian king authenticated by archaeological evidence, ruled which city?

His name also turns up in the story of Gilgamesh, which is one reason scholars suspect Gilgamesh himself was a real king of Uruk.

Which Gulf island is theorised to be Dilmun, the legendary 'home city of the land of Sumer'?

Enki, god of wisdom, was said to live there; the theory of it as the Sumerian homeland remains unproven.

What do scholars call the prehistoric people who drained the marshes and settled Sumer first?

They are thought to have evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia, though the Sumerians never mention them.

Which German archaeologist excavated Shuruppak in 1902-1903?

He is better known for uncovering Babylon; Nippur had been dug by Pennsylvania's John Punnett Peters from 1889.

Which dry climatic episode of c. 3200-2900 BC coincided with the end of the Uruk period?

It ended the warm, wet Holocene climatic optimum that had lasted some four thousand years.

Who was the last Gutian king, defeated by Utu-hengal of Uruk around 2119 BC?

Utu-hengal's fifth dynasty of Uruk lasted only until Ur-Nammu overthrew it in 2112 BC.

Which Lagash ruler rose to prominence after Akkad's fall and left many diorite statues of himself?

His second dynasty of Lagash continued the artistic practices of the Sargonic kings.

By what fraction is the population of the Sumerian lands thought to have fallen from 2100 to 1700 BC?

Salt building up in poorly drained irrigated soils slashed harvests even after the switch from wheat to barley.

Which region, famed for its copper ores, did the Sumerians know as Magan?

Meluhha, further east, is thought to have been the Indus Valley.

What were the two basic strata of Sumerian society beneath the lugal?

Male slaves were called arad and female slaves geme.

How did a Sumerian marriage become legally binding?

Parents arranged the match, and the engagement was sealed by a contract recorded on a clay tablet.

What did the Sumerians call the hill people to their north whom they raided for slaves and timber?

Their known world stretched from the 'Upper Sea', the Mediterranean, to the 'Lower Sea', the Persian Gulf.