58 Fun Facts About Sumer

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

Iraq: Sumer was so thoroughly forgotten that even its name was lost until scholars in the 1800s pieced it back together from excavated inscriptions.

Sumerian farmers lived along the valleys of which two rivers?

Tigris and Euphrates: the Greeks named the land Mesopotamia, 'between rivers', and canals cut from the two streams turned a dry plain into farmland rich enough to feed the first cities.

What was the Sumerian writing system called?

Cuneiform means 'wedge-shaped', from Latin cuneus, after the marks a cut reed stylus left; the script began as little pictures and was later borrowed for other, unrelated languages.

What material did Sumerian scribes write on?

Moist clay: a fire that would destroy paper only bakes a tablet harder, which is why burned cities left whole archives for archaeologists to read.

Which poem about a king's search for immortality is often called the oldest surviving great work of literature?

The Epic of Gilgamesh was pieced together from tablets dug up at Nineveh in the mid-1800s; its hero never wins eternal life, because a serpent eats the plant of youth before he can use it.

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

Ziggurats, unlike Egypt's pyramids, had no rooms inside: each was a solid stepped mass, thought to have carried a shrine on top reached by outside stairs or ramps.

The blue lapis lazuli in the jewellery of Sumer's royal tombs came from mines in which modern country?

Afghanistan: the stone came overland from the mountains of Badakhshan because Sumer's river plain had almost no stone, metal or timber of its own, so its cities had to trade for them.

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

Eridu: the King List opens with kingship descending from heaven to it, and excavators found its temple rebuilt on one spot again and again, a tiny shrine growing into a great platform.

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

Lugal joins lu, 'man', and gal, 'big'; the title's spread in the Early Dynastic period is often read as power passing from temple-based priest-rulers to more secular kings.

What did the Sumerians call themselves in their own language?

The black-headed people: 'Sumer' is not their own word at all but the name their northern neighbours used, which later scholars borrowed for the land and its people.

What do the oldest known Sumerian writings mostly record?

Accounts of goods came first: the earliest records are ledgers of commodities with numerals and names, and for centuries writing served bookkeepers, not poets.

Linguists generally classify Sumerian as what kind of language?

A language isolate: no attempt to tie Sumerian to another family has held. One 19th-century Paris scholar long insisted it was no language at all, only a secret code invented by the Babylonians.

The rules of the Royal Game of Ur, a Sumerian board game, were worked out in the 1980s from what?

A Babylonian tablet of 177 BC set out the rules, and British Museum curator Irving Finkel matched them to boards dug up at Ur: two players race their pieces from one end to the other.

In the Sumerian King List, roughly how long did each of the eight kings before the flood reign?

About 30,000 years each: the list gives the eight a combined 241,200 years, opening with Alulim's 28,800. After the flood the reigns shrink to centuries and then to believable decades.

Which Sumerian holy city was never a political capital, yet control of it was thought to confer kingship over the land?

Nippur: a king's armies might conquer the country, but his right to rule still had to be sanctioned at its great temple, which kept the city sacred whichever dynasty was on top.

Which storm god was the chief of the Sumerian pantheon?

Enlil split heaven from earth to make room for seeds to grow, one myth says, and then invented the hoe. His word decreed the fates, and it was he who granted kings their right to rule.

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

Venus shows itself at dawn and again at dusk, and early Uruk honoured a morning Inanna and an evening Inanna to match. Her emblem, a rayed star, later became the sign of the planet itself.

Which biblical patriarch does Genesis say came from 'Ur of the Chaldees', often identified with the Sumerian city of Ur?

Abraham: Genesis has his family set out from Ur of the Chaldees, matched with the Sumerian ruins since the 1860s, though some scholars place his Ur far to the north, near Harran.

In Sumerian myth, why did the gods create human beings?

To take over their hard labour: in the myth of Enki and Ninmah the junior gods, worn out from digging canals, complain until Enki fashions humans as their substitutes.

What small carved object did a Sumerian wear on a cord and use as a signature on documents?

A cylinder seal, engraved with figures or writing, left a raised picture strip wherever it was rolled. It hung at its owner's neck so it was always to hand.

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

Ereshkigal ruled a realm behind seven gates. When her sister Inanna came calling, she had her stripped of one garment at each gate until she stood naked and powerless before the throne.

We count in tens, but Sumerian scribes built arithmetic on which number, still hiding in every clock?

Sixty: Babylonian astronomers inherited the habit from Sumerian scribes, and it still divides our hours and minutes, the angles of geometry and the coordinates on every map.

Which crime writer met her future husband on the dig at Ur and later set a murder mystery on a Mesopotamian excavation?

Agatha Christie came to Ur as a tourist in 1930 and within months married Max Mallowan, the young archaeologist told to show her round. Murder in Mesopotamia later put Poirot on a dig much like it.

The oldest law code yet discovered, written in Sumerian, is some three centuries older than which king's famous code?

Hammurabi's Babylonian code demanded an eye for an eye. The Sumerian laws, some three centuries older, mostly set fines in silver instead: half a mina for a lost eye, two shekels for a tooth.

The Sumerians were among the first societies known to brew which drink from cereals?

Beer was a thick daily staple in Sumer, sipped through straws to strain out the dregs. A hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing, doubles as the oldest surviving beer recipe.

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

Barley copes with salty soil far better than wheat, and centuries of irrigation under a fierce sun had salted Sumer's fields. It was the staple grain and doubled as a means of payment.

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

Shadufs are long poles balanced like seesaws, with a bucket on one end and a counterweight on the other to swing the water up. Farmers in Egypt and India still use them.

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

Leonard Woolley found the lyres among the bodies of attendants in Ur's Royal Cemetery. Their wooden frames had rotted away, so the instruments on show are rebuilt around the original gold, silver and shell.

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

Puabi's tomb was one of the few at Ur that robbers never reached. She lay beneath a headdress of gold leaves and ribbons, with gold cups beside her and her attendants around her.

Scans of remains from Ur's royal tombs suggest attendants, long thought poisoned, died of what?

Head wounds: two scanned skulls showed blows from a pointed weapon. Traces of mercury suggest the bodies were then preserved for the funeral rites.

Which inlaid treasure from a Sumerian royal tomb shows war on one side and a banquet on the other?

The Standard of Ur is a hollow wooden box inlaid with shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli. Its excavator guessed it was carried into battle as a standard and the name stuck, though its real purpose is unknown.

On a plain with almost no stone or timber, what did the Sumerians build nearly everything from?

Plano-convex mudbrick, flat underneath and domed on top, was moulded from mud and dried in the sun. It crumbles in the weather, so towns were levelled again and again and rebuilt on their own rubble.

The Stele of the Vultures, a Sumerian victory monument, is named for its carved vultures doing what?

Carrying off enemy heads: the birds fly above the spearmen of Lagash with the heads of Umma's dead in their beaks. On the other face a huge figure holds more of the losers bundled in a net.

Ziusudra, a Sumerian king who survives a disaster sent by the gods, is the counterpart of which biblical figure?

Noah's story has an older Sumerian cousin: the god Enki tips off the priest-king Ziusudra, who rides out the flood in his boat and is rewarded with eternal life.

Before horses reached ancient Mesopotamia, kings' war wagons were pulled by prized kungas, a cross between a donkey and what?

A wild ass sired every kunga, DNA from 4,500-year-old skeletons showed in 2022, making them the earliest known hybrids bred by people. Each one had to be bred afresh from a captured wild male.

Ama-gi, a Sumerian term for cancelling debts and ending debt bondage, is often called the first written word for which idea?

Freedom is the usual translation, though ama-gi literally means 'return to the mother'. It appears in the reform texts of Lagash, and its two signs now serve as a logo for libertarian groups.

A Sumerian bride's words to her king, found in a drawer in Istanbul, are often called the world's oldest what?

Love poem: the bride's honeyed lines to King Shu-Sin were probably performed at a sacred marriage rite. The tablet lay untranslated in its drawer until the Sumerologist Samuel Kramer picked it up in 1951.

Sargon of Akkad, who rose from royal cupbearer to king, is often credited with founding history's first what?

Empire: Sargon served the king of Kish as cup-bearer before seizing a throne of his own and making himself master of all Sumer. His capital, Akkad, has never been found.

Enheduanna, a daughter of Sargon of Akkad who served as high priestess at Ur, is widely celebrated as which literary first?

Author known by name: hymns to the goddess Inanna speak in the first person and name her. The surviving copies were made some six centuries after she lived, so some scholars doubt she composed them.

In Sumerian myth, how did the goddess Inanna win the powers of civilisation from the wise god Enki?

She got him drunk: over a long drinking bout Enki gave away the divine powers one after another, and Inanna had loaded them on the Boat of Heaven and sailed before he sobered up and wanted them back.

In the Sumerian poem The Curse of Agade, the gods send Gutian raiders against Akkad after its king does what?

Wrecks a great temple: King Naram-Sin takes axes to the chief god's shrine, and the god calls the Gutians down from the mountains in revenge. The poem was written long after his reign to explain why Akkad fell.

Nanna, patron god of Ur, was shown as bull's horns or a boat because he was god of what?

The moon: its thin crescent lies on its back in Mesopotamian skies, so artists drew it as a bull's horns or a boat. Myth even made Nanna the sun god's father.

King Shulgi of Ur went beyond any royal title during his long reign and proclaimed himself what?

A god: Shulgi took to writing his name with the sign reserved for deities, as Naram-Sin of Akkad had done before him, and court poets answered with hymn after hymn in his praise.

Around 530 BC a Babylonian princess at Ur kept a labelled collection, often called the world's first what?

Museum: Ennigaldi's pieces, among them part of a statue of King Shulgi already some 1,500 years old, lay side by side with their labels. Her father Nabonidus is sometimes called the first archaeologist.

Sumerian poems about the sack of Ur around 2000 BC are often compared with which book of the Bible?

Lamentations mourns Jerusalem's fall in 586 BC. The Sumerian poems, some 1,400 years older, have Ur's patron goddess plead in tears with the great gods and then weep over her ruined city.

Sumerian died out as a spoken tongue, but Mesopotamian scribes went on copying it for roughly how long?

About 2,000 years: Sumerian became the learned tongue of Babylonian scholars and priests, as Latin later was in Europe. 'What kind of a scribe,' asked one proverb, 'is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?'

Which people still build the arched guest halls shown in 5,000-year-old Sumerian carvings?

Marsh Arabs bind reeds into thick columns, bend them into arches and roof them with reed mats to raise a guest hall, or mudhif. Whether they descend from the Sumerians themselves is unproven.

King Shulgi of Ur boasted in a hymn of what one-day feat?

Running to another city and back: the hymn has Shulgi race some 100 miles to feast at his capital, then run back through hail and thunder, keeping the same festival in two cities in a single day.

Dilmun, the trading land that shipped copper and pearls to Sumer, is usually centred on which Gulf island?

Bahrain sat halfway along the sea route between Sumer and the Indus Valley, trading copper and pearls for farm produce. The island is still dotted with ancient burial mounds.

In a Sumerian school story of about 2000 BC, what wins a much-caned pupil his headmaster's favour?

Dinner and gifts at home: the boy has his father invite the headmaster round, pour him date wine, dress him in a new robe and slip a ring on his hand. The teacher promptly declares him a model scholar.

Archaeologists dig Sumerian cities such as Ur out of 'tells', which are what?

Mounds of built-up ruins: as old walls crumbled, each town was levelled and rebuilt on its own rubble until, layer on layer, it stood as a hill above the plain. Tell comes from the Arabic for a hillock.

A Sumerian proverb from about 1900 BC, often billed as the oldest recorded joke, teases young wives about what?

Breaking wind: the proverb deadpans that one thing has 'never occurred since time immemorial', a young wife not doing so in her husband's lap. A 2008 British study ranked it the oldest joke on record.

A legend with a famous biblical echo says the infant Sargon of Akkad was found where?

Floating in a basket: the legend has his mother, a priestess, seal him in a rush basket with bitumen and cast him on the river, where a water-drawer fished him out. The tale of Moses tells much the same story.

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

Gudea rebuilt the great temples of Lagash and installed statues of himself inside them, hands folded in prayer. Each statue was given a name: one is called 'Gudea, the man who built the temple, may his life be long'.

Sumerian worshippers left small stone statues in their temples, figures now famous for their enormous what?

Eyes: wide and staring, they were inlaid with white shell and black stone. Each figure stood in a temple with hands clasped, keeping up the prayers while the person who paid for it got on with daily life.

Magan, the land that shipped copper by sea to Sumer, is generally identified with which modern country?

Oman, together with today's Emirates: Sumer's river plain had no metal ores of its own, so copper from the mines of Magan came north by boat. Meluhha, further east, is thought to have been the Indus Valley.

The ruins of Ur now lie far inland, but the Sumerian city was once a port near the shore of what?

The Persian Gulf: thousands of years of river silt have pushed the shoreline far to the south, stranding the harbours that once carried Ur's sea trade.

Once the two sets of parents agreed, what normally sealed a Sumerian engagement?

A written contract: a marriage was a deal between two families, negotiated by the parents. Mesopotamian law later put it bluntly: without a contract, the woman a man married was not his wife.