Ancient Sumeria

Archaeologists have established that the oldest civilized cultures in the world inhabited the area known as The Fertile Crescent and migrated to Mesopotamia (Ancient Greek for "land between the rivers", meaning the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers), which is in modern-day Iraq. Sumeria is considered history's first major civilization. It was here that mankind first developed written language, sustainable agriculture, and made its first inventions, such as the wheel.

There is some dispute as to whether Eridu or Uruk, both in Sumeria, or southern Mesopotamia, was the first full-fledged city. The ruins of Eridu, near the modern day village of Tell abu Shahrain, (near Basra in southern Iraq), were first excavated in 1949. Some feel that Eridu, which dates back to at least 5000 B.C., was more a ceremonial center than an actual city, as it was the legendary home of the god Enki and believed by the Sumerians to be the site of "the mound of creation".

Uruk (modern Warka, Iraq), on the other hand, was discovered in 1849 by British geologist and explorer Willian Loftus and has been dated to around 4000 B.C. The sites of houses and workshops as well as religious and political centers have been identified there. The earliest written records (in cuneiform) make frequent reference to Uruk. At the height of its power, in roughly 2900 B.C., as many as 80,000 inhabitants called the city home.

At both of these locations, as throughout the region in ancient times, religion played a major role in daily life. The culture was a polytheistic one, worshipping a pantheon of deities who personified such aspects of the world as sky (An), earth (Ki), sun (Utu), moon (Nanna), and Venus (Inanna). Oftentimes certain deities became more closely associated with a particular city, thus rising or falling in popularity according to the political might of that city. Pyramid-like temples, called ziggurats, were the place of worship.

In addition to their development of writing and the wheel (originally a potter's wheel), the Sumerians were an agricultural society who grew a variety of grains and vegetables in canal-irrigated fields. They also tended herds of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. The primary beasts of burden were oxen and donkeys. Competition for land and political power in the area kept the people in an almost constant state of warfare.

Other developments of the Sumerians included an advanced mathematical system and a lunisolar calendar. The best known examples of literature from this culture is the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem concerning two men's legendary adventures, and the King List, a part historic, part mythological list which details the rule of early regional kings.

Sumerian, one of the world's oldest languages, is unique in that it is not related to any other known language family. Languages of this nature are called "language isolates". Some modern examples of this type of language are (while disputed by some scholars) Basque and Korean.

Spoken in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from roughly 3200 B.C. until between 2000 and 1000 B.C., when it was replaced by Akkadian, Sumerian gradually faded from common usage and became a ceremonial, literary and scientific language, much as Latin has evolved from Roman into modern times.

Sumerian is the world's oldest known written language, with two distinct phases of development. The older phase is called "proto-literate", meaning the symbols have no linguistic or phonetic equivalent. This form of writing is also called pictographic, meaning that words are represented entirely by images. The oldest recorded form of this form is the Kish tablet, found near what is now Baghdad, which dates to 3500 B.C. The next phase, which includes linguistic content, is referred to as archaic cuneiform and includes symbols which represent sounds as well as words.

Written Sumerian pre-dates the Egyptians use of hieroglyphs by about 400 years, at least according to known archaeological records. It was succeeded by Elamite, a possible distant relative of the Dravidian languages of India, and Akkadian, which belongs to the Semitic language family. Modern examples of Semitic languages, which are spoken by some 467 million people across Africa and the Middle East, include Arabic, Amharic, and Hebrew.

Before the late 1830s A.D., the meaning of Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions was a mystery. An archaeological site in northwestern Iran contained a carving called the Behistun Inscription, which included text in three separate cuneiform languages-Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian (a late form of Akkadian). Known throughout the centuries and referred to by various explorers, the inscription was frequently misinterpreted. Starting in 1835, a British Army officer named Henry Rawlinson was able, over the course of several years, to transcribe and translate these texts, and the Behistun Inscription became the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone for ancient Mesopotamian texts.

Scholars of Ancient Mesopotamian culture and language, called Assyriologists, continue to dispute the relationships between these languages and how the region's cultures interacted and evolved. Most of the top research in the field today is conducted at a relatively small selection of universities including Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania, which houses a large selection of regional antiquities in its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.