• Formation and growth of city-states

Around 3000 BC the Sumerians began to form city-states in southern Mesopotamia that controlled areas of several hundred square miles. The names of these cities speak from a distant and foggy past: Ur, Lagash, Eridu, Uruk.

Constant warfare for water led to growth of larger city-states.

• The rise of a king and justification of kingship;

The states of Sumer seemed to have been ruled by a type of priest-king. Among their duties were leading the military, administering trade, judging disputes, and engaging in the most important religious ceremonies.

Need to legitimize the authority of the king other than kinship and responsibility: divine selection or direct divinity

    From the Epic of Gilgamesh:

After he turned his chest Enkidu said to Gilgamesh:
"Your mother bore you ever unique(!),
the Wild Cow of the Enclosure, Ninsun,
your head is elevated over (other) men,
Enlil has destined for you the kingship over the people." (Tablet 2)

• Bureaucracy, record-keeping, and writing

A bureaucracy assisted the king. Consisting of priests, it bore all the responsibility of surveying and distributing land as well as distributing crops.

Record keeping was a result of bureaucracy.

The rise of writing: The first writings were records: clay tablets filled with numbers recording distributed goods.

Writing also led to such literature as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Improvement on writing:

the Sumerians slowly converted their picture words to a short-hand consisting of wedged lines created by bending the reed against the wet clay and moving the end closest to the hand back and forth once. And thus was born cuneiform, or "wedge-shaped" (which is what cuneiform means in Latin) writing.

• Calendars and mathematics

Record keeping and calculation: invention of the decimal system; later developed into the sexagesimal system (60 based) by the ancient Babylonians. But the development of its math went beyond immediate need of accounting.

Record keeping, measuring long periods of time for agricultural planning, and calendars.

• Religion

Anthropomorphic gods, sharing human emotions, identifying with natural forms and astronomical bodies (e.g. sun, wind, etc.). Unpredictable relationship with man. No after life for man.

Major deities:

First gods: An, the god of heaven; Ki, the goddess of earth; Enlil, the god of air; and Enki, the god of water.
Heaven, earth, air, and water were regarded as the four major components of the universe.

Later gods: e.g. Shamash, god of sun and justice; Ishtar, goddess of war and love.

The Epic of Gilgamesh that captures much of ancient Sumerian religion also reflects on many aspects of ancient Sumerian culture:

    1. the blurring of nature and civilization as in the creation of Enkidu, whose "parents" were gods of both human and animal forms.

Enkidu, your mother, the gazelle,
and your father, the wild donkey, engendered you,
four wild asses raised you on their milk,
and the herds taught you all the grazing lands.
(tablet 8)

   2. Relationship between gods and humans reflected on the Sumerians' views on life:

 Gods scheming against humans (flood)

All day long the South Wind blew ...,
blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water,
overwhelming the people like an attack.
No one could see his fellow,
they could not recognize each other in the torrent.
The gods were frightened by the Flood,
and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.
The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall.
Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth,
the sweet-voiced Mistress of the Gods wailed:
'The olden days have alas turned to clay,
because I said evil things in the Assembly of the Gods!
How could I say evil things in the Assembly of the Gods,
ordering a catastrophe to destroy my people!!
No sooner have I given birth to my dear people
than they fill the sea like so many fish!'
The gods--those of the Anunnaki--were weeping with her,
the gods humbly sat weeping, sobbing with grief(?),
their lips burning, parched with thirst.
Six days and seven nights
came the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land.
When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding,
the flood was a war--struggling with itself like a woman
                       writhing (in labor).
...

Just then Enlil arrived.
He saw the boat and became furious,
he was filled with rage at the Igigi gods:
'Where did a living being escape?
No man was to survive the annihilation!'
Ninurta spoke to Valiant Enlil, saying:
'Who else but Ea could devise such a thing?
It is Ea who knows every machination!'
La spoke to Valiant Enlil, saying:
'It is yours, O Valiant One, who is the Sage of the Gods.
How, how could you bring about a Flood without consideration
Charge the violation to the violator,
charge the offense to the offender,
but be compassionate lest (mankind) be cut off,
be patient lest they be killed.
...

Enlil went up inside the boat
and, grasping my hand, made me go up.
He had my wife go up and kneel by my side.
He touched our forehead and, standing between us, he
                            blessed us:
'Previously Utanapishtim was a human being.
But now let Utanapishtim and his wife become like us,
                               the gods!

(tablet 11 the flood)

3. views on life and death:

    (tablet 13)

2.The decline of Sumer and rise of Akkad

Eventually, the Sumerians would have to battle another people, the Akkadians, who migrated up from the Arabian Peninsula. The Akkadians were a Semitic people, that is, they spoke a Semitic language related to languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. When the two peoples clashed, the Sumerians gradually lost control over the city-states they had so brilliantly created and fell under the hegemony of the Akkadian kingdom which was based in Akkad, the city that was later to become Babylon.

The Sumerian legacy

For the great experiment of the Sumerians was civilization, a culture transformed by the practical effects of urbanization, writing, and monarchy. While the Sumerians disappear from the human story around 2000 BC, the invaders that overthrew them adopted their culture and became, more or less, Sumerian. They adopted the government, economy, city-living, writing, law, religion, and stories of the original peoples.

The rise of the Amorites and the (Old) Babylonian kingdom.

After the last Sumerian dynasty fell around 2000 BC, Mesopotamia drifted into conflict and chaos for almost a century. Around 1900 BC, a group of Semites called the Amorites gained control of most of the Mesopotamian region, and centralized the government over the individual city-states and based their capital in the city of Babylon.

The Hittites (1600-1200 B.C.)

The invasion of the Hittites, an Indo-European people, spelled the end of the Old Babylonian empire in Mesopotamia (1900-1600 BC), and like so many others before them, the invaders adopted the ways of the conquered.

The Hittites were the people primarily responsible for transmitting Mesopotamian thought, law, political structure, economic structure, and ideas around the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Greece.