Sumerians

They created the first human society known to have met all the fundamental requirements for civilization. They built the earliest city-states overseen by ruling dynasties; carved out empires and engaged in foreign relations; instituted a legal code and administrative systems, complete with courts, jails, and government records; instituted military science with divisions of infantry, transport (carts drawn by pairs of desert onagers, Asiatic wild asses), and spear-throwers; invented systems of weights and measures; created accounting and record-keeping, and published histories in an original written language; organized agriculture and irrigation; warehoused produce for general distribution; engaged in long-distance commerce; ran a merchant fleet; established an economy based on the various trades of its subjects; employed skilled artisans for public works projects; organized large-scale labor and hierarchical management for the construction of monumental temples and palaces, some with arches, domes, and buttresses, thousands of years before these architectural components were re-discovered by Roman building engineers; provided welfare for the underprivileged; protected women under the law and allowed them to achieve much higher status than in other, contemporaneous societies; taught navigation, mathematics, geometry, algebra, surveying, and astronomy with abacus and slide rule; specialized in decorative arts; and codified religion.

Who were these inventive people? And how did they come to take the first step from pre-civilized to civilized humankind?

The Sumerians called themselves the Ug sag gíg-ga, or "black-headed people," though surviving examples of their painted statuary depict them with blue eyes, and poems celebrated their "fair-headed lads and maidens." Nor did they ever refer to the territories they occupied in what is today modern Iraq as "Sumer." The name is Semitic, after the later Akkadian Šumeru, itself derived from the earlier Hittite Šanhar and Egyptian Sngr. To these "Sumerians," their domain was originally known as Ki-en-gir, or "land of the civilized kings," a name reflecting their self-conscious identity as culture-creators.

They were a non-Semitic folk from Samarra, in northern Mesopotamia, their lineage going back to a Sanskrit-speaking, Aryan homeland in the Southern Urals Steppe region. These roots in south-central Russia account for the ubiquitous appearance of the swastika, that emblematic symbol of all Indo-European tribes, among the inhabitants of Samarra. Paleolinguists Hyatt and Ruth Verrill have demonstrated the relationship "between Sumerian and Sanskrit."

The proto-Sumerians of Samarra flourished as able farmers, weavers, leatherworkers, masons, and potters. Such skills led to increasing population pressures that forced some, after 4500 BC, to leave Samarra for less crowded conditions at the southern end of the Fertile Crescent. There, the immigrants drained the marshes, established their culturally superior industries, and traded with their neighbors — indigenous peasants in mud-brick huts, together with nomadic Semites, pastoralists living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats. The newcomers' innovative management of storable food fostered a demographic expansion constrained within settled areas, with consequent development of extensive labor forces required to serve the diversifying needs of burgeoning community life. Rising levels of material success had gradually matured into prosperous urban centers sprouting along the Persian Gulf. Here history merged with myth to explain the birth of civilization on the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial plain, south of Baghdad.

Although archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists are unable to definitively trace the Sumerians' ethnic or linguistic roots, the "black-headed people" themselves told how their first city was built in the south, from whence spread high culture northward throughout the Fertile Crescent. Their claim was borne out by field investigators, who identified Eridu as the oldest city not only in Mesopotamia, but in the world. It was established around 5400 BC, near the mouth of the Euphrates River and the seacoast, but lies now some distance from the Persian Gulf, due to the accumulation of silt at the shoreline over the last 74 centuries. Eridu, according to the Sumerians, was founded by Adapa, a representative from the far-off land of Dilmun, revered as the seat of Creation.

It was from this "place where the Sun rises" that "the first man" landed with the seeds of a technological society that soon after blossomed between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Although scholars have not yet determined the location of Dilmun, its culture-bearers appear to have indeed gained a foothold in coastal Iraq nearly one thousand years before immigrants from Samarra arrived at Eridu, where a synthesis of Adapa's sea-faring people from Dilmun with the Ug sag gíg-ga of Samarra resulted in Sumerian civilization. This conclusion is underscored by the excavation at Eridu of abundant fish middens containing the mid-sixth-millennium BC skeletal remains of deep-water ocean catch made by a sailing folk fitting Adad's characterization and believed to have been ancestors of the Sumerians.

Two thousand years later, Ki-en-gir was divided into about a dozen independent city-states ruled over by either an ensi, a kind of priestly governor, or a monarch, known as the lugal. These were transitional to their First Dynasty, circa 2900 BC, and Sumer flourished for more than 400 years, until violence began to wash over the "land of the civilized kings" with the onset of the 26th Century BC. Cities grew suddenly overpopulated and threw up formidable defensive walls, while undefended villages disappeared. An aggressive Semitic kingdom, Akkad, was making its bid for supreme power.

Around 2500 BC, Eannatum of Lagash endeavored to unify all of Sumer against this dire threat by taking most of his fellow city-states by force. His dynamic action saved Ki-en-gir for the next 230 years. But with the appearance of Sargon the Great, the ancient "land of the civilized kings" was completely overpowered in 2270 BC. The Akkadians themselves went into precipitous decline just 52 years later, only to be replaced by the non-Semitic Gutians. Successful revolts against this barbarous tribal people were led by the lugals, Ur-Nammu and Shulgi, who expelled the barbarous occupiers around 2047 BC. Their triumph unleashed a national revival of civilization that flourished for more than 100 years.

But renewed, mid-20th-century-BC bickering between quarrelsome city-states doomed this "Sumerian Renaissance." In 1940 BC, another Semitic people, the Amorites,...