Summary

The innovations Sumer made may seem simple, but these inventions and innovations affected how the world's first-ever civilization grew. Sumer created a solid base for the rest of humanity to flourish in; their complex irrigation systems made it easier for the Sumerians to grow and harvest food, bricks made it possible for building to be built with a stronger foundation, their writing was the first type of written language known to humans, all of these being the first of their time.  Because of these new and necessary changes, many of the  off the world's later civilizations were able to root of the example that Sumer gave.  One characteristic that the Sumerians influenced the world in was how they recorded time. Various ancient world civilizations decided to use the same system that the Sumerians used to tell time. Today, many areas in the world still rely on the Sumerians' system of telling time. This is significant to people of the past and us now as if back then they didn't have that base, they wouldn’t have changed it and innovated it, and then we wouldn’t have stuff we got in modern day. Going more specifically into to the way the Sumerians' were able to tell time, they created the concept of dividing day and night into 12-hour periods, hours into 60 minutes, and minutes into 60 seconds which, of course, relates back to their number system with  a base of 60. Sumer is important to Mesopotamia because that is where all civilization started. If Sumer doesn't exist, neither would Mesopotamia, meaning that the later Mediterreanean civilizations wouldn't have had all of the innovations left behind by the Sumerians.