Introduction to the Sumerians:
Introduction to the Sumerians:
Historical Background
Historical Background
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Cuneiform Writing
Cuneiform Writing
The Sumerians famously invented the world’s earliest known writing system, called cuneiform. The name means ‘wedge-shaped’ because its characters were made up of triangular wedges impressed into clay with a stylus. The first written documents were records of resources and trades; then came royal inscriptions, religious hymns and dedications, and myths like the famous stories of Gilgamesh. Cuneiform represented not only a technological development, but the rise of writing as a source of social and political power.*
early cuneiform
4th millennium BCE
Gilgamesh Flood Tablet
7th century BCE
Notes & References
Thomsen, The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure, 1984.
Black et al., The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004.
Frayne, Ur III Period (2112-2004 BC), 1997.
Fish, "The World of Ur III," 1939.
* Goody, "The State, the Bureau and the File," 1986.
* Robson, "Numeracy, Literacy, and the State in Early Mesopotamia," 2007.
City-States and Temples
City-States and Temples
City-states of the ancient Near East
Mesopotamia was divided into various city-states, each of which had a patron deity within a broader Sumerian pantheon. The deity’s favor had to be maintained through offerings and worship in order to ensure the well-being of the city. They were worshipped at temples called ziggurats, massive stepped pyramids which dominated city skylines and reached into the sky towards the heavens.
the partially-reconstructed Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq
Not only places of worship, the temples were also social and civic centers which acted as the main ruling entities of the city. They managed state lands and functioned as administrative centers in a system of redistributive taxation. Citizens brought offerings of grain and livestock dedicated to the gods; these resources would then be collected at the temples and re-allocated, some as offerings and others as food for the community.
1937 reconstruction illustration of the Ziggurat of Ur, with worshippers
Notes & References
Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000-323 BC, 2007.
Pooley, "Native to the Past: History, Anthropology, and Folklore in Past and Present," 2018.
Yoffee, "Political Economy in Early Mesopotamian States," 1995.
Cunningham, "Sumerian Religion," 2013.
The Ur III Dynasty
The Ur III Dynasty
Let’s zoom in to focus on one period of Mesopotamian history: the Third Dynasty of Ur. This was the last Sumerian dynasty, made up of five kings who ruled from roughly 2100 to 2000 BCE. Founded at the city of Ur on the banks of the Euphrates, the empire extended throughout the region of Mesopotamia. Its most famous king was Shulgi, who during his 48-year-reign (ca. 2094-2046 BCE) transformed the empire into a centralized state, undertook massive building projects and structural reforms, and literally rewrote his society’s religious ideology. He purged earlier narratives from regional literary tradition and established himself as divine ruler, making Ur III likely the only dynasty in Mesopotamian history to have claimed divine kingship through an organized ‘cult of living kings’.*
Ur III-period figure of King Shulgi
Ur III was a unique period of Mesopotamian history that is commonly portrayed as a massive bureaucratic surveillance state. Under Shulgi’s administrative reforms, the state kept records of every person, animal, and resource in the empire. They took detailed inventories, wrote down the names and wages of every laborer, and kept endless receipts and reports in carefully organized archives. According to scholars, this record-keeping was thorough to the point of obsession: Postgate writes that “the death of a single sheep appears three times in the government archives” (42)!
THE BALA SYSTEM
THE BALA SYSTEM
During the Ur III period, the redistributive temple economy became ultra-efficient through the bala system. This was a system of taxation where every province had to provide the state with a certain amount of resources. Like the districts in The Hunger Games, cities provided different goods depending on their regional specialization: some paid bala in cereals, while others paid in timber. Government officials would then allocate each province’s resources to the others to ensure every city had what they needed. Many of these resources also went to the cult as sacrificial offerings for the gods or as sustenance for temple staff. Records of payments often record them as gifts dedicated to specific deities.
Notes & References
* Michalowski, "The Mortal Kings of Ur: A Short Century of Divine Rule in Ancient Mesopotamia," 2008.
Zettler, "Archaeology and the Problem of Textual Evidence for the Third Dynasty of Ur," 2003.
Klein, "The Royal Hymns of Shulgi King of Ur: Man's Quest for Immortal Fame," 1981.
Steinkeller, "The Administrative and Economic Organization of the Ur III State: The Core and the Periphery," 1987. See this article for a detailed description of the bala system.
Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History, 1992.
Jones, "Sumerian Administrative Documents: An Essay," 1976.
Jones & Snyder, "The Basic Organization at Drehem,” 1961.
Molina, "Archives and Bookkeeping in Southern Mesopotamia during the Ur III Period," 2016.
Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000-323 BC, 2007.
Puzrish-Dagan
Puzrish-Dagan
The site of Tell Drehem today
Puzrish-Dagan (now Drehem, Iraq) was a city built by Shulgi on the outskirts of the religious center of Nippur. Its primary function was administrative: it housed the empire’s royal archives as well as a huge bureau and depository for the organization of livestock deliveries throughout the empire. The livestock warehouse played a special role in the bala system: animals were collected from royal pastures and outlying conquered territory, inventoried and kept at Puzrish-Dagan, and then delivered throughout the cities of the empire. Citizens of every class lived and worked here, from government officials to institutional staff to royal herdsmen. Puzrish-Dagan’s massive archives housed thousands of tablets, which help us understand the inner workings of the Ur III system.
Notes & References
Tsouparopoulou, "A Reconstruction of the Puzrish-Dagan Central Livestock Agency," 2013.
Maeda, "Bringing (mu-túm) Livestock and the Puzurish-Dagan Organization in the Ur III Dynasty," 1989.
Steinkeller, "The Administrative and Economic Organization of the Ur III State: The Core and the Periphery," 1987.
Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History, 1992.
Stępień, From the History of the State System in Mesopotamia - The Kingdom of the Third Dynasty of Ur, 2009.
Zettler, "Archaeology and the Problem of Textual Evidence for the Third Dynasty of Ur," 2003.
Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 2001.
Al-Mutawalli et al., "The Cuneiform Documents from the Iraqi Excavation at Drehem," 2017.
Image Notes
Cuneiform Writing
Cover illustration of cuneiform tablets inspired by the online collection of the British Museum (Sumerian/Akkadian signs are illustrative only and do not convey actual meaning)
Cuneiform tablet photos: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
City-States and Temples
Cover illustration of the Eanna Ziggurat in Uruk, based off of the Uruk Visualisation Project
Map of the cities of the Ancient Near East: World History Encyclopedia.
Photo of the Ziggurat of Ur: Adobe Stock.
Illustration of the Ziggurat of Ur by Marjorie V. Duffell for C. L. Woolley, 1937: Wikimedia Commons.
The Ur III Dynasty
Cover illustration of a Sumerian royal palace, based off of 19th-century reconstruction illustrations and the British Museum Girsu Project
Illustration of the foundation figure of King Shulgi from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Illustrated map of the Ur III core territory, based off of Steinkeller, "The Administrative and Economic Organization of the Ur III State: The Core and the Periphery," 1987, p18.
Illustrated graphic of the bala system; mudbrick houses loosely based off of ancient floor plans and clay models
Puzrish-Dagan
Cover illustration of a government building, based off of examples of early large-scale architecture
Photos of Tell Drehem: Al-Mutawalli et al., “The Cuneiform Documents from the Iraqi Excavation at Drehem," 2017.
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