1. What The Water Gave US
Ancient Mesopotamia and The
Invention of Writing
Professor Will Adams
Valencia College

2. Mesopotamia: land between
the rivers

3. The Impact of Geography
 The first true civilization,
Sumer, was discovered in
Mesopotamia, which means
“land between the rivers.”
 The Fertile Crescent is an arc of
land stretching from the
Mediterranean Sea to the
Persian Gulf, spanned by the
Tigris & Euphrates Rivers, which
yielded rich soil and abundant
crops.
 The first Sumerian cities
emerged in southern
Mesopotamia around 3,200
B.C.

4. Why Was Sumeria the First
Civilization?
 The Sumerians defined what constitutes a “civilization” today:
1. They built complex, advanced cities.
2. They employed specialized workers.
3. They designed complex social institutions, like centralized
government & religion.
4. They began the first system of record-keeping or writing
(cuneiform), which allowed history and literature to develop.
5. They developed advanced technologies like the wheel, sail, & plow.
6. They mastered agriculture, allowing them to create a surplus of
food, which led to trade.
7. Trade led to contact with outside cities and societies.
8. That ultimately led to cultural diffusion: the process of a new idea
or product spreading from one culture to another.

5. Disadvantages of the
Environment
 The northern Fertile Crescent is
hilly and rainy in the winter,
while the south is flat, arid, &
dry year-round.
 The South receives little rain, but
receives a lot of silt (material
deposited by rivers, good for
crops) from annual flooding, but
flooding is unpredictable.
 Irrigation could manage the
flooding, but it was difficult to
build.
 Villages clustered in open plains,
which provide no natural
barriers for protection.

6. Early Solutions to Problems
 Food: By 5000 B.C.E.,
Mesopotamian resources were
running out, so people
moved to the plains &
established Sumerian city-
states.
 Protection: Sumerians built
city walls using mud bricks to
keep out enemies.
 To get natural resources,
Sumerians traded their grain,
cloth, and crafted tools for
the stone, wood, & metal
they needed.

7. The Invention of Irrigation
 To make sure there was enough
silt, farmers had to control the
water supply, thus inventing
irrigation.
 Irrigation ditches carried water to
the fields,
 This allowed for a surplus of
crops.
 The ditches took cooperation to
complete (leaders to plan &
labors and supervisors to build).
 The project created a need for
laws to settle disputes over how
land and water should be
distributed.

8. The City-States of Sumer
 Recognizable cities first
arose around 3,000 B.C.
 The first cities were Eridu,
Ur, & Uruk.
 Each city was surrounded
by barley and wheat fields.
 As cities grew, so did their
control of the surrounding
land.
 These large, city-governed
areas are called city-states.

9. The Sumerian Cityscapes
 Sumerian city-states were
surrounded by sun-dried
brick walls with gates.
 Within the walls were
inhabitants’ houses & large
government buildings (also
mud brick).
 Each city-state shared a
similar culture & history with
the others, but each had a
different government.
 There was no Sumerian
“nation”.

10. Ancient Sumerian Religion
 Ancient Sumerians were
polytheistic (believing in
multiple gods).
 The Sumerian pantheon
consisted of a hierarchy of
roughly 3,000 gods.
 These gods were immortal,
all-powerful, and used
humans as servants.
 Sumerians built temples
called ziggurats (mountains
of god) & gave sacrifices to
please the gods.
 Sumerians did believe in the
concept of a “soul” or
personal life-force.
 The ancient Sumerians
believed that the souls of
their dead went to a “land
of no return”.
 Their view of the afterlife
was not at all optimistic.
 They saw the land of the
dead as a gloomy, dark
place, existing somewhere
between the earth’s crust
and sea.

11. The Sumerian Pantheon
 Sumerians believed that gods lived
on distant mountaintops & each god
had control of certain things.
 Each city was ruled by a different
god.
 The most revered Sumerian deities
were:
 Enlil (supreme god & god of air)
 Ishtar (goddess of fertility & life)
 An (god of heaven)
 Enki (god of water &
underworld)
 Shamash (god of sun and giver
of law)

12. Kingship and Religion Linked
 Each city-state king’s power
was enhanced & supported
by Sumerian religion.
 Sovereignty (right to rule)
was believed to be divinely
ordained.
 Sumerian kings & priests
acted as the gods’
interpreters.
 They told the people what
the gods wanted them to do
through augury (examining
the organs of a slain sheep).
 The gods were worshipped
at huge temples called
ziggurats.

13. The Mountains of God
 Ziggurats were built of many
layers of mud bricks in the
shape of a tiered pyramid.
 The mountain shape was
powerful because of the
rivers’ constant flooding &
the belief that the gods
resided on mountaintops.
 The cella (chapel) at the top
served as the god’s home &
was beautifully decorated.
 Inside was a room for
offerings of food & goods.
 One of the largest ziggurats
ever built was the Ziggurat
at Ur, built c. 2,100 B.C.E.

14. The Innovations of Sumeria
 Sumerians invented the wheel,
the sail, and the plow.
 They also ushered in the
Bronze Age by pioneering its
use in tools.
 One of the first known maps
was created in Sumeria.
 They also devised a counting
system based on the number
60.
 MOST IMPORTANT: They
created the first writing
system, allowing history to
begin.

15. The Sumerian Writing System
Over five thousand
years ago, people living
in Mesopotamia
developed a form of
writing to record and
communicate different
types of information.
The earliest writing was
based on pictograms.
Pictograms were used
to communicate basic
information about
crops and taxes.

16. Cuneiform Is Invented
 Over time, the need for
writing changed & the signs
developed into a script we
call cuneiform.
 Over thousands of years,
Mesopotamian scribes
recorded daily events,
trade, astronomy, &
literature on clay tablets.
 Cuneiform was used by
people throughout the
ancient Near East to write
several different languages.

17. Cuneiform and Agriculture
Around 3100 BCE,
people began to
record amounts of
different crops.
Barley was one of the
most important crops
in southern
Mesopotamia and
when it was first
drawn it looked like
this.

18. Inventory in Cuneiform
 Farmers brought their
barley to the temple stores.
 A record was kept of how
much barley was received.
 When some of the barley
was given to temple
workers, this was also
recorded on a tablet.
 The barley sign usually had
a number next to it to show
how much barley was being
given in to the temple or
taken away.

19. Inventory in Cuneiform
The barley sign
changed shape when
the scribes used a
writing tool with a
squared-off end
instead of a point.
The end of this tool
was used to press
wedge shapes like
these into clay tablets.

20. A reed stylus was the main writing tool used
by Mesopotamian scribes.

21. Cuneiform in Maturity
It is at this point that
the signs became what
we call cuneiform.
The barley sign had to
be written using several
wedges.

22. Some Shifty Characters
 The Sumerian writing
system during the early
periods was constantly in
flux.
 The original direction of
writing was from top to
bottom, but for reasons
unknown, it changed to
left-to-right very early on
(perhaps around 3000
BCE).
 This also affected the
orientation of the signs by
rotating all of them 90°
counterclockwise.

23. The Standardized Cuneiform
Alphabet

24. Cuneiform Upper-Case
Characters

25. Cuneiform Re-Discovered
 Knowledge of cuneiform was
lost until 1835 AD, when Henry
Rawlinson, an English army
officer, found some inscriptions
on a cliff at Behistun in Persia.
 Carved in the reign of King
Darius of Persia (522-486 BCE),
they consisted of identical texts
in three languages: Old Persian,
Babylonian & Elamite.
 After translating the Persian,
Rawlinson began to decipher the
others.
 By 1851 he could read 200
cuneiform signs.

26. The Sumerian Scribes
 Scribes were very important
people. They were trained to
write cuneiform and record many
of the languages spoken in
Mesopotamia.
 Without scribes, letters would not
have been written or read, royal
monuments would not have been
carved with cuneiform, and stories
would have been told and then
forgotten.
 Scribes wrote on different shaped
objects depending on the type of
information they wanted to
record.

27. Edubba: A Sumerian School
 Literacy was a highly valued
skill.
 Sumerians set up the first
institutions of formal
education that they called
edubbas.
 Education included writing
and mathematics
 Tuition was paid for
education.
 The educated were
privileged elite: government
officials, scribes, etc.

28. Notebooks Sumerian Style
This is known today as
a curriculum tablet.
It was used in
Mesopotamian schools
to teach pupils about
the different types of
texts written by scribes.

29. Life as a Sumerian Student
 Students worked very hard at
Sumerian schools, and the
school day lasted from early
morning until early evening.
 The teachers strictly regimented
the students.
 Once a student effectively
finished twelve years of school,
he was an official scribe, or
writer.
 This was a important position
in Sumerian culture. Scribes
were very expensive in order
to continue and recover the
evidence keeping that the
Sumerians considered so very
necessary.
Sculptor unknown, Votive Statue
of the Scribe Indu, c. 2500 BCE

30. Sumerian Security: Cylinder Seals
 Cylinder seals were small carved
cylinders made of stone or
metal.
 Scenes of gods, animals and men
were carved into the seal so
when it was rolled on the clay, it
would leave an impression. This
would act like a signature.
 Some cylinder seals also had
cuneiform signs carved on them
which recorded the name and
title of the seal owner.
 Seals were rolled over clay
tablets which were nearly dry.

31. Scenes from a Cylinder Seal
This ancient cylinder seal has been rolled out onto modern
modelling clay to show the impression.

32. Sumerian Contract and
Envelope
Some clay tablets were
wrapped in an extra
layer of clay which acted
like an envelope.
A shortened version of
the information on the
tablet was sometimes
written on the envelope.
Part of this envelope has
broken off, showing the
top of the tablet inside.

33. What Became of the
Sumerians?
 They were conquered by the
Akkadians, a Semitic (Arabic)
people.
 In 2350 B.C.E., the Akkadians
swept into the Fertile
Crescent, led by Sargon the
Great (King Sargon I).
 They conquered & assimilated
the Sumerians, thus creating
the world’s first empire.
 An empire is a large political
unit or state under a single
leadership, that controls large
areas of conquered and native
territory.

34. But Then What Happened?
 In 1792 B.C.E., the
Akkadian empire was
absorbed into a new
empire centralized in the
city of Babylon.
 The Babylonians were led
by their King Hammurabi.
 As leader of the newly-
minted Babylonian
Empire, Hammurabi
introduced a standardized
law code and promoted
the use of a single
language empire-wide.

35. The Code of Hammurabi
 As king, Hammurabi authored a collection of 282 laws,
based on a system of strict justice.
 Penalties for various crimes were routinely severe, and the
punishments varied by social class.
 The concept of retaliation (“an eye for an eye”) was an
important part of the legal system.
 Officials were held accountable to the injured (If they didn’t
catch a murderer, they had to pay the victim’s family).
 The Code of Hammurabi also addressed issues in marriage
and family laws.
 The Code was meant to reinforce the principle that
government had a responsibility for what occurred in society.