Where is sumer

Ziggurats often featured sloping sides and terraces with gardens. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was one of these. Palaces also reach a new level of grandiosity. In Mari around B. Sumerians had a system of medicine that was based in magic and herbalism, but they were also familiar with processes of removing chemical parts from natural substances. They are considered to have had an advanced knowledge of anatomy, and surgical instruments have been found in archeological sites.

One of the Sumerians greatest advances was in the area of hydraulic engineering. Early in their history they created a system of ditches to control flooding, and were also the inventors of irrigation, harnessing the power of the Tigris and Euphrates for farming.

Canals were consistently maintained from dynasty to dynasty. Their skill at engineering and architecture both point to the sophistication of their understanding of math.

The structure of modern time keeping, with sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour, is attributed to the Sumerians. Sumerians left behind scores of written records, but they are more renowned for their epic poetry, which influenced later works in Greece and Rome and sections of the Bible , most notably the story of the Great Flood, the Garden of Eden, and the Tower of Babel. The very first ruling body of Sumer that has historical verification is the First Dynasty of Kish.

The most famous of the early Sumerian rulers is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who took control around B. A devastating flood in the region was used as a pivotal point in the epic poem and later reused in the Old Testament story of Noah.

Somewhere around B. The first conflict resulted in the kingdom of Awan seizing control and shifting the ruling body outside of Sumer until the kingship was returned to the Kish. The Kish kept control briefly until the rise of Uruk King Enshakushanna, whose brief dynasty was followed by Adabian conqueror Lugalannemundu, who held power for 90 years and is said to have expanded his kingdom up to the Mediterranean. Lugalannemundu also conquered the Gutian people, who lived in the Eastern Iraqi mountains and who would later come to rule Sumer.

In B. She is the only female listed on the Sumerian King List, which names all rulers of Sumer and their accomplishments. This last Kish dynasty ruled for a century before Uruk king Lugal-zage-si ruled for 25 years before Sargon took control in Sargon was an Akkadian whose past is shrouded in legends that some claim were ignited by Sargon himself.

The claim is that he was the secret child of a high priestess who placed him in a basket and cast him off into a river, a story that was later utilized for Moses in the Old Testament.

Sumerian tradition says that Sargon was the son of a gardener who rose to the position of cupbearer for Ur-Zababa, king of Kish, which was not a servant position but a high official. Stone relief of Sargon I standing before a tree of life, dating back to 24thrd century B. Ur-Zababa was defeated by the king of Uruk, who was, in turn, overtaken by Sargon.

Sargon followed that victory by seizing the cities of Ur, Umma and Lagash, and establishing himself as ruler. His militaristic reign reached to the Persian Gulf. Sargon built the city of Agade as his base, south of Kish, which became an important center in the ancient world and a prominent port. Sargon took control of the religious cultures of the Akkadians and the Sumerians, making his daughter Enhedu-anna the head priestess of the moon god cult of Ur. Enheduanna is best remembered for her transcriptions of temple hymns, which she also wrote and preserved in her writings.

Sargon ruled for 50 years, and after his death, his son Rimush faced widespread rebellion and was killed. Naram-Sin considered himself divine and was leveled with charges of sacrilege. The Gutians invaded in B. Their era is marked by decentralized chaos and neglect. It was during Gutian reign that the grand city of Agade decayed into wreckage and disappeared from history. The final gasp of Sumer leadership came in B.

The first plow appeared about B. And by B. All the efficiencies helped support a growing population, as well as a growing system of rulers and religion. And as their cities grew, so did their efforts in writing, math and religion. As far back as 5, years ago, the Sumerians had developed cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing.

Sumerian inscriptions on clay and stone tracked the trade and movement of grain and other goods, recorded Sumerian history, and even included cooking recipes and pornography. Thousands of Sumerian tablets still sit awaiting translation in museums around the world. The Sumerians also invented or utilized a wide-array of other more modern seeming innovations like wheeled chariots, the minute hour, and even possibly the first written work of literature — The Epic of Gilgamesh.

According to the tablets, it was the gods who first told humans to take up living in cities in Sumer. But eventually, the gods decided to wipe out the human race with a deluge. According to the myth, one particular god, Enki, tipped off a Sumerian king named Ziusudra that he should build a boat to save his people. In modern times, Sumer has captivated everyone from archaeologists to ancient alien conspiracy theorists.

But the fascination with Sumerian society goes back much further in human history. Both the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, which rose to control parts of the Middle East as Sumer faded away, continued using the Sumerian language in their religious rituals for millennia. Excavations of Babylonian homes have uncovered tablets inscribed with the Sumerian language from long after the civilization itself was gone. And the Babylonians, who created the first star maps, seem to have inherited some of their knowledge of astronomy from the Sumerians as well.

The Babylonian people had two sets of constellations — one for tracking farming dates and another to recognize the gods. The latter was passed onto us today thanks to the Greeks and formed the foundations for the 12 zodiac constellations.

And the star names that they used seem to date back to the Sumerian people, implying this ancient civilization had a seriously sophisticated knowledge of much more than the Earth below their feet. So, while the Sumerians may have disappeared thousands of years ago, their influence and intrigue has continued on into the present, shaping aspects of modern society we all take for granted today.

The Sumerians seem to have first developed cuneiform for the mundane purposes of keeping accounts and records of business transactions, but over time it blossomed into a full-fledged writing system used for everything from poetry and history to law codes and literature. Since the script could be adapted to multiple languages, it was later used over the course of several millennia by more than a dozen different cultures. In fact, archaeologists have found evidence that Near East astronomical texts were still being written in cuneiform as recently as the first century A.

A detail from the so called Standard of Ur, side B. This panel shows a banquet, perhaps after a victory and men driving cattle and sheep. Their most important commercial partner may have been the island of Dilmun present day Bahrain , which held a monopoly on the copper trade, but their merchants also undertook months-long journeys to Anatolia and Lebanon to gather cedar wood and to Oman and the Indus Valley for gold and gemstones.

The Sumerians were particularly fond of lapis lazuli—a blue-colored precious stone used in art and jewelry—and there is evidence that they may have roamed as far as Afghanistan to get it.

Chalky alabaster statue of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. The origins of the sixty-second minute and sixty-minute hour can be traced all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. In the same way that modern mathematics is a decimal system based on the number ten, the Sumerians mainly used a sexigesimal structure that was based around groupings of This easily divisible number system was later adopted by the ancient Babylonians, who used it make astronomical calculations on the lengths of the months and the year.

Base eventually fell out of use, but its legacy still lives on in the measurements of the both hour and the minute. Other remnants of the Sumerian sexigesimal system have survived in the form of spatial measurements such as the degrees in a circle and the 12 inches in a foot.

Detail of the fragment from a steatite vase. After Mesopotamia was occupied by the Amorites and Babylonians in the early second millennium B.