Download Sumerian Society Enlil-lord of the sky Enki

Sumerian Society
Enlil-lord of the sky
Enki-Lord of water
Sumerians moved to Mesopotamia, perhaps from the Persian Gulf.
12 cities formed, Ur having about 24,000 people for example.
Put men over women domination into effect.
Widow would take possessions if man died.
Acquired slaves from hill country. Called female slaves “mountain girl”
and male slaves are called “mountain man”.
Fought each other in wars over availability of water and other
resources, wars that they thought were “between the gods.”
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CIVILIZATIONS before 1000 BCE
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The Sumerians
The Fertile Crescent, 9000 to 4500 BCE.
Click to enlarge and focus
Sample Sumerian characters
circa 3200 BCE
Sumerians at War. The army of King Eannatum
of Lagash (with pikes and shields) trample on the
defeated of city of Umma. (Source: UCLA Art History.)
Hunter-gatherers had roamed that part of the Middle East called the Fertile Crescent, and they
had planted gardens. By 7000 BCE the crops they planted became a major source of food. They
had begun farming, which required permanent settlement.
It was around 4000 BCE that a people called Sumerians moved into Mesopotamia, perhaps from
around the Caspian Sea. By 3800 BCE the Sumerians had supplanted the Ubaidians and Semites
in southern Mesopotamia. They built better canals for irrigating crops and for transporting crops
by boat to village centers. They improved their roads, over which their donkeys trod, some of
their donkeys pulling wheeled carts. And the Sumerians grew in number, the increase in
population the key element in creating what we call civilization -- a word derived from an
ancient word for city.
At least twelve cities arose among the Sumerians. Among them were Ur, Uruk, Kish and Lagash
-- Ur, for example, becoming a city of about 24,000 people. In the center of each city was a
temple that housed the city's gods, and around each city were fields of grain, orchards of date
palms, and land for herding. Besides planting and harvesting crops, some Sumerians hunted,
fished, or raised livestock. In addition to an increase in population, civilization was also about
variety, and enough food was produced to support people who worked at other occupations -such as the priesthood, pottery making, weaving, carpentry and smithing. There were also
traders, and the Sumerians developed an extensive commerce by land and sea. They built
seaworthy ships, and they imported from afar items made from the wood, stone, tin and copper
not found nearby.
Writing
Sumerian writing is the oldest full-fledged writing that archaeologists have discovered. The
Ubaidians may have introduced the Sumerians to the rudiments of writing and recorded
numerical calculation, which the Sumerians used with the rise in trade and to calculate and to
keep records of supplies and goods exchanged. The Sumerians wrote arithmetic based on units of
ten -- the number of fingers on both hands. Concerned about their star-gods, they mapped the
stars and divided a circle into units of sixty, from which our own system of numbers, and
seconds and minutes, are derived.
The Sumerians wrote poetically, describing events as the work of their gods, and they wrote to
please their gods. The Sumerians wrote by pressing picture representations into wet clay with a
pen, and they dried the clay to form tablets. Instead of developing their writing all at once, as one
might expect with divine revelation, they developed their writing across centuries. They
streamlined their pictures into symbols called ideograms, and they added symbols for spoken
sounds -- phonetic letters -- forming what is called cuneiform.
Early in Sumerian civilization, eighty to ninety percent of those who farmed did so on land they
considered theirs rather than communal property. Here too the Sumerians were expressing a
trend that was common among others. Another individual effort was commerce, and with a
growth in commerce the Sumerians had begun using money, which made individual wealth more
easily measured and stored. Commerce required initiative, imagination, an ability to get along
with people and luck, and, of course, some merchants were more successful than others.
Common Sumerians remained illiterate and without power, while kings, once elected by
common people, became monarchs. The monarchs were viewed as agents of and responsible to
the gods. It was the religious duty of their subjects to accept their rule as a part of the plan of the
gods. Governments drafted common people to work on community projects, and common people
were obliged to pay taxes to the government in the form of a percentage of their crops, which the
city could either sell or use to feed its soldiers and others it supported.
Men Dominate Women
Physically stronger than women, men could rule women by brute force, and in societies where
men were the warriors it was they who got together and made decisions for their entire society.
Presumably before the time of the Sumerians, kings were chosen by the warriors, with the king
as the leading warrior.
The Sumerians put the domination of men over women into law. If a husband died, the widow
came under the control of her former husband's father or brother, or if she had a grown son she
was put under his control. A woman in Sumer had no recourse or protection under the law. A
woman's power, if she had any, was the influence of her personality within her family.
Education
Early in Sumerian civilization, schooling was associated with the priesthood and took place in
temples. But this changed. Education apart from the temples arose for the children of affluent
families, which these familes paid for. Most if not all students were males. The students were
obliged to work hard at their studies, from sun up to sun down. Not believing in change, there
was no probing into the potentials of humankind or study of the humanities. Their study was
"practical." It was rote learning of complex grammar and practice at writing. Students were
encouraged with praise while their inadequacies and failures were punished with lashes from a
stick or cane.
War and Slavery
Sumerian kings sent men out to plunder people in hill country, and they acquired slaves. The
Sumerian name for a female slave was mountain girl, and a male slave was called mountain man.
The Sumerians used their slaves mainly as domestics and concubines. And they justified their
slavery as would others: that their gods had given them victory over an inferior people.
As Sumerian cities grew in population and expanded, the swamps that insulated city from city
disappeared. Sumerians from different cities were unable or unwilling to resolve their conflicts
over land and the availability of water, and wars between cities erupted -- wars the Sumerians
saw as between their gods. And the Sumerians made slaves of other Sumerians they had
captured.
It was a new kind of warfare. In herding and hunter-gatherer societies -- mobile societies -- the
entire community might enter the field of battle. In settled agricultural communities such as
those of the Sumerians, the younger and stronger, maybe fourth or fifth of society, went to war.
The others remained at home, working at farming or other chores.
Some people associate Uruk with the city commonly spelled Ereck in the Book of Genesis 10:10
Wars with distant people were fueled by the greed and ambitions of kings. The Sumerians
described this in a poetic tale of conflict between the king of Uruk [note] and the distant town of
Arrata. It was a tale written by a Sumerian some five hundred years after the event, a tale of
which only fragments remain. Here was reporting as it would be for more than 3,000 years, as it
would be with Homer and his Iliad, the sacred writings of Hindus and with the Old Testament,
with gods in command and not disapproving of war.
Among the Sumerian cities was an impulse to be supreme, and, around 2800 BCE, Kish had
become the first of the cities to dominate the whole of Sumer. Then Kish's supremacy was
challenged by the city of Lagash, which launched a bloody conquest against its Sumerian
neighbors and extended its power beyond Sumerian lands. A bas-relief sculpture uncovered by
archaeologists depicts a king of Lagash celebrating his victory over the city of Umma, the king's
soldiers, with helmets, shields and pikes, standing shoulder to shoulder and line behind line over
the corpses of their defeated enemy.
Dissent
Civilized societies had more diversity in opinion than existed in the less populous societies of
hunter-gatherers. And civilized societies had dissent -- something authoritarians would never be
able to extinguish. Sumerians complained. A Sumerian complained in writing that he was a
"thoroughbred steed" but was drawing a cart carrying "reeds and stubble." Another complained
of the futility of wars of aggression, writing "You go and carry off the enemy's land; the enemy
comes and carries off your land."
Rather than docility, people in the city of Lagash instigated history's first recorded revolt. This
came after Lagash's rulers had increased local taxes and restricted personal freedoms. Lagash's
bureaucrats had grown in wealth. The people of Lagash resented this enough that they overthrew
their king -- probably believing that they were acting in accordance with the wishes of the gods.
They brought to power a god-fearing ruler named Urukagina, who eliminated excessive taxation
and rid the city of usurers, thieves and murderers -- the first known reforms.
CIVILIZATIONS before 1000 BCE
Sargon and the Vanishing Sumerians
Possibly the Head of Sargon the Great
The Sumerians had a salinization problem. Evaporating water left behind layers of salt, and
rising water tables brought more salt to the surface. Sumerians wrote of the earth turning white.
A solution to the problem was to leave lands not watered for many seasons, to let the water table
fall and let rain wash the salt down far below the surface. But this would have taken years. It was
not done. Wheat is less tolerant of salt than barley, and Sumerian clay tablets describe the
Sumerian diet changing from wheat to barley. Then the growing of barley and other crops
diminished and the Sumerians suffered from hunger, malnutrition and disease. A Sumer
weakened has been described as unable to defend itself.
Those who conquered the Sumerians were a Semitic people. A dynasty of Semitic kings came to
rule the city of Kish. There, perhaps around 2200 BCE, a former cup-bearer to one of these kings
overthrew the ruling dynasty. With good military tactics that included holding and fighting from
high ground, he extended his rule. He defeated the Sumerian king of Nippur, where the Sumerian
god Enlil was believed to dwell. He claimed that his victories were given to him by Enlil. And he
became known as Sargon the Great.
Agade has not been located by archaeologists.
Sargon established his capital near Kish, at a city called Agade, [note] and his kingdom became
known as Akkad -- derived from the name Agade. His warriors became an aristocracy that lived
off the taxes collected from conquered farmers and artisans. And his empire became commercial,
with fortresses at strategic points along its trade routes. These were times in West Asia (the
Middle East) when bronze weapons had replaced those of stone, and supplying an army with
bronze weapons required control over trade routes that gave access to the tin and copper from
which bronze is made. Perhaps responding to this need for tin and copper, Sargon extended his
empire northwest into Syria, and some scholars speculate that he crossed the Taurus Mountains
and extended his empire into the center of Asia Minor. He placed governors throughout his
empire to rule in his name. He built himself a library of thousands of clay tablets. And to help
unite his empire he built an efficient system of roads and a postal service.
Sargon passed power to his son, creating a new dynasty of kings. Around 2150 BCE, during the
rule of Sargon's grandson, Naramsin, a wave of nomads called Gutians, from the east, overran
Agade and Sumer. Why Naramsin was unable to defeat the invaders is unknown. His empire
may have been weakened by drought and famine or by plague. But like the Sumerians, the
Akkadian people saw adversity as the work of displeased gods, and they interpreted the Gutian
invasion as the result of their goddess Inanna having left their city because of Naramsin's sins.
After only a hundred years Sargon's empire became a memory, but Sargon remained as a legend.
It was said that Sargon's mother had abandoned him in a cradle of reeds, that she had placed the
cradle on one of Mesopotamia's great rivers and that Sargon had been found and adopted by
Sumerians -- a story similar to one which would emerge centuries later about a man called
Moses.
Revival and Demise of the Sumerians
After the fall of Sargon's empire, war erupted between the Sumerians and Gutians, and the
Sumerians exterminated or evicted the Gutians. Sumerian civilization revived, including rule in
the city of Ur by a king called Ur-Nammu, who, around the year 2050, created the first known
code of laws. Ur-Nammu created retribution and punishment in the form of fines, superseding
the justice of an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. He was described as having removed the
"grabbers" of the citizen's oxen, sheep and donkeys, as having established laws that guarded an
orphan or widow from anyone who might wish to exploit them, and as having guarded the poor
from the rich.
The Sumerian renaissance lasted until about 1950 BCE, when Sumer was attacked by Elamites
from the Zagros Mountains, just east of Mesopotamia. And Sumer was attacked by a Semitic
speaking people from Syria who became known as Amorites (a word meaning westerner). The
Amorites sacked and burned Sumerian cities. And Sumerians wrote lamentations, complaining
that the blood of their people filled holes in their grounds like hot bronze in a mold. They wrote
of bodies dissolving like fat in the sun and their cities covered with a shroud of smoke. What
weakness if any among the Sumerians prevented them from successfully defending themselves
remains unknown. But the Sumerian writers of lamentations saw their demise as the result of
their gods having abandoned them like migrating birds.
The Amorites overran much of Sumer and settled along the Euphrates River just north of Sumer,
where they founded the city of Babylon, and the Amorites settled to the north, along the Tigris
River, in an area that included the city of Ashur. A Sumerian had described the Amorites as
nomadic: as a people knowing no submission and having no house in their lifetime. The Book of
Genesis in the Old Testament describes an Amorite as the grandson of Ham, youngest son of
Noah, and describes an Amorite and other descendants of Noah as living between "the river of
Egypt" and the Euphrates (Genesis 10:1-16 and 15:18-21). And in Amos 2:9, Amos describes the
Amorites as being as tall as cedar trees.
By 1800 BCE, salinization had greatly diminished agriculture in southern Mesopotamia from
what it had been many centuries before when Sumer was a more densely populated land.