Sumer: Cuneiform
The Sumerian civilization is known as the oldest civilization and had been a center of the ancient world. The origin of Sumer is still uncertain. Some historians say it originated from the Russian grassland southeast of Mesopotamia. Others argue that the Sumerians were instead from India. However, the language they spoke, Sumerian, is rooted in neither the Indo-European nor the Semitic language families, which are two very populous ethnolinguistic groups, rendering the search for the origin of the Sumerian language more complex.
The Sumerians settled in the Fertile Crescent and dedicated themselves to agricultural industries utilizing rich soils and rivers around 10,000 BCE with the Neolithic Revolution. They occupied Mesopotamia and maintained control by establishing multiple city-states from approximately 4,500 BCE. Some of the major and the most prominent city-states were Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur, Kish, and Eridu. Each city shared a similar culture and religion, and each city connected with the others through trade routes.
As a first civilization, Sumerians invented numerous “firsts” in history: wheels, irrigation system, writing system (which we call Cuneiform), the duodecimal system that we still apply when counting time, law, and more.
Cuneiform: The First Writing System
Our knowledge of Sumer heavily depends on the records of ancient tablets carved with Cuneiform. Cuneiform is a pictogram Sumerians invented around 3,500 BCE in Uruk, making it the oldest writing system in the world. It was carved in the clay tablets with sharpened reeds from the banks of the Euphrates or the Tigris. The fertile and muddy soil of Mesopotamia enabled the mass production of clay tablets for enough writings. Numerous Cuneiform tablets from Sumer were found throughout the Middle East.
The Sumerians needed a united and compatible writing system to keep the records of harvests, administrative works, temple activities, and trade between city-states. The primary interest of early writing in Cuneiform tablets was finance. As shown in the photo, Barley, one of the essential crops in Southern Mesopotamia, is expressed with the following symbol:
These records and accounts of the economy and harvest distribution were kept by the priests, who had supreme authority in ancient Mesopotamian societies as pacifiers and representatives of Sumerians deities.
Sumerian schools taught Cuneiform writing to students who were mostly from wealthy and influential families in the cities. The tuition that the schools demanded proved unaffordable for other lower classed Sumerians. Students were trained to become scribes, priests, or administrative professionals to meet the government’s demand. The invention of Cuneiform enabled the Sumerians to expand their field of learning. The discovery and development of mathematics, literature, and astronomy were all made using Cuneiform.
Like any other language, Cuneiform evolved and transformed as time passed. Cuneiform started as a pictographic proto writing but was later modified into a phonological language system with new alphabets and syllabic elements that were created. Cuneiform spread to other surrounding areas and became the primary writing system in the region. This was with the exception of Egypt, where there was a unique style of writing: Hieroglyph. The Babylonians used Cuneiform to create the Code of Hammurabi, one of the first codified system of laws in the world, and the Assyrian library officials of Nineveh used Cuneiform to copy ancient books.
Many of the great old legends, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh (written around 1,800 BCE), were recorded with Cuneiform in the clay tablet. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a series of tales of a legendary demigod king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, who lived around 2,800 BCE. The Epic includes Gilgamesh’s adventure with his best friend, Enkidu, and his ultimate search for eternity. It also includes the flood story—considered to be the prototype of Noah’s ark in the Judeo-Christian Bible.
Many succeeding civilizations and empires adopted and developed Sumer’s Cuneiform and utilized it in many of their cultures until the empires that used the Phoenician alphabet dominated the region thousands of years after the invention of Cuneiform.
Reference Links
https://omniglot.com/writing/sumerian.htm
https://www.ancient.eu/cuneiform/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/cuneiform
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/miguel-civil-worlds-leading-scholar-ancient-sumerian-1926-2019 (leading scholar)