Who were the Sumerians?

The Sumerians were the inhabitants of Sumer, the southernmost region of ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day southern Iraq). They are credited with creating many of the foundational innovations of civilization: the first cities, the first writing system, the first law codes, the first schools, and some of the oldest known literature.

The origins of the Sumerians are unclear — their language is unrelated to any known language family, and they may have been indigenous to the region or migrants from elsewhere. What is clear is that by 4500 BCE, Sumerian-speaking communities in southern Mesopotamia were developing the agricultural and organizational foundations that would produce the world's first urban civilization.

Sumerian cities — Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur, and others — operated as independent city-states, each centered on a temple complex dedicated to a patron deity. These temples were not just religious centers but economic hubs, managing agricultural production, trade, labor, and redistribution. The need to track these increasingly complex transactions drove the invention of cuneiform writing around 3400 BCE.

Sumerian contributions to human culture are extraordinary: the base-60 mathematical system (which gives us 60-minute hours and 360-degree circles), the concept of the arch in architecture, the wheel, the plow, the sailboat, organized irrigation, and literary works including the Epic of Gilgamesh. Though Sumer was eventually absorbed by Semitic-speaking empires (Akkad, Babylon), the Sumerian language survived as a scholarly and liturgical language for centuries — much like Latin in medieval Europe.

Understanding the Sumerians is essential for understanding the origins of civilization itself. The patterns they established — urban life, written law, bureaucratic governance, literary culture — became the template for subsequent societies across the ancient Near East and, through centuries of cultural transmission, much of the modern world.