History of the Ancient Near East · Part 2 · The first cities and kingdoms · B1
Sumer and the Invention of Writing
Part 2 of History of the Ancient Near East: more than five thousand years ago, in the marshes of southern Iraq, the people of Uruk began to press signs into wet clay. They were not writing poems. They were counting barley. Used to for past habits, the first … to, and dates (around 3200 BCE, for three thousand years), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the oldest writing in the world. Or nearly the oldest: Egypt is very close behind.
Let me guess. Hymns to the gods. Great poems about heroes.
Barley, Marcos. And beer, and sheep, and the names of the people who were owed them.
Then the first writers were accountants. My father will be very pleased.
Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, about 3500–2000 BCE
Sumer was the land in the far south of Mesopotamia, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, near the marshes of the Persian Gulf. Its people dug canals, grew barley, and built some of the first cities: Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur and Kish. Uruk was the largest; around 3200 BCE it probably had tens of thousands of people, though nobody knows exactly how many.
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