How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System

“In Uruk he built walls, a great rampart, and the temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu, and for Ishtar the goddess of love. Look at it still today: the outer wall where the cornice runs, it shines with the brilliance of copper; and the inner wall, it has no equal. Touch the threshold, it is ancient.” –The Epic of Gilgamesh, ca. 1750 BC *

In the middle of the fourth millennium before Christ, men and women could feed themselves and their families, much of the time, but almost nobody else. They did not yet have the wheel. They could fight, but they did not have the capacity to make war. They could not read or write, for there was no writing. Without writing, there was no history. There were stories but no literature. Art was something that people might produce on their pottery, but never for a living. There were customs but no laws. There were chiefs but no kings, tribes but no nations. The city was unknown.

And then, around that time, civilization was born: urban life, based on nutritional surplus and social organization, characterized by complexity and material culture, much of it made possible by writing. This happened in a very particular part of the world: the flood-prone, drought-wracked, frequently pestilential plain of southern Iraq, where the rivers Tigris and Euphrates meet the Persian Gulf. The plain could be fertile, very fertile, but only when people worked together to irrigate it and control the floods with channels and earthworks; this necessity, most likely, accounts for much of the early surge in social complexity that distinguished the area. Later civilizations would arise independently in two great river valleys not so far away, the Indus and the Nile, but the original organized, literate, urban culture was produced by a far crueler and more challenging environment than either of those.

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