The Sumerian civilization is the most highly developed of all that existed. The history of the Sumerian civilization Who are the Sumerians

Sumer was the first of the three great civilizations of antiquity. It originated on the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in 3800 BC. e.

The Sumerians invented the wheel, were the first to build schools and created a bicameral parliament.

It was here that the first historians appeared. Here the first money was in circulation - silver shekels in the form of ingots, cosmogony and cosmology arose, taxes began to be introduced for the first time, medicine and a number of institutions appeared that “survived” to this day. Various disciplines were taught in the Sumerian hotels, and the legislative system of this state was similar to ours. There were laws protecting the employed and the unemployed, the weak and the helpless, and there was a system of judges and juries.

In the library of Ashurbanipal discovered in 1850 in Mesopotamia, 30 thousand clay tablets were found containing a lot of information, much of which remains undeciphered to this day.

Meanwhile, clay tablets with records were found before the discovery of the library, and then, and in many of them, in particular in the Akkadian texts, it is indicated that they were copied from earlier Sumerian originals.

The construction business was well established in Sumer, and the first brick kiln was also created here. The same furnaces were used to smelt metals from ore, a process that became necessary already in the early stages, as soon as the supply of natural native copper was exhausted.

Researchers of ancient metallurgy were extremely surprised how quickly the Sumerians learned the methods of ore enrichment, metal smelting and casting. They mastered these technologies only a few centuries after the emergence of civilization.

Even more striking is the fact that the Sumerians mastered the methods of obtaining alloys. They pioneered the production of bronze, a hard but workable alloy that changed the course of human history.

The ability to alloy copper with tin was the greatest achievement. Firstly, because it was necessary to choose their exact ratio, and the Sumerians found the optimal one: 85% copper to 15% tin.

Secondly, in Mesopotamia there was no tin, which is generally rare in nature, it had to be found somewhere and brought. And thirdly, the extraction of tin from ore - tin stone - is a rather complicated process that could not be discovered by accident.

Unlike scientists of later centuries, the Sumerians knew that the Earth revolved around the Sun, the planets moved, and the stars were stationary.

They knew all the planets of the solar system, and Uranus, for example, was discovered only in 1781. Moreover, the clay tablets tell about the catastrophe that happened to the planet Tiamat, which is now commonly called Transpluto in science and science fiction literature, and the existence of which was indirectly confirmed in 1980 by the American spacecraft Pioneer and Voyager, directed to the borders solar system.

All the knowledge of the Sumerians regarding the movement of the Sun and the Earth was combined in the world's first calendar they created.

This solar-lunar calendar came into force in 3760 BC. e.

The Sumerians are the first civilization on Earth.

in the city of Nippur. And it was the most accurate and complex of all subsequent ones. And the sexagesimal number system created by the Sumerians made it possible to calculate fractions and multiply numbers up to millions, extract roots and raise to a power.

The division of an hour into 60 minutes and a minute into 60 seconds was based on the sexagesimal system. Echoes of the Sumerian number system were preserved in the division of a day into 24 hours, a year into 12 months, a foot into 12 inches, and in the existence of a dozen as a measure of quantity.

This civilization lasted only 2 thousand years, but how many discoveries were made!

It can't be!

And yet this impossible Sumer existed and enriched mankind with such an amount of knowledge that no other civilization gave him.

Moreover, the civilization of Sumer, mysteriously born six thousand years ago, just as suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. On this score, orthodox scientists have several versions. But the reasons they call for the death of the Sumerian kingdom are as unconvincing as the versions with which they try to explain its emergence and a truly fantastic, incomparable rise.

The Sumerian civilization perished as a result of the invasion from the west of warlike Semitic nomadic tribes.

In the 24th century BC, the king of Akkad, Sargon the Ancient, defeated the king Lugalzaggisi, the ruler of Sumer, uniting northern Mesopotamia under his power. On the shoulders of Sumer, the Babylonian-Assyrian civilization was born.

Sumerian architecture

The development of the architectural thought of the Sumerians is most clearly traced by how the external appearance of the temples changes.

In the Sumerian language, the words "house" and "temple" sound the same, so the ancient Sumerians did not share the concepts of "build a house" and "build a temple." God is the owner of all the wealth of the city, his master, mortals are only unworthy of his servants. The temple is the dwelling of God, it should become a testament to his power, strength, military prowess. In the center of the city, on a high platform, a monumental and majestic structure was erected - a house, the dwelling of the gods - a temple, stairs or ramps led to it from both sides.

Unfortunately, from the temples of the most ancient buildings, only ruins have survived to this day, according to which it is almost impossible to restore the internal structure and decoration of religious buildings.

The reason for this is the humid, damp climate of Mesopotamia and the absence of any durable building material other than clay.

In ancient Mesopotamia, all buildings were built of brick, which was formed from raw clay mixed with reeds. Such buildings required annual restoration and repair and were extremely short-lived. Only from ancient Sumerian texts do we learn that in early temples the sanctuary was moved to the edge of the platform on which the temple was erected.

The center of the sanctuary, its sacred place, where sacraments and rituals were performed, was the throne of God. He required special care and attention. The statue of the deity, in whose honor the temple was erected, was located in the depths of the sanctuary. She, too, had to be carefully taken care of. Probably, the interior of the temple was covered with paintings, but they were destroyed by the humid climate of Mesopotamia.

At the beginning of the III century BC. the uninitiated were no longer allowed into the sanctuary and its open courtyard. At the end of the 3rd century BC, another type of temple building appeared in Ancient Sumer - a ziggurat.

It is a multi-stage tower, the “floors” of which look like pyramids or parallelepipeds tapering upwards, their number could reach up to seven. On the site of the ancient city of Ur, archaeologists discovered a temple complex built by the king Ur-Nammu from the III dynasty of Ur.

This is the best preserved Sumerian ziggurat that has survived to this day.

It is a monumental three-story brick building, over 20m high.

The Sumerians built temples carefully and thoughtfully, but residential buildings for people did not differ in special architectural delights. Basically, these were rectangular buildings, all of the same raw brick. Houses were built without windows, the only source of light was the doorway.

But in most buildings there was a sewerage system. There was no planning of developments, houses were built haphazardly, so often narrow crooked streets ended in dead ends. Each residential building was usually surrounded by an adobe wall. The same wall, but much thicker, was built around the settlement. According to legend, the very first settlement that surrounded itself with a wall, thereby assigning itself the status of a “city”, was ancient Uruk.

The ancient city remained forever in the Akkadian epic "Uruk Fenced".

Mythology

By the time the first Sumerian city-states were formed, the idea of ​​an anthropomorphic deity had formed.

The patron deities of the community were, first of all, the personification of the creative and productive forces of nature, with which the ideas about the power of the military leader of the tribe-community, combined with the functions of the high priest, are connected.

From the first written sources, the names (or symbols) of the gods Inanna, Enlil, and others are known, and from the time of the so-called.

n. period of Abu-Salabiha (settlements near Nippur) and headlights (Shuruppak) 27-26 centuries. - theophoric names and the most ancient list of gods. The earliest actually mythological literary texts - hymns to the gods, lists of proverbs, exposition of some myths also date back to the period of Fara and come from the excavations of Fara and Abu-Salabih. But the bulk of the Sumerian texts of mythological content dates back to the end of the 3rd - the beginning of the 2nd millennium, to the so-called Old Babylonian period - the time when the Sumerian language was already dying out, but the Babylonian tradition still retained the system of teaching in it.

Thus, by the time writing appeared in Mesopotamia (end.

4th millennium BC BC) a certain system of mythological representations is recorded here. But each city-state retained its own deities and heroes, cycles of myths and its own priestly tradition.

Until the end of the 3rd mill.

BC e. there was no single systematized pantheon, although there were several common Sumerian deities: Enlil, “lord of the air”, “king of gods and people”, god of the city of Nippur, the center of the ancient Sumerian tribal union; Enki, the lord of underground fresh waters and the oceans (later also the deity of wisdom), the main god of the city of Eredu, the ancient cultural center of Sumer; An, the god of keba, and Inanna, the goddess of war and carnal love, the deity of the city of Uruk, which rose at the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC.

BC e.; Naina, the moon god worshiped in Ur; the warrior god Ningirsu, who was revered in Lagash (this god was later identified with the Lagash Ninurta), etc. The oldest list of gods from Farah (c. 26 century BC) identifies six supreme gods of the early Sumerian pantheon: Enlil, An, Inanna , Enki, Nanna and the sun god Utu.

Valery Gulyaev

Sumer. Babylon. Assyria: 5000 years of history

Where did the Sumerians come from?

Even if we assume that the Sumerians were already carriers of the Ubeid culture, the question of where these Ubeid Sumerians came from still remains unanswered. “Where did the Sumerians themselves come from,” notes I.M. Dyakonov, is still completely unclear.

32. Impressions of cylinder seals of the Jemdet-Nasr period: a) a seal depicting a sacred boat;

b) a seal from the temple of Inanna in Uruk.

Early III millennium BC e.

Their own legends make us think of an eastern or southeastern origin: they considered their oldest settlement to be Eredu - in the Sumerian "Ere-du" - "Good City", the southernmost of the cities of Mesopotamia, now the settlement of Abu-Shakhrain; the place of origin of mankind and its cultural achievements, the Sumerians attributed to the island of Dilmun (possibly Bahrain in the Persian Gulf); Cults associated with the mountain played an important role in their religion.

From an archaeological point of view, the connection between the ancient Sumerians and the territory of Elam (southwestern Iran) is probable.”

The anthropological type of the Sumerians can be judged to a certain extent by bone remains, but not by their sculpture, as scientists believed in the past, since it is apparently highly stylized and the emphasis on some facial features (large ears, large eyes, nose) is not explained by physical traits of the people, but the requirements of the cult.

The study of skeletons allows us to conclude that the Sumerians of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. belonged to the anthropological type that has always dominated Mesopotamia, that is, to the Mediterranean small group of the Caucasoid large race. If the Sumerians in the Southern Mesopotamia had predecessors, then, obviously, they belonged to the same anthropological type. This is not surprising: in history it very rarely happens that newcomers completely exterminate the old inhabitants; much more often they took wives from the local population.

Aliens could be less than local residents. Therefore, even if the Sumerians actually came from afar and brought their language from afar, this could have almost no effect on the anthropological type of the ancient population of Lower Mesopotamia.

As for the language of the Sumerians, it continues to remain a mystery for the time being, although there are few languages ​​in the world with which they would not try to establish its relationship: here are Sudanese, and Indo-European, and Caucasian, and Malayo-Polynesian, and Hungarian, and many others.

For a long time, a theory was widespread that attributed Sumerian to the number of Turkic-Mongolian languages, but quite numerous comparisons were made (for example, Turk. tengri"sky, god" and Sumerian. dingir"god") were eventually dismissed as coincidences. Also, the long list of proposed Sumerian-Georgian comparisons was not accepted by science.

There is no relationship between the Sumerian and its peers in ancient Asia Minor - Elamite, Hurrian, etc.

Who are the Sumerians - a people who firmly occupied the arena of Mesopotamian history for a good thousand years (3000-2000 BC).

BC e.)? Do they really represent a very ancient layer of the prehistoric population of Iraq, or did they come from some other country? And if this is so, then where exactly and when did fate bring the “blackheads” to Mesopotamia (the self-name of the Sumerians is sang ngig, "blackheads")? This important problem has been debated in scientific circles for more than 150 years, but so far its final solution is still very far away. Most scientists, however, believe that the ancestors of the Sumerians first appeared in the Southern Mesopotamia in Ubeid times and, thus, the Sumerians are an alien people.

33. Stone vessel with colored inlays. Uruk (Varka).

Kon. IV millennium BC

Sumerian civilization briefly

“One thing is indisputable,” writes the Polish historian M. Belitsky, “they were a people ethnically, linguistically and culturally alien to the Semitic tribes that settled Northern Mesopotamia at about the same time ... Speaking about the origin of the Sumerians, one should not forget about this circumstance.

Long-term searches for a more or less significant language group related to the Sumerian language did not lead to anything, although they searched everywhere - from Central Asia to the islands of Oceania.

Evidence that the Sumerians came to Mesopotamia from some mountainous country is their way of building temples, which were erected on artificial embankments or on terraces made of mud bricks. It is unlikely that such a method could have arisen among the inhabitants of the plain.

It, along with beliefs, had to be brought from their ancestral homeland by the highlanders, who paid honors to the gods on the mountain peaks. Moreover, in the Sumerian language, the words "country" and "mountain" are spelled the same.

The Sumerians themselves do not say anything about their origin. The most ancient myths begin the history of the creation of the world with individual cities, “and it is always that city,” notes the Russian historian V.V. Emelyanov - where the text was created (Lagash), or the sacred cult centers of the Sumerians (Nippur, Eredu).

The texts of the beginning of the 2nd millennium are called the island of Dilmun as the place of origin of life, but they were compiled just in the era of active trade and political contacts with Dilmun, therefore, they should not be taken as historical evidence.

Much more serious is the information contained in the most ancient epic - "Enmerkar and the lord of Aratta". It tells about the dispute between two rulers for the settlement of the goddess Inanna in their city. Both rulers equally revere Inanna, but one lives in the south of Mesopotamia, in the Sumerian Uruk, and the other in the east, in the country of Aratta, famous for its skilled craftsmen. Moreover, both rulers bear Sumerian names - Enmerkar and Ensukhkeshdanna.

Do not these facts speak of the eastern, Iranian-Indian (of course, pre-Aryan) origin of the Sumerians?

ill. 34. Vessel with the image of animals. Susa. Kon. IV millennium BC e.

Another piece of epic evidence. The Nippur god Ninurta, fighting on the Iranian highlands with certain monsters seeking to usurp the Sumerian throne, calls them "children of An", and meanwhile it is well known that An is the most respected and oldest god of the Sumerians, and, therefore, Ninurta is with his opponents in kindred.

Thus, epic texts make it possible to determine, if not the area of ​​origin of the Sumerians, then at least the eastern, Iranian-Indian direction of Sumerian migration to the South Mesopotamia. Where, you ask, did the word “Sumer” come from in this case, and by what right do we call the people Sumerians?

Like most questions of Sumerology, this question is still open.

The non-Semitic people of Mesopotamia - the Sumerians - were named so by their discoverer Yu.

Oppert on the basis of Assyrian royal inscriptions, in which the northern part of the country is called "Akkad", and the southern "Sumer". Oppert knew that mostly Semites lived in the north, and their center was the city of Akkad, which means that people of non-Semitic origin must have lived in the south, and they should be called Sumerians.

And he identified the name of the territory with the self-name of the people. As it turned out later, this hypothesis turned out to be incorrect. As for the word "Sumer", there are several versions of its origin. According to the hypothesis of the Assyriologist A. Falkenstein, this word is a phonetically modified term Ki-en-gi(r)- the name of the area in which the temple of the common Sumerian god Enlil was located. Subsequently, this name spread to the southern and central part of Mesopotamia and already in the era of Akkad, in the mouths of the Semitic rulers of the country, it was distorted to Shu-me-ru. Danish Sumerologist A.

Westenholtz proposes to understand "Sumer" as a distortion of the phrase ki-eme-geer -"land of the noble language" (as the Sumerians themselves called their language). There are other, less convincing hypotheses. Nevertheless, the term "Sumer" has long been given the rights of citizenship in both special and popular literature, and no one is going to change it yet.

And this is all that can be said now about the origins of the Sumerian civilization.

As one of the venerable Assyriologists put it, "the more we discuss the problem of the origin of the Sumerians, the more it turns into a chimera."

So, by the beginning of the third millennium

BC e. Southern Mesopotamia (from the latitude of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf) was the birthplace of about a dozen autonomous city-states, or "nomes." From the moment of their appearance, they waged a fierce struggle for dominance in this region. In the northern part of the Mesopotamian plain (Mesopotamia), the most influential force was the rulers of the city of Kish, in the south, either Uruk or Ur alternately took the lead.

Nevertheless, “despite the lack of complete cultural unity (which is manifested in the existence of local cults, local mythological cycles, local and often very different schools in sculpture, glyptics, arts and crafts, etc.), there are also features of the cultural community of the whole country ... To these features belong to the common self-name - "black-headed" ( saiga—pgiga)… common for the entire Mesopotamia cult of the supreme god Enlil in Nippur, with which all local communal cults and all genealogies of deities were gradually correlated; mutual language; distribution of carved cylinder seals with realistic images of hunting, religious processions, killing of prisoners, etc.

P.; well-known common features of style in glyptic in general, as well as in sculpture. The most interesting thing is that the Sumerian writing system, for all its complexity and with the disunity of individual political centers, is practically identical throughout Mesopotamia. The textbooks used are also identical - lists of signs, which were copied without changes until the second half of the 3rd millennium BC.

e. One gets the impression that writing was invented at a time, in one center, and from there, in a finished and unchanged form, it was distributed to separate “nomes” of Mesopotamia.”

The center of the cult union of all the Sumerians was Nippur (Sumerian Niburu, modern Niffer). Here was E-kur - the temple of the common Sumerian god Enlil. Enlil was revered as the supreme god for another millennium by all the Sumerians and the eastern Semites-Akkadians.

And although Nippur has never been an important political and administrative center, it has always been the "sacred" capital of all the "blackheads". Not a single ruler of the city-state ("noma") was considered legitimate if he did not receive blessings for power in the main temple of Enlil in Nippur.

Who ruled the Sumerians at the dawn of their history?

What were the names of their kings and leaders? What was their social status? What kind of business did they do? The inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia, like the Greeks, Germans, Hindus, Slavs, had their own "heroic age" - the time of the existence of demigods, half-heroes, brave warriors and powerful kings who stood almost on a par with the gods and performed extraordinary feats, proving their prowess and greatness. And only now we are beginning to understand that at least some of these heroes are by no means mythical characters from old fairy tales, but quite real historical figures.

The Sumerians used a six-decimal number system. Only two signs were used to depict numbers: the “wedge” denoted 1; 60; 3600 and further degrees from 60; "hook" - 10; 60 x 10; 3600 x 10 etc.

Sumerian civilization

The digital notation was based on the positional principle, but if you, based on the basis of numeration, think that numbers in Sumer were displayed as powers of 60, then you are mistaken.

The base in the Sumerian system is not 10, but 60, but then this base is strangely replaced by the number 10, then 6, and then back to 10, and so on. And thus, positional numbers line up in the following row:

1, 10, 60, 600, 3600, 36 000, 216 000, 2 160 000, 12 960 000.

This cumbersome sexagesimal system allowed the Sumerians to calculate fractions and multiply numbers up to millions, extract roots and raise to a power.

In many respects this system even surpasses the decimal system we currently use. Firstly, the number 60 has ten prime divisors, while 100 has only 7. Secondly, this is the only system that is ideal for geometric calculations, and this is why it continues to be used in our time from here, for example, dividing a circle into 360 degrees.

We rarely realize that not only our geometry, but also the modern way of calculating time, we owe to the Sumerian sexagesimal number system.

The division of the hour into 60 seconds was not at all arbitrary - it is based on the sexagesimal system. Echoes of the Sumerian number system were preserved in the division of a day into 24 hours, a year into 12 months, a foot into 12 inches, and in the existence of a dozen as a measure of quantity.

They are also found in the modern counting system, in which numbers from 1 to 12 are singled out, and then numbers like 10 + 3, 10 + 4, etc. follow.

It should no longer surprise us that the zodiac was also another invention of the Sumerians, an invention that was later adopted by other civilizations. But the Sumerians did not use the signs of the zodiac, tying them to each month, as we do now in horoscopes. They used them in a purely astronomical sense - in the sense of the deviation of the earth's axis, the movement of which divides the full cycle of precession of 25,920 years into 12 periods of 2160 years.

With the twelve-month movement of the Earth in orbit around the Sun, the picture of the starry sky, which forms a large sphere of 360 degrees, changes. The concept of the zodiac arose by dividing this circle into 12 equal segments (zodiacal spheres) of 30 degrees each. Then the stars in each group were combined into constellations, and each of them received its own name, corresponding to their modern names. Thus, there is no doubt that the concept of the zodiac was first used in Sumer.

The inscriptions of the signs of the zodiac (representing imaginary pictures of the starry sky), as well as their arbitrary division into 12 spheres, prove that the corresponding zodiac signs used in other, later cultures, could not have appeared as a result of independent development.

Studies of Sumerian mathematics, much to the surprise of scientists, showed that their number system is closely related to the precessional cycle. The unusual moving principle of the Sumerian sexagesimal number system focuses on the number 12,960,000, which is exactly equal to 500 large precessional cycles occurring in 25,920 years.

The absence of any other than astronomical possible applications for the products of the numbers 25920 and 2160 can only mean one thing - this system is designed specifically for astronomical purposes.

It seems that scientists are avoiding answering the uncomfortable question, which is this: how could the Sumerians, whose civilization lasted only 2,000 years, notice and fix the cycle of celestial movements that lasts 25,920 years?

And why does the beginning of their civilization refer to the middle of the period between the changes of the zodiac? Does this not indicate that they inherited astronomy from the gods?

It has already been proven that the Sumerian civilization is the oldest on Earth. Their first civilization arose in general at a breathtaking time: at least 445 thousand years ago. Many scientists have fought and are struggling to solve the mystery of the most ancient people on the planet, but the mysteries still remain.

More than 6 thousand years ago, in the region of Mesopotamia, out of nowhere, a unique civilization of the Sumerians appeared, which had all the signs of a highly developed one. Suffice it to mention that the Sumerians used the ternary counting system and knew the Fibonacci numbers. The Sumerian texts contain information about the origin, development and structure of the solar system. In their depiction of the solar system, located in the Middle East section of the State Museum in Berlin, the Sun is at the center of the system, surrounded by all the planets known today. However, there are differences in their depiction of the solar system, the main of which is that the Sumerians place an unknown large planet between Mars and Jupiter - the 12th planet in the Sumerian system! The Sumerians called this mysterious planet Nibiru, which means "crossing planet". The orbit of this planet - a highly elongated ellipse - once every 3600 years crosses the solar system.

The next passage of the Niber through the solar system is expected between 2100 and 2158. According to the Sumerians, the planet Niberu was inhabited by conscious beings - the Anunaki. Their life span was 360,000 Earth years. They were real giants: women from 3 to 3.7 meters tall, and men from 4 to 5 meters.

It is worth noting here that, for example, the ancient ruler of Egypt, Akhenaten, was 4.5 meters tall, and the legendary beauty Nefertiti was about 3.5 meters tall. Already in our time, two unusual coffins were discovered in Akhenaten's city of Tel el-Amarna. In one of them, an image of the Flower of Life was engraved right above the head of the mummy. And in the second coffin were found the bones of a seven-year-old boy, whose height was about 2.5 meters. Now this coffin with the remains is exhibited in the Cairo Museum.

In Sumerian cosmogony, the main event is called the “celestial battle”, a catastrophe that occurred 4 billion years ago and changed the appearance of the solar system. Modern astronomy confirms the data on this catastrophe!

A sensational discovery by astronomers in recent years has been the discovery of a set of fragments of some celestial body with a common orbit corresponding to the orbit of the unknown planet Nibiru.

Sumerian manuscripts contain information that can be interpreted as information about the origin of intelligent life on Earth. According to these data, the genus Homo sapiens was created artificially as a result of the use of genetic engineering about 300 thousand years ago. Thus, perhaps humanity is a civilization of biorobots.
I’ll make a reservation right away that there are some temporary inconsistencies in the article. This is due to the fact that many dates are set only with a certain degree of accuracy.

Six millennia ago... Civilizations ahead of their time, or the mystery of the climatic optimum.

The deciphering of Sumerian manuscripts shocked the researchers. Here is a brief and incomplete list of the achievements of this unique civilization that existed at the dawn of the development of Egyptian civilization, long before the Roman Empire, and even more so Ancient Greece. We are talking about the time about 6 thousand years ago.
After deciphering the Sumerian tables, it became clear that the Sumerian civilization had a number of modern knowledge in the field of chemistry, herbal medicine, cosmogony, astronomy, modern mathematics (for example, it used the golden ratio, the ternary calculus system, used after the Sumerians only when creating modern computers, used Fibonacci numbers! ), possessed knowledge in genetic engineering (this interpretation of the texts was given by a number of scientists in the order of the version of the decoding of manuscripts), had a modern state structure - a jury trial and elected bodies of people's (in modern terminology) deputies, and so on ...

Where could such knowledge come from at that time? Let's try to figure it out, but let's draw some facts about that era - 6 thousand years ago. This time is significant in that the average temperature on the planet then was several degrees higher than at present. The effect is called the temperature optimum. The approach of the binary system of Sirius (Sirius-A and Sirius-B) to the solar system belongs to the same period. At the same time, for several centuries of the 4th millennium BC, two moons were visible in the sky instead of one moon - the second celestial body, then comparable in size to the moon, was the approaching Sirius, an explosion in the system of which occurred again in the same period - 6 thousand years ago! At the same time, absolutely regardless of the development of the Sumerian civilization in Central Africa, there was a Dogon tribe leading a rather isolated lifestyle from other tribes and nationalities, however, as it became known in our time, the Dogon knew the details of not only the structure of the Sirius star system, but also owned other information from the field of cosmogony. Those are the parallels. But if the Dogon legends contain people from Sirius, whom this African tribe perceived as gods who descended from heaven and flew to Earth due to a catastrophe on one of the inhabited planets of the Sirius system associated with an explosion on the star Sirius, then, according to the Sumerian According to texts, the Sumerian civilization was associated with immigrants from the dead 12th planet of the solar system, the planet Nibiru.

Crossing planet.

According to Sumerian cosmogony, the planet Nibiru, not without reason called "crossing", has a very elongated and inclined elliptical orbit and passes between Mars and Jupiter once every 3600 years. For many years, the information of the Sumerians about the dead 12th planet of the solar system was classified as a legend. However, one of the most surprising discoveries of the last two years has been the discovery of a collection of fragments of a previously unknown celestial body moving along a common orit in a way that only fragments of a once single celestial body can do. The orbit of this collection crosses the solar system once every 3600 years precisely between Mars and Jupiter and exactly corresponds to the data from the Sumerian manuscripts. How could the ancient civilization of the Earth have such information 6 thousand years ago?

"Descended from heaven" - myth or reality?

The planet Nibiru plays a special role in the formation of the mysterious civilization of the Sumerians. So, the Sumerians claim to have had contact with the inhabitants of the planet Nibiru! It was from this planet that, according to the Sumerian texts, the Anunaki came to Earth, "descending from heaven to Earth."

Here we are dealing with evidence of the possible assimilation of settlers from Nibiru. By the way, according to these legends, which are numerous in different cultures, humanoids not only belonged to the protein form of life, but were also so compatible with earthlings that they could have a common offspring. Biblical sources also testify to such assimilation. We add that in most religions, the gods converged with earthly women. Doesn't the above testify to the reality of paleocontacts, that is, contacts with representatives of other inhabited celestial bodies that occurred from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago.

How incredible is the existence of beings close to human nature outside the Earth? Among the supporters of the plurality of intelligent life in the Universe there were many great scientists, among whom it is enough to mention Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky and Chizhevsky.

However, the Sumerians report much more than the biblical books. According to Sumerian manuscripts, the Anunaki first arrived on Earth about 445 thousand years ago, that is, long before the emergence of the Sumerian civilization.

People or ... biorobots?

Let's try to find an answer in the Sumerian manuscripts to the question: why did the inhabitants of the planet Nibiru fly to Earth 445 thousand years ago? It turns out that they were interested in minerals, primarily gold. Why?

If we take as a basis the version of an ecological catastrophe on the 12th planet of the solar system, then we could talk about creating a protective gold-containing screen for the planet. Note that a technology similar to the proposed one is currently used in space projects.

The Sumerians were excellent travelers and explorers - they are also credited with the invention of the world's first ships. One dictionary of Sumerian words contained at least 105 designations for various types of ships - according to their size, purpose and type of cargo. One inscription speaks of the possibility of repairing ships and lists the types of materials that the local ruler brought to build the temple of his god around 2200 BC. The breadth of the assortment of these goods is amazing - ranging from gold, silver, copper - to diorite, carnelian and cedar. In some cases, these materials have been transported over thousands of miles.

In Sumer, cosmogony and cosmology first arose, the first collection of proverbs and aphorisms appeared, and literary debates were held for the first time; here the first book catalog appeared, the first money (silver shekels in the form of "bullions by weight") were in circulation, taxes were introduced for the first time, the first laws were adopted and social reforms were carried out, medicine appeared, and for the first time attempts were made to achieve peace and harmony in society.

The Sumerian civilization perished as a result of the invasion from the west of warlike Semitic nomadic tribes. In the 24th century BC, the king of Akkad, Sargon the Ancient, defeated the king Lugalzaggisi, the ruler of Sumer, uniting northern Mesopotamia under his power. On the shoulders of Sumer, the Babylonian-Assyrian civilization was born.

It was in this way, according to the ancient civilization of the Sumerians, that MAN appeared on earth.

But who were the Sumerians?

Introduction

What happened on the land called Mesopotamia by the Greeks, which meant between two rivers (Tigris and Euphrates), can be called a turning point in the history of mankind: civilization was born here. The descendants of the landowners of the Stone Age, who timidly settled along the banks of the swamps - the people known to us as the Sumerians - managed to turn all the apparent disadvantages of their native land into huge advantages that influenced the development of all mankind.

The sun scorches the ground, killing the sparse vegetation that has sprouted from the rare spring rains. A hot wind, born of the desert to the south, raises dust storms that roam the bleak plain. Not a single hill is visible on the horizon. It is hardly possible to find a tree in these parts in order to hide from the heat in its shade. The monotony of the landscape is broken only by two rivers. Water brings life to itself. Above the swamp, where rivers overflow their banks during the rains, birds circle, schools of fish gather in shallow water. Along the banks of the swamps, people live in simple huts made of clay and silt. Digging up the earth, they cultivate small plots of land. Such was the valley lying between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates 9 thousand years ago. The land seemed completely barren. But, nevertheless, about 3000 years before the new era, a different picture would have appeared. Splendid cities sprang up all along the valley. And all around were fields sown with grain crops. The wind blew through the groves of date palms. Temples rose everywhere. One could see stone palaces, mansions and streets lined with spacious houses, hundreds of workshops with a variety of goods from pottery to precious jewelry.

Who were the first Sumerians, where did they come from in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates - these questions are destined to remain unanswered. The homeland of these dark-haired and fair-skinned people should be considered the east or north-west of Mesopotamia, their language is very similar to the language of the peoples of the coast of the Caspian Sea. The Sumerians probably settled in the valley around 3500 BC, around the time when primitive agricultural settlements were founded there. In any case, the first Sumerians settled in the south of the valley, building their huts along the banks of the marshes, overgrown with reeds, which were numerous in the delta, where the Tigris and Euphrates flowed into the Persian Gulf.

The history of the discovery and life of the Sumerians is still a mystery to historians and is compared in complexity with the discovery of space.

Chapter 1. The mystery of the discovery of the Sumerians.

1.1. First explorers

Espotamia has attracted travelers and explorers for centuries. This country is mentioned in the Bible, ancient geographers and historians tell about it. The history of Mesopotamia was little known also for the reason that Islam later reigned here, so it was difficult for non-believers to get here. Interest in the past, the desire to know what was before us, have always been the main factors that encourage people to take actions, often risky and dangerous.

The very first studies of Mesopotamia were written in 1178 and printed in 1543 in Hebrew, and 30 years later in Latin - with a detailed report that deals with the monuments of ancient Mesopotamia.

The first explorer of Mesopotamia was the rabbi from Tudela (Kingdom of Navarre) Benjamin, the son of Jonah, who in 1160 went to Mesopotamia and wandered around the East for 30 years. Hills with ruins buried in them, protruding from the sands, made a strong impression on him and aroused a passionate interest in the past of the ancient people.

The assumptions of the first European travelers were not always plausible, but always fascinating. They excited and aroused the hope of finding Nineveh - the city about which the prophet Nahum said: “Nineveh is ruined! Who will regret her?" Nineveh, in 612 B.C. e. destroyed and put on fire by the Median troops, who defeated the hated Assyrian kings in bloody battles, cursed and forgotten, became the embodiment of a legend for Europeans. The search for Nineveh contributed to the discovery of Sumer. None of the travelers even imagined that the history of Mesopotamia is rooted in such distant times. The Neapolitan merchant Pietro della Valle did not think about this either, setting off in 1616 on a journey to the East. We are indebted to him for the information about the bricks found on the hill of Mukaiyar, covered with some amazing signs. Valle suggests that these are letters, and they should be read from left to right. It seemed to him that the bricks were dried in the sun. As a result of excavations, Valle discovered that the foundation of the building was made of bricks fired in kilns, but no different in size from those dried in the sun. It was he who first delivered cuneiform writing to scientists, thereby marking the beginning of a two-hundred-year history of their reading.

The second traveler who stumbled upon the traces of the Sumerians was the Dane Karsten Niebuhr, who on January 7, 1761. went to the East. He dreamed of collecting and studying as many cuneiform texts as possible, the mystery of which worried linguists and historians of that time. The fate of the Danish expedition was tragic: all its members died. Only Niebuhr survived. His "Description of Travels to Arabia and Neighboring Countries", published in 1778, became something of an encyclopedia of knowledge about Mesopotamia. She was read not only by exotic lovers, but also by scientists. The main thing in this work was carefully made copies of Persepolis inscriptions. Niebuhr was the first to determine that inscriptions consisting of three distinctly delimiting columns represent three types of cuneiform. He called them 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades. Although Niebuhr did not succeed in reading the inscriptions, his reasoning turned out to be extremely valuable and mostly correct. He, for example, argued that class 1 is the Old Persian script, consisting of 42 characters. To the same Niebuhr, descendants should be grateful for the hypothesis that each of the classes of writing represents a different language.

1.2. Deciphering the mysterious signs.

the opiums made by this traveler and discoverer, as well as his reasoned assumptions, were used by Grotenfend when deciphering the cuneiform. These materials turned out to be the key to solving the mystery of the existence of Sumer. On the threshold of the 19th century, the scientific world already had a sufficient number of cuneiform texts to move from the first, timid attempts to the final decipherment of the mysterious writing. So the Danish scientist Friedrich Christian Munter suggested that class 1 (according to Niebuhr) is alphabetic writing, class 2 is syllables and class 3 is ideographic signs. He hypothesized that three multilingual inscriptions immortalized by three writing systems from Persepolis contain the same texts. These observations and hypotheses were correct, however, this was not enough to read and decipher the indicated inscriptions - neither Münter nor Tichsen managed to read the Persepolis inscriptions. Only Grotefend, a teacher of Greek and Latin at the Lyceum in Göttingen, achieved what his predecessors could not do. This story has a rather spicy beginning. They say that Grotefend, a passionate lover of charades and puzzles, bet in a tavern that he would solve the “puzzle from Persepolis”, which allegedly caused laughter and ridicule. Who could have imagined that the most difficult problem, over which the famous scientists of Europe struggled in vain, would be solved by a humble teacher? Getting to work, Grotefend used not so much his experience as an inveterate puzzler, although this experience undoubtedly helped him, but the achievements of his predecessors.

In the south of modern Iraq, in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates, almost 7000 years ago, a mysterious people settled - the Sumerians. They made a significant contribution to the development of human civilization, but we still do not know where the Sumerians came from and what language they spoke.

Mysterious language

The valley of Mesopotamia has long been inhabited by tribes of Semitic pastoralists. It was they who were driven north by the Sumerian aliens. The Sumerians themselves were not related to the Semites, moreover, their origin is still unclear. Neither the ancestral home of the Sumerians nor the language family to which their language belonged is known.

Fortunately for us, the Sumerians left many written monuments. From them we learn that the neighboring tribes called this people "Sumers", and they themselves called themselves "Sang-ngiga" - "black-headed". They called their own language the “noble language” and considered it the only one suitable for people (in contrast to the not so “noble” Semitic languages ​​spoken by their neighbors).
But the Sumerian language was not homogeneous. It had special dialects for women and men, fishermen and shepherds. How the Sumerian language sounded is unknown to this day. A large number of homonyms suggests that this language was tonal (as, for example, modern Chinese), which means that the meaning of what was said often depended on intonation.
After the decline of the Sumerian civilization, the Sumerian language was studied for a long time in Mesopotamia, since most religious and literary texts were written in it.

Ancestral home of the Sumerians

One of the main mysteries remains the ancestral home of the Sumerians. Scientists build hypotheses based on archaeological data and information obtained from written sources.

This Asian country, unknown to us, was supposed to be located on the sea. The fact is that the Sumerians came to Mesopotamia along the riverbeds, and their first settlements appear in the south of the valley, in the deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates. At first, there were very few Sumerians in Mesopotamia - and not surprisingly, because the ships can not accommodate so many settlers. Apparently, they were good sailors, since they were able to climb up unfamiliar rivers and find a suitable place to land on the shore.

In addition, scientists believe that the Sumerians come from a mountainous area. No wonder the words “country” and “mountain” are spelled the same in their language. Yes, and the Sumerian temples "ziggurats" in their appearance resemble mountains - these are stepped structures with a wide base and a narrow pyramidal top, where the sanctuary was located.

Another important condition is that this country had to have developed technologies. The Sumerians were one of the most advanced peoples of their time, they were the first in the entire Middle East who began to use the wheel, created an irrigation system, and invented a unique writing system.
According to one version, this legendary ancestral home was located in southern India.

flood survivors

It was not in vain that the Sumerians chose the valley of Mesopotamia as their new homeland. The Tigris and Euphrates originate in the Armenian Highlands, and carry fertile silt and mineral salts to the valley. Because of this, the soil in Mesopotamia is extremely fertile, with fruit trees, cereals, and vegetables growing in abundance. In addition, there were fish in the rivers, wild animals flocked to the watering place, and there was plenty of food for livestock in the water meadows.

But all this abundance had a downside. When the snow began to melt in the mountains, the Tigris and Euphrates carried streams of water into the valley. Unlike the floods of the Nile, the floods of the Tigris and Euphrates could not be predicted, they were not regular.

Strong floods turned into a real disaster, they destroyed everything in their path: cities and villages, eared fields, animals and people. Probably, having first encountered this disaster, the Sumerians created the legend of Ziusudra.
At the meeting of all the gods, a terrible decision was made - to destroy all of humanity. Only one god Enki took pity on the people. He appeared in a dream to King Ziusudra and ordered him to build a huge ship. Ziusudra fulfilled the will of God, he loaded his property, family and relatives, various masters to preserve knowledge and technology, livestock, animals and birds onto the ship. The ship's doors were tarred on the outside.

The next morning a terrible flood began, which even the gods were afraid of. Rain and wind raged for six days and seven nights. Finally, when the water began to recede, Ziusudra left the ship and offered sacrifices to the gods. Then, as a reward for his loyalty, the gods granted Ziusudra and his wife immortality.

This legend is not just reminiscent of the legend of Noah's Ark, most likely the biblical story is borrowed from the Sumerian culture. After all, the first flood poems that have come down to us date back to the 18th century BC.

Priest kings, builder kings

Sumerian lands have never been a single state. In fact, it was a collection of city-states, each with its own law, its own treasury, its own rulers, its own army. Only language, religion and culture were common. City-states could be at enmity with each other, could exchange goods or enter into military alliances.

Each city-state had three kings. The first and most important was called "en". It was a priest-king (however, a woman could also be enom). The main task of the king-en was to conduct religious ceremonies: solemn processions, sacrifices. In addition, he was in charge of all temple property, and sometimes the property of the entire community.

An important area of ​​life in ancient Mesopotamia was construction. The Sumerians are credited with the invention of fired bricks. City walls, temples, barns were built from this more durable material. The priest-builder ensi was in charge of the construction of these structures. In addition, the ensi kept an eye on the irrigation system, because canals, locks and dams allowed at least a little control over irregular spills.

For the duration of the war, the Sumerians elected another leader - the military leader - lugal. The most famous military leader was Gilgamesh, whose exploits are immortalized in one of the most ancient literary works - the Epic of Gilgamesh. In this story, the great hero defies the gods, defeats monsters, brings a precious cedar tree to his hometown of Uruk, and even descends into the afterlife.

Sumerian gods

Sumer had a developed religious system. Three gods enjoyed special reverence: Anu, the sky god, Enlil, the earth god, and Ensi, the god of water. In addition, each city had its own patron god. Thus, Enlil was especially revered in the ancient city of Nippur. The inhabitants of Nippur believed that Enlil gave them such important inventions as a hoe and a plow, and also taught them how to build cities and build walls around them.

Important gods for the Sumerians were the sun (Utu) and the moon (Nannar), replacing each other in the sky. And, of course, one of the most important figures of the Sumerian pantheon was the goddess Inanna, whom the Assyrians, who borrowed the religious system from the Sumerians, would call Ishtar, and the Phoenicians - Astarte.

Inanna was the goddess of love and fertility and, at the same time, the goddess of war. She personified, first of all, carnal love, passion. No wonder that in many Sumerian cities there was a custom of "divine marriage", when the kings, in order to ensure the fertility of their lands, livestock and people, spent the night with the high priestess Inanna, who embodied the goddess herself.

Like many ancient gods, Inanna was capricious and fickle. She often fell in love with mortal heroes, and woe was to those who rejected the goddess!
The Sumerians believed that the gods created humans by mixing their blood with clay. After death, the souls fell into the afterlife, where there was also nothing but clay and dust, which the dead fed on. To make the lives of their dead ancestors a little better, the Sumerians sacrificed food and drink to them.

Cuneiform

The Sumerian civilization reached amazing heights, even after the conquest by the northern neighbors, the culture, language and religion of the Sumerians were borrowed first by Akkad, then by Babylonia and Assyria.
The Sumerians are credited with inventing the wheel, bricks, and even beer (although they most likely made the barley drink using a different technology). But the main achievement of the Sumerians was, of course, a unique writing system - cuneiform.
Cuneiform got its name from the shape of the marks left by a reed stick on wet clay, the most common writing material.

Sumerian writing originated from a system for counting various goods. For example, when a person counted his flock, he made a ball of clay to designate each sheep, then he put these balls in a box, and left notes on the box - the number of these balls. But after all, all the sheep in the herd are different: different sex, age. Marks appeared on the balls, according to the animal they denoted. And, finally, the sheep began to be denoted by a picture - a pictogram. It was not very convenient to draw with a reed stick, and the pictogram turned into a schematic image consisting of vertical, horizontal and diagonal wedges. And the last step - this ideogram began to denote not only a sheep (in Sumerian “udu”), but also the syllable “udu” as part of complex words.

At first, cuneiform was used to draw up business documents. Extensive archives have come down to us from the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia. But later, the Sumerians began to write down literary texts, and even whole libraries of clay tablets appeared, which were not afraid of fires - after all, after firing, the clay only became stronger. It is thanks to the fires in which the Sumerian cities, captured by the warlike Akkadians, that the unique information about this ancient civilization has come down to us.

What people created the Sumerian civilization? What language did the people of Mesopotamia speak? The foundations of civilization in Mesopotamia were laid by the Sumerians. Already in the VI millennium BC. they were the main population of Mesopotamia, but by no means its first inhabitants. Gradually occupying southern Mesopotamia, the Sumerians may have met some tribes here. Where the ancestral home of the Sumerians was located is not clear. The Sumerians themselves considered themselves to be from the island of Dilmun in the Persian Gulf. They spoke a language whose relationship with other languages ​​has not yet been established.

From the 3rd millennium BC Semitic tribes began to penetrate into Mesopotamia from the Syrian steppe. The language of this group of tribes was called East Semitic (Akkadian). By the end of the III millennium BC. the Sumerian and Semitic populations finally mixed up. From the end of the 4th millennium BC. three languages ​​coexisted in Mesopotamia: pre-Sumerian banana, Sumerian, and East Semitic (Akkadian). Until about 2350 B.C. the population of Lower Mesopotamia spoke Sumerian, while the Akkadian language prevailed in Upper Mesopotamia. In the end, the Semitic language turned out to be the main language: the pre-Sumerian language disappeared, and Akkadian won and gradually replaced the Sumerian language, adopting many Sumerian words. This was by no means explained by the power and large number of the Eastern Semites, but only by the fact that they were mobile pastoral tribes that quickly merged with neighboring peoples. There was no ethnic enmity between peoples who spoke different languages. The entire population of Mesopotamia called themselves blackheads, regardless of the language each spoke.

From the second half of the IV millennium BC. a new stage in the development of the Mesopotamian civilization began, called the Uruk culture (2nd half of the 4th - 3rd millennium BC). It was at this time that the formation of the economic and cultural basis of the Sumerian civilization, which had developed in the southern part of Mesopotamia, was completed.

The first cities in the history of mankind arose on the territory of Mesopotamia. Already in the IV millennium BC. large settlements are transformed here into city-states. A city-state is a self-governing city with its surrounding area. Usually, each such city had its own temple complex in the form of a high stepped tower of a ziggurat, a ruler's palace and adobe residential buildings. Sumerian cities were built on hills and surrounded by walls. They were divided into separate settlements, from the combination of which these cities appeared. In the center of each village was the temple of the local god. The god of the main village was considered the lord of the whole city. Approximately 40-50 thousand people lived in each of these city-states.

The city of Uruk, located on the Euphrates, played an important role in the development of the Sumerian civilization. In the IV millennium BC. it was the largest city in Mesopotamia. Uruk occupied an area of ​​approximately 7.5 square meters. km., a third of which was under the city, a third was occupied by a palm grove, and brick quarries were located on the rest of the area. The habitable territory of Uruk was 45 hectares. There were 120 different settlements in the Uruk region, indicating a rapid population growth. There were several temple complexes in Uruk, and the temples themselves were of considerable size. The Sumerians were excellent builders, although they lacked stone and wood. To protect against the effects of water, they lined buildings. They made long clay cones, fired them, painted them red, white or black, and then pressed them into the clay walls, forming colorful mosaic panels with patterns imitating wickerwork. The red house of Uruk was decorated in a similar way, the place of popular meetings and meetings of the council of elders.

The Sumerian civilization of the period of the Uruk culture did not always develop in a straight line. In the pottery industry, the highly artistic so-called. culture of painted pottery. This regression was associated with the mass production of pottery made using the potter's wheel. The new craftsmen no longer had time to apply magical patterns to the dishes, as this could slow down the process of mass production of ceramic products, the production of which had to keep up with the growth of the population and its needs.

The Sumerian tribes of Mesopotamia in various parts of the valley were engaged in draining marshy soil and used the waters of the Euphrates, and then the Tigris, to create irrigation agriculture. The creation of a whole system of main canals, on which regular irrigation of fields was based, in combination with well-thought-out agricultural technology, was the most important achievement of the Uruk period.

The main occupation of the Sumerians is agriculture, based on a developed irrigation system. In urban centers, handicraft was gaining strength, the specialization of which was rapidly developing. There were builders, metallurgists, engravers, blacksmiths. Jewelery became a special specialized production. In addition to various ornaments, cult figurines and amulets were made in the form of various animals: bulls, sheep, lions, birds. Having crossed the threshold of the Bronze Age, the Sumerians revived the production of stone vessels, which in the hands of talented anonymous craftsmen became genuine works of art. Such is the cult alabaster vessel from Uruk, about 1 m high. It is decorated with the image of a procession with gifts going to the temple. There were no deposits of metal ores in Mesopotamia. Already in the first half of the III millennium BC. the Sumerians began to bring gold, silver, copper, lead from other areas. There was a brisk international trade in the form of barter deals or gift exchanges. In exchange for wool, textiles, grain, dates and fish, they also received wood and stone. Perhaps there was also a real trade, which was conducted by trading agents.

The life of the Sumerian society took shape around the temple. The temple is the center of the district. The creation of cities was preceded by the creation of temples, followed by the resettlement of residents of small tribal settlements under its walls. In all the cities of Sumer, there were monumental temple complexes as a kind of symbol of the Sumerian civilization. Temples were of great social and economic importance. At first, the high priest led the entire life of the city-state. The temples had rich granaries and workshops. They were centers for collecting reserve funds, from here trading expeditions were equipped. Significant material values ​​were concentrated in the temples: metal vessels, works of art, various kinds of decorations. The cultural and intellectual potential of Sumer was collected here, agronomic and calendar-astronomical observations were carried out. Around 3000 BC Temple households became so complex that they needed to be accounted for. They needed writing, and writing was invented at the turn of IV-III millennium BC.

The appearance of writing is the most important stage in the development of any civilization, in this case the Sumerian. If earlier people stored and transmitted information in oral and artistic form, now they could write it down in order to store it for an arbitrarily long time.

Writing in Sumer arose first as a system of drawings, as a pictogram. They drew on wet clay tablets with the angle of a pointed reed stick. Then the tablet was hardened by drying or firing. Each sign-drawing denoted either the depicted object itself, or any concept associated with this object. For example, the leg sign meant to walk, stand, fetch. This ancient form of writing was invented by the Sumerians. Around the middle of the III millennium BC. they gave it to the Akkadians. By this time, the letter had already largely acquired a wedge-shaped appearance. So, it took at least four centuries for writing to turn from purely reminder signs into an ordered system for transmitting information. Signs have become a combination of straight lines. At the same time, each line, due to the pressure on the clay with the corner of a rectangular stick, received a wedge-shaped character. This writing is called cuneiform.

The first Sumerian records did not record historical events or milestones in the biographies of rulers, but simply economic reporting data. Perhaps that is why the oldest tablets were not large and poor in content. A few written signs of the text were scattered over the surface of the tablet. However, they soon began to write from top to bottom, in columns, in the form of vertical columns, then in horizontal lines, which greatly accelerated the process of writing.

The cuneiform used by the Sumerians contained about 800 characters, each representing a word or syllable. It was difficult to remember them, but the cuneiform was adopted by many of the Sumerians' neighbors to write in their completely different languages. The cuneiform script created by the ancient Sumerians is called the Latin alphabet of the Ancient East.

The Sumerian civilization also created early forms of statehood. In the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. Several political centers developed in Sumer. For the rulers of the states of Mesopotamia in the inscriptions of that time, there are two different titles lugal and ensi. Lugal is the independent head of the city-state, a big man, as the Sumerians usually called kings. Ensi is the ruler of a city-state who has recognized the authority of some other political center over himself. Such a ruler only played the role of the high priest in his city, and political power was in the hands of the lugal, to whom the ensi was subordinate. However, not a single lugal was the king over all the other cities of Mesopotamia.

There were several political centers in Sumer, headed by the Lugals, who claimed dominance in the country. All of them lived in constant clashes with each other. There was a fierce struggle for land, for the head sections of irrigation facilities, for control over the entire irrigation network. Among the states whose rulers claimed the dominant position were Kish in the north and Lagash in the south. The struggle of Kish with the South Sumerian city of Uruk is reflected in the cycle of epic poems about Gilgamesh. However, Kish soon overtook Lagash. This city became very powerful and waged successful wars with the neighboring city of Umma. The rulers of Lagash bore the title of ensi and received the title of lugal from the council of elders only temporarily, for the duration of the war. But wars were fought more and more often, and the lugals gained almost unlimited power.

The internal position of Lagash was not stable. More than half of all land was the property of the ruler and his family. The situation of the community members, who were in debt to the nobility, worsened. The fees associated with the growth of the state apparatus have increased. All this caused discontent among the most diverse segments of the population and made it necessary to carry out anti-aristocratic reforms that were carried out by the ruler (ensi) of Lagash, Uruinimgina, who later assumed the royal title of lugal. But the reforms were small and short-lived. In essence, the situation has changed little: the withdrawal of temple facilities from the property of the ruler was nominal, the entire government administration remained in its place. In addition, Lagash again got involved in the war and suffered a defeat in 2312 in the fight against the ruler of Umma Lugalzagesi, who managed to unite all of Sumer for a while. However, this state was only a confederation of city-states (nomes), which Lugalzagesi headed as high priest.

In the life of the Sumerian civilization, from the moment of its appearance, the idea of ​​unification was born and then began to develop steadily. The entire political life of Mesopotamia was built around it. The confederate union of Sumer under Lugalzagesi lasted only 25 years. This was followed by two attempts to create a united state of Mesopotamia under Sargon of Akkad and under the III dynasty of Ur. This process took 313 years.

In the northern Mesopotamia suddenly appeared such an outstanding personality as Sargon of Akkad (Ancient), a talented commander and statesman. Everything that is known about him fits into the classical formula of an oriental despot: he created a kingdom for himself, became a true king, having unlimited power, founded a dynasty, and established the authority of his state in the eyes of other peoples. Legends and traditions about the origin of Sargon brought him closer to the mythical gods and thus contributed to the growth of popularity. A foundling, raised in the family of a water carrier, Sargon became the personal servant of the lugal Kish, and then exalted the unknown city of Akkad, creating his own kingdom there.

Semitic Akkad first united the north of Mesopotamia, and this region became known as Akkad. Subsequently, he subjugated the city-states of Sumer, thus creating a single state of Mesopotamia. Sargon's victory over the cities of Sumer was largely achieved because the Sumerian city-states were constantly at odds and competed with each other, and also due to the support of the Sumerian nobility.

Having united Akkad and Sumer, Sargon began to strengthen state power. He managed to suppress the separatism of rival kingdoms. The city-states retained their internal structure, but the ensi actually turned into officials who managed the temple economy and were responsible to the king. Sargon managed to create a unified irrigation system, which was regulated on a nationwide scale.

Sargon created a permanent professional army for the first time in world history. The army of the united Mesopotamia consisted of 5400 people. Professional warriors were settled around the city of Akkakda and were completely dependent on the king, obeying only him. Particularly great importance was attached to the archers as a more dynamic and operational army than the spearmen and shield-bearers. Relying on such an army, Sargon and his successors also achieved foreign policy by conquering Syria and Cilicia. The state was replenished with raw materials, products of labor and living labor force - slaves.

The despotic-bureaucratic rule of Sargon created a whole army of officials, a new service nobility, whose ranks were not replenished. A huge court environment was also created. The despotic form of government was established in Mesopotamia for millennia, determining the specifics of the civilization developing here. Already the grandson of Sargon, Naram-Suen, abandoned the old traditional title and began to call himself the king of the four corners of the world. The Akkadian state reached its apogee.

In the future, despotism became a special form of state power in all the ancient Eastern states. The essence of despotism was that the ruler at the head of the state had unlimited power. He was the owner of all the lands, during the war he was the supreme commander in chief, performed the functions of the high priest and judge. Taxes flowed towards him. The stability of the despotisms was based on the belief in the divinity of the king. A despot is a god in human form. The despot exercised his power through an extensive administrative-bureaucratic system. A powerful apparatus of officials controlled and calculated, levied taxes and carried out the court, organized agricultural and handicraft work, monitored the state of the irrigation system, and recruited militia for military campaigns.

The unification of Mesopotamia into a single state is an important step in the development of the Sumerian civilization: economic life, trade developed, strife stopped. However, the common people, both the Sumerians and the Akkadians, actually gained nothing from the ensuing changes. Discontent reigned in the country, uprisings broke out. The Akkadian state, weakened by social contradictions, collapsed around 2200 BC. under the blows of an external enemy of the Gutians. The hill tribes of the Kutians, who invaded from the east, destroyed the royal power in Mesopotamia and imposed tribute on the rulers dependent on them. The ruler of Lagash, Gudea, was appointed governor of the Gutians in Sumer. The power of the Gutians over Mesopotamia lasted 60 years, and Gudea tirelessly continued to create the well-being of Lagash at the expense of other areas. It was a time of priestly reaction, a temporary regression in comparison with the Akkadian period.

The rule of the Gutians was short-lived. To replace them in 2112 BC. power came over the Mesopotamia of the city of Ur, its III dynasty, the most prominent representative of which was Shulgi. The new state was named the Kingdom of Sumer and Akkad. It was a typical ancient Eastern despotic and bureaucratic state. Shulgi achieved his complete deification. The seventh or tenth month in the calendars of various cities was named after him. The country was divided into districts, which may or may not coincide with the former nomes. They were led by ensi, who were just officials and could be transferred from place to place. Each region paid the king a tribute. There was a single state economy, all the workers of which were called gurushi (well done), and the workers were called slaves. All of them were brought together in detachments that could be transferred from one job to another. They employed about half a million people. They worked seven days a week and therefore the mortality rate was quite high.

Such a system of labor organization required constant accounting and control. The workers received a standard daily ration of 1.5 liters. (male), 0.75 l. (female) barley, some vegetable oil and wool. This highly centralized bureaucratic system, established by the 3rd Dynasty of Ur, lasted for about 100 years.

The political support of such an ancient Eastern despotic state was the army, the priesthood, the administration of the ruler, petty officials, skilled artisans, and overseers. It was at this stage in the development of the Sumerian civilization that the doctrine of the divine origin of kings and kingship, which descended from heaven and forever dwelt on earth, was introduced into the consciousness of people, passing from dynasty to dynasty. An idea was developed about the circle of duties of a person in relation to God and the king close to him.

The III dynasty of Ur fell under the blows of external enemies, primarily the Amorite Semites. The entire complex bureaucratic system collapsed. This event is dedicated to the Song of Lamentation, created in the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. in Sumerian. Taking advantage of the situation, the Elamite tribes invaded from the east. In 2003 BC the city of Ur was sacked, which then lay in ruins for a long time. In Mesopotamia, a period of political fragmentation began again, which lasted over two centuries. In such a situation, the city of Babylon, which had not previously played a significant role, advanced and gradually gained predominance.