Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 8. The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

In the dusts of Iraq, the ruins of the world's first civilization lie buried. This episode, we travel into the extremely distant past to look at the Sumerians. These ancient people invented writing and mathematics, and built some of the largest cities that the world had ever seen. Find out about the mystery of their origins, and learn how they rose from humble beginnings to form the foundation of all our modern societies. With myths, proverbs and even some recreated Sumerian music, travel back to where it all began, and find out how humanity's first civilization fell.Credits:Sound engineering by Thomas NtinasVoice Actors:Jake Barrett-MillsRhy BrignellShem JacobsNick BradleyEmily JohnsonMusic by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100209Artist: incompetech.com/Sumerian Music kindly provided by Gayle andPhilip Neuman, of Ensemble De Organographia. Their CD, "Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks," is available fromnorthpacificmusic.com.

In the year 1625, an Italian nobleman named Pietro de la Valle went on a tour of the Middle East. Delavale was a prolific traveler. He journeyed around Asia, North Africa, and even India. He married an Assyrian Christian princess in Damascus, and now the two of them traveled together, journeying by horseback and camel, accompanied by local guides. At this time, travel in this region couldn't have been more dangerous. The Ottoman and Persian empires were at war, fighting over who would rule in Baghdad. And meanwhile, local bandits took advantage of the chaos to prey on travellers. In those days, lions even roamed in these hills.

Due to these various dangers, Delavale's guides were constantly on edge. It was June the 18th, 1625, when they spotted a distant group of tribesmen on the horizon. Their guides decided that they might be in danger and began to search for a place to hide. In the distance, they spotted the looming mass of a series of enormous ruins, as Delavale later wrote in his memoirs. Being suspicious to some Arabian vagrants or vagabonds, for more security we removed a mile further and took up our station under a little hill near some ruins of buildings, which we saw from far away. Delavale's group stayed in those ruins for several nights, while their guides negotiated with the local ruler asking for safe passage. During the day, under the baking Iraqi sun, Delavale passed his time.

by walking among those monumental ruins. Our removal, hence, being still deferred, I went in the forenoon to take a more diligent view of the ruins of the above-said ancient building. What it had been I could not understand, but I had found it to have been built with very good bricks, most of which were stamped with certain unknown letters which appeared very ancient.

I observed that they had been cemented together, not with lime, but with bitumen or pitch. Delavelle was fascinated by the broken fragments of writing that littered the ground of this ruined place. He explored further and wrote down some of the symbols that he saw again and again stamped into the stones and pieces of clay brick. Surveying the ruins again, I found on the ground some pieces of black marble, hard and fine engraven with the same letters as the bricks, which seemed to me to be a kind of seal.

Amongst other symbols which I discovered in that short time, two I found in many places. One was like a pyramid, and the other resembled a star of eight points. Della Valle and his wife didn't know it, but they had stumbled across the ruins of Ure, a city that had formed the center of one of mankind's first civil. civilizations. This society was known as Sumer, and it was where so much of the world we know today first began. Eventually, negotiations with the local leader fell apart, and Delavale's guides no longer felt safe camped out there in the ruins. They departed in the dead of night and fled to safety across the desert. In Delavale's bags were a few of the clay tablets that he had found scattered

around the ruins of Ure. These would be the first examples ever seen in Europe of a language that had been dead and forgotten for thousands of years. All the way home, Delavallet must have turned those tablets over in his hands, gazed at their mysterious ancient symbols. He must have wondered to himself, who had built those enormous mounds of brick and earth, all alone out there in the middle of the desert. What did the symbols on those broken pieces of clay mean? And if such a great city had once stood there, what in all the world could have happened to it? My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time, who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to go back to the very beginning and look at a society that is one of the candidates for the first ever technological human civilization. These are the people of Sumo, who we call the Sumerians. I want to show how, over the course of millennia, the Sumerians would build a society that would form the blueprint for all that followed after. I want to show how they rose to invent writing, mathematics and the wheel,

and built the largest cities that humanity had ever seen. seen, and I want to explore what happened to cause their final and devastating collapse. In the highlands of southeastern Turkey, a range of snow-topped limestone peaks rise over 3,000 metres above the flat plains beneath. These are the Taurus Mountains. The mountains of Turkey rise so sharply that rain clouds find it difficult to pass over them. Instead, these clouds pool in their hollows and valleys, and give these hills an exceptionally high rate of annual rainfall. In spring and summer, the warm air means that the clouds are even denser, and violent thunderstorms rock these mountains too, echoing of the stones of the valleys.

As a result, this is a landscape shaped by water. The steep sides of the Torres Mountains have been eroded to form streams and waterfalls, while underground rivers have cut into the rock and hollowed out some of the largest caves in Asia. Just as it has shaped the rocks, water has also shaped the beliefs of this region's people. The name of these mountains, Taurus, comes from the Latin word for bull, and the reason for this isn't hard to see. Temples have been unearthed all across these mountains, decorated with terracotta statues of bulls. Since ancient times, the people who lived here worshipped the storm god Teshub.

They believed he rode on the back of a bull, perhaps because the sound of the thunderstorms reminded them of the thumping of enormous hooves. Accompanied with the cracking and booming of these thunderstorms, these heavy springings. rain drain into streams and join rivers already flowing down from the snowy mountain passes of Armenia. Soon, these small rivers join together and flow down from the mountains and out onto the wide flat plains beneath in two great majestic watercourses that run together in near parallel for nearly 2,000 kilometres. The vast floodplain of these rivers, is today the land we call Iraq. In Arabic, this area is called Biled El Raphidane, the land of the two rivers. And in the west it has been known since ancient times by its Greek

name, combining the words Mesos or Middle and Potamos or River, Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. These two great waterways are known as the Tigris and the Euphrates. For millennia, these rivers have brought life down into the flat floodplain of Iraq, and the source of that life comes from some of the most lifeless things, the rocks of the mountains themselves. Virtually all rocks are held together with tiny flecks of two different materials, called quartz and feldspar. Quartz is a clear glittering crystal formed from oxygen and silicon, while feldspar is a complex mineral derived from silicon. Together they make up over 60% of the earth's crust. And when rivers cut their roots through the mountain gullies and underground streams,

their waters wash over the rocks and dissolve their soluble parts. But courts and feldspar don't dissolve in water, and so these tiny crystals are carried along by the river in a cloud of glittering particles. We call this substance silt. Silt is sometimes known by the more poetic name, rock flower, and its particles are smaller than a grain of sand, but these tiny specks can have an enormous impact. soil with a high silt content tends to hold water better and promotes air circulation. And for this reason, silty soil forms the perfect habitat for most plants. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates transport vast amounts of silt down into the lowlands of Iraq every year,

and as a consequence, this flat stretch of otherwise arid desert has become exceptionally fertile. For the history of this region and the history of all humanity, these tiny particles would prove immensely significant. Other than its rich clay soil, the desert plains of southern Iraq are an inhospitable landscape. In fact, this is perhaps the last place you might expect the first human civilizations to arise. For one thing, the climate of this region is extremely hot and dry. summer temperatures can reach over 52 degrees centigrade or 126 degrees Fahrenheit and rainfall is rare especially in summer coupled with the strong winds that blow across these plains this means that the soil is arid and wind-swept and although the seasonal flooding of the rivers brings life to the earth these floods are also

unpredictable. In Egypt, the River Nile flows directly from the Great Lakes of Africa, which act as a stabilizing and regulating force. But the Tigris and Euphrates depend on the amount of rain that fell on the mountains of Turkey, Armenia, and Kurdistan, a quantity that varies greatly from year to year. Years of drought can often be followed by years of devastating floods, and during winter, the whole plain is covered with a thick layer of mud. The region of southern Iraq is also poor in natural resources. The land is essentially nothing but a floodplain made of clay and silt.

There are no metals to be mined here and virtually no stone. And because of all these challenges, it took early humans a long time to reach this hostile environment. In the far prehistoric, archaic humans like Homo erectus vied for survival in the upper reaches of the rivers. Archaeologists have found stone axes and other artefacts dating back to nearly half a million years ago. But the riverlands of southern Iraq weren't suitable for this hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But about 13,000 years ago, things began to change. The first nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down in permanent villages. These early innovators had noticed something interesting.

They saw that when they threw away the discarded seeds of edible plants, that same plant would later sprout out of their rubbish dumps. And this gave them an idea. They realized that if you buried plant seeds in the earth, fed them and watered them and watered them, more of the same plants would grow. These were some of the first farmers, and once they found a good patch of land, they quite understandably didn't want to move. They soon built houses nearby and store houses to keep food through the winter. They banded together into larger communities in order to divide the labor of farming and to protect their grain

should anyone else try to take it. They learned how to take the clay from the ground and shape it into pots. But they were still limited to areas where the rains were plentiful, to the mountains and the foothills. From about the year 6,500 BC, these human settlements began to spread. Century by century, millennium by millennium, they worked their way down the course of of the two great rivers, and into the inhospitable land of southern Iraq. Who these people were, what language they spoke, and what they called themselves, we have no idea. Today, we call this stretch of several thousand years, the Ubaid period, named quite arbitrarily after the site where their first artifacts were found. As the Ubaid people move down the rivers of the river's of the river's

of Iraq, they began to notice other things too. They noticed that date palms grew in some areas of the river, providing them with a rich and delicious source of calories. They soon found out that these too could be cultivated and planted in orchards, and they also noticed that these palms could provide shade for other more fragile plants, allowing them to be grown too beneath the harsh Iraqi sun, and they made another crucial discovery too. They realized that they didn't have to grow their plants only on the banks of the river. With a bit of hard work, they could dig channels that diverted the life-giving water inland. Now they could grow crops just about anywhere, so long as you could dig a canal long enough. And the people of this region would soon become very

good at digging canals. Worked properly in this manner, this landscape could be immensely productive. In their fields, the people here grew wheat, millet and sesame, and in gardens beneath the shade of their date palms, they also grew pomegranates, grapes and figs, as well as chickpeas, lentils, leeks, garlic, cucumbers, and watercress. But there was one noticeable patch of green in the midst of all this desert. In the south of Iraq, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates branched into deltas and shallow lakes before they meet the ocean, creating an ancient marsh landscape.

Here, dense thickets of reeds grow, so tall you can't see over the tops of them, populated with buffalo, wild boar, and marshland birds. Since ancient times, the people here have built their houses out of reeds, binding them together into incredibly strong beams of up to a metre thick, and building large, vaulted houses out of nothing but reeds. And it's in this marshy southern landscape that the greatest Sumerian cities rose. Just as Mesopotamia was watered by two great rivers, its lands were also populated by two great peoples.

These were the people of Sumer and the people of Akkad. Over the course of their history, the Sumerians and the Akkadians grew together in such a symbiotic way that it's impossible to tell the story of one without the other. We know a decent amount about the Akkadian people in the north. They spoke a language in the Semitic family, meaning that it's in the same language family as the Aramaic of the Bible, and later Hebrew and Arabic. This language seems to have been indigenous to the region, and it shares grammar and words with many other languages that surrounded it.

But the Sumerian people are much more mistaken. In fact, they are such a mystery that they have caused archaeologists to refer to what's called the Sumerian problem. Sumerians spoke what we call a language isolate. That is, it has no relation to any of the languages around it, and it's essentially in a language family all of its own. Sumerian was so alien to the region that early scholars who discovered its first texts didn't believe it could be a real language at all. They thought it must have been a kind of code used to communicate in secret. This alone has led some historians to ask whether the Sumerians may have arrived in southern Iraq from somewhere else. The Sumerian culture centered on the sea coast of Iraq's far south, and so some have suggested that they may have

arrived by boat. Some backing for this theory may come in the writings of Roman historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote down a Babylonian legend that he heard in the first century AD. It relates the story of a half-man, half-fish called Oannis, who walked out of the sea and taught the people of Mesopotamia the secrets of culture. He brought them the knowledge of letters, signed, and all kinds of techniques. He also taught them how to found cities, build temples, create laws, and measure plots of land. He revealed to them how to work the land and gather fruits. After teaching mankind all these secrets, O'Anus leaps back into the sea and swims away. It's possible that in this myth, ancient storytellers have preserved some memory of the arrival of the Sumerians,

landing en masse by boat, and bringing with them their advanced urban culture. Some have even argued that the Sumerians may have come from as far afield as India, and more evidence for the migration theory seems to come from the words that the Sumerians used for their professions. For more common jobs, the ones that involved manual labor, the Sumerians used old pre-Sumarian words. Meanwhile, they brought new words with them to describe more sophisticated and urban occupations. For instance, the words for Scribe and Winemaker are both distinctly Sumerian. But others have proposed a more interesting theory, which does seem to solve some of these

contradictions. Although it does seem a little far-fetched, I think it is worth mentioning here. The clue to this theory comes, once again, from mythology. The Sumerian version of history was dominated by a devastating event of apocalyptic proportions. And if you were brought up reading Bible stories, you may find it familiar. The Sumerians believed that in a time long before, in the time of their most distant ancestors, a great flood had washed over the world. This same story would later pass on into the legends of the Babylonian Empire, and from there to the Hebrew poets who wrote the first books of the Bible.

For this reason, the story of the flood is perhaps the oldest continuously told story, and it's in this legend that the clue to the origin of the Sumerians might lie. The story of the flood is so striking that many historians with varying degrees of of credibility, have tried to come up with some historical event that may have inspired it. And history is actually full of great inundations. When the last ice age ended around 10,000 BC, global temperatures rose between 4 to 7 degrees, over a period of about 5,000 years. Up until that point, vast ice sheets had covered the land in the north of the planet, reaching as far south as Berlin.

But as temperatures rose, these ice caps melted, and their water poured back into the oceans. Global sea levels rose an average of two and a half centimetres a year, until by the end the sea had risen an incredible 120 metres, or enough to completely swallow a 30-story building. Around the world, the sea engulfed vast regions of the coast. The land bridge that had once connected Russia and Alaska was submerged, separating Asia and the Americas forever. Low-lying regions of what is now Europe's North Sea flooded, turning Great Britain

into an island. And in the Middle East, the effects were felt just as dramatically. During the low sea levels of the Ice Age, the Tigris and Euphrates had flowed for a further 600 kilometers, joining into a single river and meandering along a stretch of low-lying valley wedged between what is now Iran and Saudi Arabia. This grand river would have met the Indian Ocean around the region of Dubai today. and if you're having trouble visualising this, I'll post a map on Patreon of how this region would have looked in those days. Some historians have argued that Neolithic humans may have made their home in this fertile valley, having journeyed down from the mountains of Iran. But as the glaciers melted, the sea advanced, slowly at first, but with an increasing speed. Over the next 5,000,

years, the coastline would have moved an average rate of 120 meters a year. That's over a kilometer every 10 years, or one meter every three days. If there were humans living in this low-lying region at the time, this event must have been utterly terrifying. The next centuries would see these people driven north by the encroaching waves, which swallowed whole forests and villages. These people would have been pressed into ever-denser populations, forced to adapt as they went. They would have been a roving band of refugees, never able to settle anywhere for long before the sea made its next advance. This exodus would have continued until the planet's temperature stabilized, and the seacoast reached its furthest point, right around

the year 5,000 BC, just at the time that Sumerian culture as we know it burst onto the historical stage. So this is a theory that I think deserves some consideration, that as the waves of Semitic-speaking farmers move down the rivers from the mountains to the north, they met another population coming up from the south, a ravaged and devastated people, speaking a language. Speaking a language, that had evolved independently, and telling tales of a flood that had drowned the whole world. This theory could be supported by that legend of the amphibious fishman O'Annes. Is it possible that the Sumerians came to southern Iraq, not by boat, but actually walking out of a land that was now at the bottom of the sea?

Another legend, called the myth of Enki and Nynorsag, relates a crux of. creation story, in which the god Enki creates man in a land called Dilmoon. Like the garden of Eden, Dilmoon is an earthly paradise. In Dilmoon, the crow does not utter its cry. The lion does not kill. The wolf does not seize the lamb. The wild dog, devourer of kids, is unknown. Dilmoon is thought to have been what is now Bahrain, an island in the middle of the Persian Gulf. that body of water that was once a fertile river valley. All we have on this subject is speculation, and until any further evidence is found, this will remain just a theory. But as a storyteller, I can't help but be drawn to this colourful explanation. When we try to work out the truth

of what happened in this incredibly distant past, we are reminded that history, is not a rigid set of dates and facts, but a continuing process of inquiry and debate. It can sometimes feel like mapping the surface of a planet in another solar system, or like exploring the dark depths of the deep sea, and all we have to work with are the small spots of light that history provides. We may never know the truth about where the Sumerians came from, but there is plenty that we do know. The Sumerians referred to themselves as Uksaggigga, or the black-headed people,

and the Akkadians called them Salmat Kakadi, which meant the same thing in their own language. From carvings that depict Sumerians, we can see how they wore their hair, curly on top and cut short on the sides. Common men wore sheepskin kilts, while the richer. people would have worn coloured fabrics spun from wool, decorated with tassels and beads. Among the wealthy, both men and women wore jewelry, anklets, bracelets, necklaces and ear ornaments, made of copper and sometimes gold. Remarkably, we also have a great deal of evidence about Sumerian music. Like everything else, the Sumerians wrote their music to down on clay tablets. And we've also discovered other texts that explain how to play it,

including how to tune the instruments. Today, the musicians Gail and Philip Neumann have actually been able to recreate the sounds of ancient Sumer, using authentic instruments of the day, early forms of liars and lutes, reed pipes, and bells made of clay. Philip and Gail agreed to let me share some of their music, which you'll hear a few times throughout this episode. And so today, we're able to hear the sounds of the music that once played in the temples and courtyards of cities like Eridu, Ur and Uruk. I'll put detailed notes on Patreon about each of these pieces of music, so you can learn more about them and their history. These two great peoples. The Semitic Akkadians and the Sumerians formed a symbiosis over the next centuries

that would see their cultures run in parallel, just like their two great rivers. They shared their successes and advances. They shared the cities that were even now growing to become the largest ever seen. But they also shared their failures. And as a result, their fates became inextricably intertwined. The Sumerians believed that the world was a roughly circular landmass, surrounded on all sides by a huge body of water. They believed that another ocean also lay above their heads, held in place by the solid structure of the sky, which occasionally let some of this water through as rain. They divided water into two types, that of the rain, that of the rain, plain and rivers, sweet water, and that of the sea, bitter water. Sumerians called their

homeland Ki-en-Gir, which means the land of the noble lords. To describe the settled societies of the Sumerians and Akkadians, they used the word Kalam, meaning civilized, while they used the word Kour to describe the mountainous zones bordering the plains. Kour's, in the Sumerian language meant mountain, but it also came to mean rebellious, barbarous, and wild. And at this time, that's how the outside world must have looked to them. To their south and west, the vast desert of Arabia yawned, a rolling sea of sand dunes where nothing grew, home to fierce nomadic tribes. To the north, the rocky torus mountains of Turkey and Kurdistan hemmed them in, full of hardy mountain people, while the Zagros mountains of Iran formed the edge of their world to the east.

Today, the Arabic word for the region of Upper Mesopotamia still holds within it a sense of this feeling of isolation. They call it El Jazeera, meaning the island. I'll post some maps on Twitter and Patreon, for you to picture this region yourself. But despite the challenges of their landscape, the Sumerians flourished. They had no stone to build with,

so instead they learned to make bricks from the river mud, mixing them with straw, gravel and broken pottery, and baking them. With clay, they made everything from pots and plates, to sickles and writing tablets. They had no wood, so instead they harvested vast numbers of reeds, tying them together into bundles and plating them together into mats. The Sumerians invented or adopted the pottery wheel, the wagon wheel, the plough and the sailboat. Their buildings used complex arches and domes. They worked out how to cast metals such as copper and later bronze.

and the Sumerians were also avid mathematicians. They developed complex systems of measurement, as well as methods for dividing, multiplying, and calculating angles, even writing down the first ever multiplication tables on clay tablets. We actually use Sumerian mathematics every day. It was the Sumerians who divided time into the minutes and seconds we still use. And since their number system worked on a base of 60, rather than our system of 10, that's why we have 60 minutes in an hour.

The reason for using 60 as the base of a number system is actually quite simple, and it's rooted in the design of our bodies. If you hold your hand out in front of you right now, you'll notice that each of your four fingers is divided into three segments. It's thought that ancient people would use the thumb of their right hand to tap each segment of the finger, counting up to 12. When they reached 12, they would raise a finger on their left hand, counting up the 12s. And when you had five fingers raised on your left hand, you had 60, and you had to start again. The fact that there were 12 cycles of the moon in each year would have confirmed for the Sumer.

that this was the number system intended by the gods. The 360 degrees we still use in angle measurement is another relic of this system. Due to this spark of ingenuity, Sumerian society grew at a slow but steady pace. They dug vast networks of irrigation canals that extended the agricultural zone around the rivers and also allowed them to transport goods in canal boats. They built dams to regulate the flow of the rivers and ensure that the spring floods came in a more controlled way. In fact, the Sumerian language has a vast array of words to describe the different kinds of canals, reservoirs, dams and lock gates required to control their water. Gradually, the landscape of southern Iraq transformed, from the landings of the

from dusty salt flats and marshy swamps to a green patchwork of farmland. Many historians have argued that it was the digging of these canals and watercourses that originally led to the greater social organisation we see during the Sumerian period. These extensive systems of water management needed careful planning, engineering expertise and mathematical calculations. Work teams needed to be organised and paid in the same. food and beer. Foreman and overseers needed to be appointed, and all of this led to a kind of early bureaucracy that gave rise to the first true states. In the 1930s, historian Arnold Toynbee famously argued

that it was just these environmental challenges in southern Iraq that created the conditions in which civilization could be created. The desiccation of the region impelled the fathers of the Sumeric civilization to come to grips with the jungle swamp of the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and to transform it. The ordeal through which the fathers of the Sumeric civilization passed is commemorated in Sumeric legend. The slaying of the dragon Tiamat by the god Marduk and the creation of the world out of her mortal remains signifies the subjugation of the primeval wilderness and the creation of the land by the canalization of the waters and the draining of the soil. The tough semi-desert landscape created what he called a stimulus and response effect in these early people.

Toynbee argues that in conditions that are too comfortable, people have little need of increased social organization or technological development, and in conditions that are too harsh, society finds it impossible to develop. He argues that it's in environments such as southern Iraq, where the challenges are numerous but not overwhelming, that a cradle of civilization can occur. According to Sumerian texts, the first city in the region was the city of Eridu. One controversial document known as the Sumerian king list describes Eridu as the place where the god Enki first decided that a king should rule. When kingship from heaven was lowered, the kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Al-Lim became king.

He ruled for 28,800 years. Alangar ruled for 36,000 years. For obvious reasons, many historians have questioned the reliability of this source. Some have even gone so far as to call it a piece of utter fiction, or a later piece of propaganda. designed to legitimize a usurper to the throne. But the kinglist does tell us how the Sumerians of at least one point thought of their history. And many have argued that Eridu may well have been the world's first city.

Eridu was founded around the year 5,400 BC. That's nearly seven and a half millennia ago. At this time, populations of woolly mammoths, survivors of the end of the Ice Age, still roamed in remote parts of the world. Eridu was populated by Sumerian speakers, and soon it would make up just one of a whole constellation of small cities that dotted the landscape of southern Iraq. These independent city states were centered around their temples, and ruled by priest-king. known as the NC. Records show that these NC were often assisted by a council of elders, which included both men and women. Most of the largest cities in this period were probably no bigger than about 10,000 people. The borders of these city states were defined by the

courses of canals and specially created boundary stones, carved monuments left jutting out of the earth to mark the line between one territory and another. Slowly, these cities began to eclipse the old Ubiad culture that had preceded them. Art and architecture began to take on the form that we would truly call Sumerian, and technology also began to take huge leaps forward. This first period seems to have been a time of relative peace. There's little evidence of organized warfare, or the keeping of professional soldiers in these early cities. Most towns during this period went without walls. One exceptionally ancient Sumerian myth, called the Gifts of Inana, seems to capture some of the spirit of this period of transition.

It describes technology and the refinements of civilization, being handed down by Enki, the king of the gods, to his daughter, the goddess Inana. She later passes them down to the people of Sumer. Holy Inana received the craft of the carpenter, the craft of the coppersmith, the craft of the scribe. the craft of the smith, the craft of the leather worker, the craft of the builder, the craft of the reed worker. Holy Inana received wisdom, the shepherd's hut, the knowledge to pile up glowing chargals, the sheepfold.

Enki teaches Inana about family, the proper laws of inheritance and the art of good judgment. But he also goes on to give her other gifts, some of which show that the darker side of civilization was already beginning to make itself known. Holy Inana received deceit and the rebel lands. Holy Inana received heroism, power, wickedness, the plundering of cities and the making of lamentations. It may be that the ancient Sumerians already recognized, right at the dawn of settled human society,

what the scholar Valta Benjamin would one day write, that there is no record of civilization, that is not at the same time a record of barbarism. And it's true that during this period, the Sumerians began practices that would begin a sorrowful phase of human history. Among them is the use of slave labor. They captured men and women from the hill countries outside their borders, and used their labor to fuel the growth of their own economy. In the last episode, I used the metaphor of the death of stars to talk about the life cycle that empires often pass through, but we might also think

about the birth of civilizations in this way. The first stars were born from gas clouds, compacted together under the weight of their own gravity, into a spinning ball of matter. Under enough pressure, the temperature of the star's core increased, and finally nuclear fusion began. The first stars burst into light. When enough people gather together in one place, that settlement obtains a kind of gravity. It draws other people towards it, and as the size of the settlement increases, so does pressure on its various systems. In some cases, this pressure results in those people being fused together, into more complex forms of organization.

Sometime around the year 3,200 BC, the first stars of these human settlements began to burst into light, and that light was the invention of writing. One Sumerian epic poem called Enmarcar and the Lord of Arata gives the first known story about the invention of writing. This poem attributes the invention to a king who has to send so many messages that his messenger can't remember them all. Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat the message, the Lord of Calabba patted some clay and put words on it like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The Sumerians had two things around them,

in virtually limitless abundance. That's the clay beneath their feet and the reeds that grew in the marshes and along the banks of the rivers. and it's these two resources that combined to form the first human writing. Sumerian scribes would pick up a lump of clay big enough to fit in their hand, in fact about the size of a modern smartphone. They would take a piece of reed cut into the shape of a wedge and print it over and over into the clay to form symbols. The distinctive wedge shapes of the reeds give this form of writing its name.

We call it cuneiform. The oldest cuneiform clay tablets come from the city of Oruk, and date to the late 4th millennium, probably around the 32nd or 31st centuries. This script originally consisted of pictographs, small pictures designed to depict objects, so everyone could understand what they represented. These were first used to keep track of everyday things like rations and supplies, and on some of these very early tablets, you can still see very clearly what they mean. A bowl of food is depicted with an eating mouth next to six impressions, and a sheaf of wheat next to five. This indicates that a worker can exchange this tablet

for six bowls of food and five sheaths of wheat. I'll post some examples of these on Patreon for you to see. Scribes would have had to work fast, copying hundreds of documents throughout their day, and slowly this pressure meant that the signs had to become simpler and more abstract. Before long, they no longer looked like the objects they described. After the years, after the year 3000, the number of symbols was reduced from around 1500 to about 600. And someone else had the bright idea that each symbol could stand for a certain sound instead of a whole idea. This was the beginning of the first alphabet. But it meant that now only an educated few could understand writing, and soon a separate class of scribes emerged. The human brain

brain would never be the same again. People could now read the words of kings and scribes who had died hundreds of years before, and they could also begin to write down everything that they had learned, so it could be remembered, and more importantly, it could be built upon. Partly due to this ability to record knowledge, the technology of Sumer around this time began to take even greater leaps forward. This next period of history would be known as the period of Uruk. The period is named after the city of Uruk, which by the middle of the 4th millennium BC had grown into the largest and most powerful city in southern Mesopotamia. One of the key ways that historians mark the shift into the Uruk period is by observing

a dramatic change that occurred around this time, in the region's pottery. If you're thinking that the pottery must have got more sophisticated and ornate as technology improved, then you're mistaken. In fact, the ancient pottery of the Ubiad period was exceptionally beautiful. It was made on a device known as a slow wheel and painted with distinctive geometrical designs in brown or black. It was a luxury item for the select few. The shift to the Uruk period saw a great increase in the amount of pottery produced, but the quality fell dramatically. Thanks to a technology known as the fast wheel, clay jars and pots could now be made in great numbers by workmen in intensive workshops.

This was the first era of mass production. The booming economy of the Sumerian cities comes to in their documents. The clay tablets tell us that in the city of Girsu, for instance, 15,000 women were employed in the textile industry. One factory produced 1,100 tons of flour a year, as well as bread, beer, and linseed oil. This factory employed 134 specialists and 858 skilled workers, of which the vast majority were women. Since there was no currency at this time, workers were paid directly in food and other goods. The minimum ration of an unskilled factory worker consisted of 20 litres of barley a month, along with two liters of oil and two kilos of wool per year. Meanwhile, their supervisor would earn roughly twice this ration. The poor,

in Sumerian society were downtrodden and were probably pretty miserable. They often had to borrow food or silver from predatory money lenders at crushing interest rates of as high as 30%. But despite this rising inequality, by the middle of the 4th millennium BC, economic advancement meant that the city of Uruk had grown into the largest and most powerful city in southern Mesopotamia. This was around the year 3,500 BC, or over 5,000 years ago. By this time, nearly 2,000 years had already passed since the original founding of the first city at Eridu. That's enough time to take us from the present moment to the age of Julius Caesar. By this time, Sumerian civilization was already ancient.

but the very earliest of the pyramids of Egypt would still not be built for another 900 years. In Britain, the Neolithic Monument Stonehenge was at this time just a series of barrows and earthworks, and its large stones would not be moved into place for another 1,300 years. When writing was invented in Uruk, in the 32nd century BC, the last population of the world of woolly mammoths to survive the end of the Ice Age, were still clinging to life on a rocky outcrop in the East Siberian Sea, known as Wrangel Island. By this time, Uruk would have had about 50,000 inhabitants. That's only enough to fill a modern, medium-sized football stadium, but at this time it was the largest city that the Earth had ever seen. The world's earliest

surviving piece of literature, known as the epic of Gilgamesh, begins in this city. It is the story of a king of Uruk named Gilgamesh, who likely ruled some time in the third millennium. Whatever the historical facts of his reign are, Gilgamesh made enough of an impression as a ruler, that he went down into legend as a mythical hero, two-thirds God and one-third man. And although there's much more myth than fact in this ancient tale, the Gilgamesh epic does tell us a little about how Sumerian society changed in the early centuries of the third millennium. For one thing, it's clear that warfare had begun to increase in the region.

The tale opens in the powerful city of Uruk, and one feature of the city is mentioned as a great source of pride. a ring of enormous fortified walls, as these lines from the epic of Gilgamesh show. Behold the outer walls which gleam like copper. See the inner wall, which none can rival. Touch the threshold stone. It is from ancient days. Go up and walk on the wall of Uruk, inspect the cornerstone, and examine its brickwork. Is it not built of baked brick? It's clear that city walls were now a necessity, but we can tell from the great pride shown in Uruk's fortifications that they may have also been quite rare. In fact, throughout the story, the city is referred to

repeatedly as strong-walled Uruk. We also get a sense of how the city was divided during this time, suggesting some level of urban planning from its rulers. These parts comprise Uruk. one third for city, one third for garden, one third for field, and a precinct for the temple of Ishtar. At the height of the Uruk period, the city covered an area of two and a half square kilometres. It had a port on the river, along with workshops and cluttered houses. At the centre of the city was Uruk's famous white temple. It was elevated 21 metres and covered in one. white gypsum plaster that reflected the sunlight and would have caused the temple to glow during the day.

If you walked the streets of Uruk during this time, you would have seen markets full of produce like beans and lentils, pomegranates and dates, jars of date syrup and oil. In the richer parts of town, houses would be built from baked bricks, but elsewhere they would be mud and clay dried in the sun. The houses would likely be arranged in a chaotic way, creating a labyrinth of alleys and warrens, covered by reed matting to keep them cool in the heat of the day. Farmers would be carrying large bundles of reeds and wheat on their backs, and herders would bring their long-haired sheep and oxen into the city. Here and there, you would see men sitting in circles

in shaded courtyards, sharing a large jar of beer in the center, all sipping it through long straws made of hollow reeds. While the Sumerians did import some wines from the northern regions, it was beer that they loved most of all. They had over 30 different varieties, with names like white, dark, cloudy, and sweetened with honey. Some of their beer was flavoured with herbs, It was brewed directly from the wheat and barley of the fields, and if you bought the cheapest kind, it would often still have seeds of grain floating at the bottom. One cuneiform text has even preserved a kind of drinking song. I will summon brewers and cupbearers to serve us floods of beer and pass it around. What pleasure, what delight, blissfully to take it in, to sing jubilantly of this noble,

liquor, our hearts enchanted, and our souls radiant. We can imagine the conversations that these ancient people would have had around their jars of beer, probably not that different to the conversations you'd find in any bar or pub today. Some of these everyday concerns have been preserved in lists of ancient Sumerian proverbs. These groups of beer drinkers would doubtless have complained that they were not appreciated at work. I am a thoroughbred steed, but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a cart and carry reeds and stubble. Others would have commiserated about one of the oldest human concerns, not having enough money.

The poor man is better dead than alive. If he has bread, he has no salt. If he has salt, he has no bread. And as with drinkers in all parts of history, they would have fallen out and shan, and shan, shouted insults at each other in the streets. If you were put in water, the water would become foul. If you were put in a garden, the fruit would rot. At night, people usually slept on their rooftops,

since the heat inside the houses would have been too much for them. The city would have been a pungent mixture of smells. Pottery kilns and brickworks would have belched smoke throughout the day. There were no drainage systems. in the roads, and people would have thrown their waist out into the street. In the houses, people laid down layers of clay, crushed gypsum dust, and reed mats to create a soft carpet-like effect. From the epicentre of this great metropolis, the Uruk civilization sent out ripples across the world, and eventually a number of similarly great cities rose up around it.

But as the fourth millennium drew to a close, another Sumerian city was rising in power, and soon it would take Uruk's place as the new center of Sumerian culture. It would flourish into realms of untold wealth and push the boundaries of what humanity thought possible in the realms of art and architecture. It's the city whose ruins we opened this episode with, and the name of that city was Ure. Ure.R. was situated right at the point where the Euphrates River met the sea. It was a trading port and fishing town, where seagulls would have circled and fishermen came in with their catches of fish, oysters and turtles. It's a trade of the port and fishing town, it's a citygulls, Its position both on the sea and the river would have made it a booming hub of the region's trade.

As we've already seen, if you needed clay or reeds, southern Iraq was the place to be. But for virtually everything else they needed, the Sumerians had to import from other lands. But luckily for them, they always had something to trade. They were alone among almost all the nations of the ancient Middle East. in that they produced a large surplus and variety of food. Archaeology shows that due to their farming abilities, the Mesopotamians of antiquity enjoyed a far more rich and varied diet than their neighbours in either Turkey or Iran.

We have even uncovered some ancient Sumerian recipes, written down on clay tablets. This is the recipe for a dish they called Tohu, and it gives you a sense of the variety they enjoyed. Get the water ready. Add fat, salt, beer, onion, rocket, coriander, semolina, cumin, and beetroot. Add them to the cooking pot. Then pound leek and garlic together and add. Let all blend and reduce to a pulp, then sprinkle with coriander and carrot.

I'll post some more of these ancient recipes on Twitter and Patreon. in case you'd like to try to cook some Sumerian delicacies yourself. Boats full of wheat and grains, dried reeds and figs, were now forging up the rivers, bringing food to all the neighboring lands, and in return, other resources flowed back. Copper came down from the mountains of northwestern Iran, and later by ship from the island of Cyprus. Tin traveled through the long mountain passes from Afghanistan, as it would throughout the later Bronze Age.

Silver came down the Euphrates on barges, from Turkey's Taurus Mountains, while gold came overland from Egypt and by ship from India. Ordinary wood for everyday building could be chopped in the Zagros Mountains of Iran to the east, but for finer constructions, for palaces and ornate city gates, only the prized wood of the cedar tree would do. This was brought by ship from Lebanon, where it grew among the high mountain passes. In fact, one episode in the epic of Gilgamesh relates the king's quest to slay a monster in the mountains of Lebanon and steal this beautiful wood from its forest. The ancient Sumerians traded in what we would consider a truly globalized way. From their tiny coast on the Persian Gulf, their ships sailed out to trading ports in modern Bahrain and Oman,

and from there they sailed along the coast to trade with another of the world's most ancient and mysterious cultures, the people we know today as the Indus Valley civilization. From there, the Sumerians got all kinds of spices and gemstones like Carnilian, as well as the brilliant blue lapis lazuli that the Sumerians got the Sumerians got all kinds of spices and gemstones like Carnelian, as well as the brilliant blue lapis lazuli that the Sumerians adored. They used it to make jewelry and amulets, inlays in gaming boards, musical instruments and sculptures of astonishing beauty. I'll post an image of some of these amazing artifacts on Patreon few to see. All of this trade would have passed through Ur, and swelled the city to a wealth that likely

no other human habitation had ever achieved. Grave goods uncovered in Ur show not only the incredible wealth of its rulers, but also magnificent craftsmanship that suggests an advanced community of artists. One such artefact, found in a royal tomb in Ur, has given us an incredible insight into the lives and manners of the ancient Sumerians. It's an ornate, decorative piece of furniture, inlaid with a mosaic of shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli, and its images show detailed scenes from everyday life around 4,600 years ago. Today, it is called the standard of Ur. On one side, the artifact shows images of the Sumerians at war, the chariots pulled by donkeys, the soldiers wearing

leather capes and helmets, the men carrying spears and axes. On the other side, it depicts the Sumerians at peace, farmers and herders working on one level, and above them the scribes with their shaved heads sitting at their desks. Of course I'll put a number of these images and details of this artifact up on Patreon for you to see. At this time, urbanism in the Sumerian world was reaching its peak. By the end of the third millennium, a majority of the region's population would live in cities. And in this newly urbanized world, the economic power of Ur-R remained king. Over the next centuries, its power expanded and contracted, and at one point, some of its

kings wrote inscriptions, calling themselves both the King of Ur and the King of Kish, another city that lay nearby. This suggests that Ur may have subdued some of its neighbors under its political control. But by the mid-third millennium, it seems the influence of Ur began to wane. This was a new, militarized age, when the power of trade and diplomacy seems to have no longer been enough. And one city, called Lagash, truly came into its own in this era of violence. Lagash was a slaving city. It had grown rich by raiding villages in the hills, kidnapping people and selling them across the region. Sometime around the year 2,500 BC, Lagash fell out with its neighbor, a city

called Uma. The dispute seems to have been over a stretch of farmland along the river, and it caused the two cities to go to war. One carved stone monument from this time, known as a stele, captures something of the spirit of this age. It is known as the Stee. It is known as the Dele of the vultures. The upper part of the stone is normal enough. It shows the king of Lagash, a man named Aenatum, leading his soldiers into battle. They wear leather helmets and skirts made of reeds, shouldering their spears. These spears would have likely been topped with blades of copper or bronze, and would have flashed red in the sun as they marched. The king is riding ahead of them in an early chariot, wearing an animal skin slung across his chest,

with a spear and a container of javelins beside him. When the armies met, the stele shows King Eonatum of Lagash, dismounting from his chariot and proceeding to lead his men on foot. They advance in a phalanx, a tight square of men with broad shields protecting their fronts, and a porcupine of short spears jutting out. ahead. The fighting was bitter. Eonatum was struck in the eye by an arrow, but he lived on to see his army to victory, as the inscription on the Stele records. Eonatim struck at Uma. The bodies were soon 3,600 in number. I, Eanatum, like a fierce storm wind, I unleashed the tempest. As the soldiers of Umer,

tried to flee the bloody battlefield, the stelae shows the soldiers of Lagash, cutting them down and trampling them beneath their feet. There's something to this carving that to me embodies something of a change in the spirit of Sumerian warfare. It's a particular kind of nastiness that revels in the suffering of your enemies, and this is shown most clearly in the part of the carving that gives it its name. These are the vultures flying overhead, carrying the severed heads of the soldiers of Umar in their beaks, picking at their tongues and eyes. It clearly shows a kind of massacre perpetrated by the city of Lagash, and it does so with relish. Due to military victories of this kind, the slaving city of Lagash went on to conquer much of southern Mesopotamia.

Lagash established what some historians have called the first true empire in the world, but its rule was short-lived. In these ancient times, administrating even one city was difficult, and the empire of Lagash, despite its military success, was soon critically overstretched. To make matters worse, King Aonatum seems to have ruled through what amounts to a campaign of terror. Unsurprisingly, his rule was unpopular, and revolts rose up against him. As the hated empire of Lagash fractured and collapsed, the ruler of one of its subjugated cities seized his chance. He was the king of Umar, the city whose defeat and humiliation is depicted with some of the city.

such relish on the stelae of the vultures, and his name was Lugal Zagasy. It's not clear exactly what made Lugal Zagasy so successful, but it's clear he was animated by an ardent desire for revenge against the Empire of Lagash. Perhaps he had even been at the battle when King Eonatum had slaughtered thousands of his fellow citizens. He rose in rebellion against Lagash, and quickly toppled kings that were still loyal to the empire in the cities of Kish and Larsa. Then he marched on the great city of UR itself and the mighty walled fortress of Uruk. These both fell in turn and the rebel Lugal Zagazi moved his capital to Uruk. Finally, he marched on the city of Lagash itself, the heart of the empire.

and it's here that that fiery vengeance in his heart burst out. The city didn't hold out for long. Lugal Zagazi burst over its walls, sacked the city, and burned it to the ground. Even by the standards of the time, this seems to have been a shocking act, as one piece of Sumerian poetry recalls with sorrow. Because the man of Amma destroyed the bricks of L'Gar, Lugalsh, he committed a sin against the city's god. The god will cut off any hand raised against him. May Nidaba, the personal goddess of Lugalsagazi, make him bear all these sins.

After sacking Lagalzagasy's momentum seems to have been unstoppable. He worked his way north, up the course of the two rivers, and soon he had conquered all the regions that Lagash had once claimed. One inscription written by him even claims to have conquered all the lands between what he calls the upper and the lower seas, meaning from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast. The great god Enl gave kingship of the land to him, the region from the lower sea through the Tigris and Euphrates to the upper sea. 32 kings gathered against him, but he defeated them and smote their cities and prostrated their

lords and destroyed the whole countryside as far as the silver mines. Admittedly, this is probably something of an exaggeration. The Sumerians had never been able to maintain distant colonies or occupy far-off lands for very long. It's more likely that Lugal Zagasy pulled off something like a successful raiding party on the coast, perhaps looting some towns and cities and bringing treasure back to Uruk. But this was the first time that a Sumerian prince had ever made this claim. For them, this upper sea was the western edge of their entire world.

And the idea of a king who might conquer all the lands between the seas began to possess the imaginations of all the kings who came after. But King Lugalzagasy, like the rulers of Lagash before him, had made the critical mistake of overstretching his resources. This empire was simply too big. Before long, civil wars and rebellions broke out between the various Sumerian cities. In this time of chaos, the other great people of Mesopotamia began to fancy their chances at ruling. These were the people who up until this moment had been something of a junior partner in the civilization of southern Iraq. These were the people of Akkad.

One man would soon lead them in an outright rebellion against the Sumerian Empire. He would go down in history with a name that in Akkadian means the one true king. That name was Sargon, and he ushered in the twilight of the Sumerian age. Like many episodes in Sumerian history, The origin story of Sargon of Akkad is one you might find familiar if you were brought up on the stories of the Bible. He was born sometime in the middle of the 24th century BC, and legend has it that as a baby he was found in a reed basket on the banks of the Tigris. He was found by a gardener who worked in the palace in the city of Kish and who brought him up as his son. But, like the biblical Moses, this foundling child had big ambitions.

There seems to have been something special about him. Something about his charming manners meant that he was soon taken on as a cupbearer in the palace, bringing wine to the lords and royalty of the kingdom. This was a position of high honor and a way for a young man to gain influence at court. The young Sargon must have proven himself in other ways too. That's because he was soon entrusted with a mission of the utmost secrecy and importance. At this time, Kish was still part of Lugalsagazi's Sumerian Empire, stretching over all the lands between the two seas.

The Sumerian king Lugalzeghese was away on a distant campaign, possibly fighting in the of Syria or putting down a rebellion in a far-flung province. The young Sargon was given a small band of fighting men and told to travel to the city of Uruk, where Lugalsar Zagasy kept his royal court. Their plan was to strike the city in a surprise attack, to knock out the capital of this new empire and free the city of Kish from imperial control. It was a daring plan. The tall city walls of Uruk, immortalized in legend, must have looked daunting to the young Sargon and his men as they readied for their attack. But Lugal Zagasy had taken much of his army with him on campaign and left few behind to defend his capital. The attack came as a complete surprise.

Sargon's men overcame their defenses, poured over their walls, and the defender's flare. Sargon captured the city, and before reinforcements could arrive, he broke down several sections of those famous city walls. It was a deeply symbolic act, and a strike against the might of Lugalsagazi's empire. King Lugalsagazi must have been enraged. He swung around from his distant war-making and marched back home, gathering all his subject kings to him as he went. Inscriptions record that as many as 50 kings may have marched under his banner, and their task was easy enough to crush the forces of one small city-state. But Sargon seems to have been one of those characters from history, one of those geniuses like Hannibal or Napoleon, who are able to

turn battles in their favor no matter the odds. We don't know how he did it, but in a pitched battle, with the whole amassed force of the empire. It was Sargon's army that emerged victorious. Lugalzagasy was captured, and Sargon marched him through the gates of the holy city of Nipur wearing a neckstock, a heavy piece of wood clapped around his neck and shoulders like an oxen. This would have been humiliating, of course, but here again is where Sargon sets himself apart from other rulers of the time. That's because he seems to have had something of a merciful streak. The old King Lugalsagazi wasn't killed. Incredibly, he was allowed to continue on as the governor of Uruk,

so long as he swore an oath to the High King Sargon. Sargon founded a new city to act as his empire's capital, and he named it Akkad. From there, he would go on to conquer much of what the preceding empires had before. as one inscription beneath a statue in the city of Nipur claims. Sargon the king of Kish triumphed in 34 battles over the cities, up to the edge of the sea, and destroyed their walls. He bowed down to the gods and the gods gave him the upper land, up to the cedar forest, and up to the silver mountain.

And Sargon didn't make the mistakes of his predecessors. At each city he conquered, he made a point of dust. destroying the city's walls, reducing its ability to defend itself, and therefore reducing the likelihood of it rebelling against his rule. He conducted a ceremony to symbolize his mastery over the whole land. He washed his weapons in the waters of both the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean sea. But once the dust of war had settled, his achievements went on. He made efforts to centralize the empire's administration and even reformed the dating system. His reforms strengthened the central state and increased the stability of the empire. In many ways, he was something of a progressive

and enlightened ruler. But Sargon was also Akkadian, and he was what we today might call a nationalist. Until now, Sumerian had been the official language of royal inscriptions on palaces and temples. But during Sargon's reign, Akkadian began to be used in official inscriptions for the first time. The Kuneiform alphabet was now re-engineered to write Akkadian, and Sargon also gave himself the new title, King of Akkad. He appointed only his fellow Akkadians to key positions in the government and garrisoned Sumerian cities with Akkadian troops to ensure. their loyalty. The two people of Mesopotamia, who had lived and grown together for millennia, were now beginning to drift apart. Resentment in the southern Sumerian-speaking cities began to reach

a boiling point. Sargon ruled for 55 years, and towards the end of his reign, this resentment bubbled over, as one later Babylonian text recalls. old age, all the lands revolted against him, and they besieged him in Akkad the city. But he went forth to battle and defeated them. He knocked them over and destroyed their vast army. For the meantime, it's clear that Sargon's flair for battle kept his empire together. But as the old king weakened, virtually all the southern cities burst out in open rebellion. When Sargon of Akkad died around the year 2284, his two sons had to take over and try to fix the mess he had left behind. The first of these sons was called Rimush. He ruled for nine years, and spent most of them in bitter battles to reconquer the rebellious Sumerian cities of the south.

He crushed rebellions in Ur, Umah, Laghash and Adab, and one of the years in which he ruled is even known as the year that Adab was destroyed. When Rimush died, Sargon's other son Manish Tushu took over. He seems to have resorted to the kinds of terror tactics that had once made the kings of Lagash so hated. It was Sargon's grandson, a man named Nassu, a man named Nassu, Naram Sin, who would return the empire to its former greatness. He managed to quell the Sumerian rebellion in its southern heartlands, and returned the empire of Akkad to stability. And Naram Sin didn't rule only by force. It seems he made some effort to reconcile the two intertwined peoples of Mesopotamia, breaking from his grandfather's title, King of Akkad, and ruling under the more

diplomatic title, King of Sumer and Akkad. But this didn't entirely heal the rift. There was even now continuing to grow between these two peoples. Part of the problem was that the Sumerian people were no longer the primary cultural force in the region. For centuries, Akkadian had been gradually replacing Sumerian as a spoken language. Some of this may have been down to the official policies of the Akkadian Empire, discouraging the use of Sumerian in official documents, but it was also affected by the increasingly cosmopolitan makeup of the empire. Sumerian, as we've seen, was a language isolate, with a different structure and sound to all the languages around it. But the people who lived in all the surrounding lands

spoke languages that were linguistic cousins of Akkadian, all in the Semitic family of languages. They had the same grammar and even shared sounds and words with Akkadian. Learning Akkadian for them would have been like an English speaker learning French or Spanish, while Sumerian would have been like learning Korean. Akkadian was just easier to learn for these people, and so it would naturally become the language of trade and commerce. The people of Mesopotamia had been largely bilingual for centuries, but gradually all Sumerians would have learned to speak Akkadian, and fewer and fewer Akkadians would have needed to learn Sumerian. Slowly the Sumerian language began to fade. But the days of

the Akkadian Empire were also numbered, and the Sumerians would get one more chance to leave their mark on the world's history. When the great Akkadian king Naram Singh died, his son Shah Kalishari took over. He was Sagan of Akkad's great grandson, and four years into his reign, a great celestial sign would have appeared in the skies overhead, far out in the depths of space,

nearly 200 million kilometers away from Earth, a giant ball of ice and dust, 40 kilometers across, flew past, sometime around the year 2,213 BC. This was the comet, Hale-Bop. It would spend the next four millennia or so flying through our solar system on a deep elliptical orbit, until it flew past the earth again as a blazing streak of light in the year 1997. It was the brightest comet with the longest tail that has ever been observed in our night skies. It remained visible with the naked eye for 18 months. In 1997, the site of the comet in San Diego, California,

caused 39 members of an apocalyptic cult called Heaven's Gate, to commit suicide by drinking a lethal mixture of vodka and phenobarbital. They believed that their souls would be carried away on a spaceship that was hidden behind the iridescent tail of the comet. And we can only imagine what effect the sight of this comet may have had on ancient people. Some may have looked up and seen the blessings of the gods, smiling on the lands of Sumer and Akkad. Others may have stared up at that lonely cosmic traveler and seen a sign of doom. Ultimately, it was these latter who would prove correct. During the reign of King Shah Kalishari, the world's climate underwent a mysterious and sudden shift. This change is known only by the

cryptic name, the 4.2 kilo-year event. It has been tentatively linked to changes that took place in the sea ice of the North Atlantic, causing ripples throughout the world's delicate and intimately interlinked climate systems. But whatever the causes, its effects were dramatic. In various places around the world, it coincided with periods of reduced rainfall. Studies of dust-lake in Iraq and the Middle East have shown that around this time annual rainfall dropped dramatically and the climate became much more arid. The annual floods of the rivers on which so much of the agriculture of the region depended would now routinely fail and famine would set in. And this dry period wasn't brief. In fact, it would last for well over a century and some think it may have even

lasted for the next 300 years. This period of drought and the famines it caused were mentioned in Egyptian texts of the time too, and it affected cultures all around the globe. It's been linked to civilizational collapses in Egypt's old kingdom, the Indus Valley's civilization in India, and the Langzhou culture in China. In Mesopotamia around this time, still ruled by the Akkadian Empire, it's clear that resources became suddenly scarce. The days of a booming surplus of food were over, and it's around this time that the first towns and cities began to be abandoned in the drier zones of the north.

After the death of King Shah Kalishari around the year 2193 BC, a period of chaos and bitter civil war descended on the empire of Akkad. The Sumerian king list records this period with an almost sarcastic tone. Then who was king? Who was not the king? Four of them ruled in only three years. All this chaos did not go unnoticed. In the mountains overlooking the plains of Mesopotamia,

a nomadic tribal people known as the Guti were watching. Who the Guti were, what language they spoke, and which gods they worshipped, we don't know. They seem to have been an unsophisticated nomadic people, and the ancient Sumerian texts reserve particular contempt for them. The Guti were unhappy people, unaware of how to revere the gods and ignorant of the right religious practices. The Guti had raided and plundered along the borders of the Akkadian Empire for years, burning villages, and stealing cattle. One remarkable letter, dating from the reign of King Shah Khalishari,

was written by an Akkadian lord who owned land on the borders of the Guti territory. He tells his workers to ignore the Guti attacks and keep working, although it's clear he does this while keeping himself at a safe distance. Cultivate the field and watch over the cattle. Do not tell me, the Gouthi enemy. are around, I could not cultivate the field. Post-centries at one-mile intervals, and if the Gooty try to attack you, take all the cattle into the village. Now I swear on the life of King Shah Kalishari that if the Guti men drive off the cattle and you cannot pay for them yourself,

I won't pay you any silver when I come to town. For years now, these hill people had watched, as drought ravaged the settled societies of the River Valley. They watched as the city-dwellers fought over the increasingly scarce farmland. And it's in this moment of weakness that they chose to strike. The Guti gathered their forces and marched down from the hills into the lands of Sumer, this time not to raid, but to invade and take these lands for themselves. One remarkable literary text relates the tragic events of those days. It was written a few centuries. later, and is called the Curse of Akkad. In this version of the story, the great god Enlil is angry at the king of Akkad for disrespecting the gods, and he summons the Guti as a punishment. The hill people are

imagined as monstrous creatures, half-animal, with a language that sounded to the Sumerians, like the barking of dogs. Enlil, what destruction he ruled. He raised his eyes to the mountain and mustered the whole mountain as one. The rebellious people, the land whose people is without number, Gutiom, that land that brooks no control, whose understanding is human, but whose appearance and stuttering words are that of a dog. Ennil brought them down from the mountain, in vast numbers, like locusts, they covered the earth. Nothing escaped their arm. No one escaped their arm.

all of the lands raised a bitter cry on their city walls. It's not clear how many men were in the Guti army, but they were enough to quickly overwhelm the weakened forces of Akkad. It seems the Guti practiced hit-and-run tactics, raiding supply lines and leaving scorched earth behind them. Their attacks devastated the economy of Akkad, and the already drought-ridden and war-torn society began to fall apart.

For the first time since cities were built and founded, the great agricultural tracts produce no grain. The inundated tracts produce no fish. The irrigated orchards produce nover syrup nor wine. The gathered clouds did not rain. The plants did not grow. He who slept on the roof died on the roof. He who slept in the house had no burial.

People were flailing at themselves. from hunger. The weakened Akkadian society folded completely beneath the pressure of the Guti attacks. The demoralized Akkadian army went out to meet this fearsome enemy in battle and was defeated. Soon after, the Gouthis swept down on the city of Akkad and burned it to the ground. They destroyed Sargonne's city so utterly that its ruins have never been found. The Guti attempted to set up their own dynasty and rule over the lands of Sumer, but for a number of reasons they were not successful. After all, as empires in our own day have found out,

it's much easier to conquer a country than it is to rule it. Cuneiform sources suggest that the Gutee administration showed little concern for maintaining agriculture, written records or public safety. The Gooty were not literate and would have struggled to administrate an empire that for over a millennium had relied on the power of the written word. For reasons known only to them, and perhaps relating to their nomadic lifestyle, they didn't believe in keeping animals in pens. They released all of the land's livestock to roam about the countryside freely. Their policies, soon brought even further famine and caused a massive increase in the price of grain.

Under neglect and lack of investment, the land's infrastructure began to crumble. The poetry of the curse of Akkad shows how the roads of the kingdom began to fall apart and become overgrown with weeds, while long grass grew on the tow paths, where oxen used to pull barges. The grass grows long on your canal bank towpaths. The grass of morning grows on your highways laid for wagons. Wild rams and snakes of the mountains allow no one to pass on your towpaths built up with canal sediment. The destruction of the central authority of the Akkadian Empire meant that during this time a number of Sumerian city states reasserted their independence.

And it seems the Guti, weakens. by their failing attempt to hold an empire together, don't seem to have been able to do much to stop them. The Guti occupied southern Iraq for more than 150 years, and this period was by all accounts a time of suffering. It was a miniature dark age, where written records are unsophisticated as well as few and far between. But as resentment to their rule grew, rebellions rose around the country, and one Sumerian man would see the opportunity this period of crisis provided. He was filled with a desire to return the lands of Sumer to the rule of a Sumerian king, and his name was Uttu Hengal.

Little is known about the life of Uttu Hengal. He was a Sumerian and may have been the governor of Uruk during the final years of the Gutian period. he must have watched as the ongoing famine ravaged his people, and the arrogant Gooty Kings refused to do anything about it, violently punishing any resistance to them. At this time, a new Gooty King had just ascended to the throne of Sumer and Akkad. His name was Tirigan, and he seems to have been typical of the Guti rulers. He cared little for maintaining the land's infrastructure and even destroyed elements of it to punish populations who rebelled against him, as recalled in the Sumerian king list. Tirigan's troops established themselves everywhere. Nobody would leave their cities to face him.

In the south, in Sumer, he blocked the water from the fields. In the uplands, he closed off the roads. because of him the grass grew high on the highways of the land. Tirigan had been on the throne for only 40 days, and he was still in the middle of consolidating his rule. It's clear that Uttu Hengal, the governor of Uruk, thought that this was the time to make his move. His plan may have been in place for years. Perhaps he sent out secret envoys to the other Sumerian cities of the south,

telling them to prepare for war the moment a new king ascended to the throne. And then, when everything was in place and his moment came, he struck. When Tiragan heard of this rebellion, he must have been enraged. But he doesn't seem to have been the bravest of kings. He sent two of his generals, men named Uninazu and Nabi Enl, to lead his armies in his place, while he stayed back home in the palace. palace. Meanwhile, the rebel leader Uttu Hengal massed his forces and marched to meet the two Guti generals on the field. On his way to the decisive battle, he stopped at the temple of

Ishkur, the Sumerian god of storms, and made an offering. He may have sacrificed a lamb or goat and sang an ancient prayer in the Sumerian tongue before the altar of the god. Then he marched out to meet Tidagan's armies. After departing from the Temple of Ishkur, on the fourth day he set up camp in Nagsu on the Surungal Canal. He captured the generals of Tirigan, sent as envoys to Suma, and put chains on their hands. Uttu Hengal was victorious. And here again we see that the Guti King Tidigan wasn't the courageous sort. After getting the news that his generals had been defeated,

he fled north to a city called Dabrum. The Sumerian king list records what happened next. Then Tiraghan, the king of the Guti, ran away alone on foot. He thought himself safe in Dabrum, where he fled to save his life. But since the people of Dabram knew that Uttu Hengar was a king endowed with power by Enlil, they did not let Tiragan go, and an envoy of Utu Hengal arrested Tiragan, together with his wife and children in Dubrum.

He put handcuffs and a blindfold on him. After centuries, the Sumerians finally rejected both Guti and Akkadian rule. For the first time since the reign of Sagan, a Sumerian king would once again rule over the lands of Sumer. Utu Hengal made the Guti, the fanged snakes of the mountains, go back to the king. to drink again from the rocky crevices. He brought back the kingship of Sumer. Uttu Hengal's successful rebellion ushered in an era known today as the third dynasty of Ull, and sometimes called the Neo-Sumarian Empire. Others have even called this the Sumerian Renaissance. It was the final flourishing of Sumerian culture. But it was a flourishing that would leave an

indelible mark on human history. Despite bringing the kingship back to Sumer, the rebel king Uttu Hengal didn't rule for long. He died in unusual circumstances after only seven years, apparently killed when a river dam that he was inspecting burst, sweeping him away in a flood. If you think this sounds suspicious, it's because it probably is. One of Uttu Hengal's more ambitious governors, a man named Urumamu, came to the throne soon after, and some historians have certainly raised questions about whether he had a hand in that dam bursting, if indeed any dam burst at all.

Regardless of the way he rose to power, Uurnamu proved to be an effective ruler and an outstanding administrator. He standardized bronze weights that merchants used in the market, and created a standardized weight that would lay down the foundations for the first currencies. He divided silver into a unit known as the miner, which was made up of 60 shekels. Urenamu also wrote down a code of laws that today is the earliest surviving example of a legal code, three centuries older than the more famous code of Hamurabi. Here are a few examples of the laws contained within. Number 17. If a slave escapes from the city limits and someone returns him,

the owner shall pay two shekels to the one who returned him. Number 18. If a man knocks out the eye of another man, he shall weigh out half a mina of silver. Number 19. If a man has cut off another man's foot, he is to pay ten shekels. Among all his other achievements, Urnamu was also a prodigious builder. He constructed buildings at the cities of Nipur, Larsa, Kish, Adab and Umah. He rebuilt the kingdom's roads and irrigation ditches after the long decades of neglect under the Guti rule, but more than anything, Urnamu loved to build ziggurats. These are the distinctive stepped towers that were the hallmarks and pinnacle of Sumerian architecture.

Each one rose in three layers like a wedding cake, with steps leading up to the top. They would have been painted with white gypsum paint. The priests who kept them may have grown plants and trees on the terraces that lined them, and birds would have roosted high up in these tall towers. Under Uunnamu, soon every Sumerian city would have a ziggurat. and they formed the focal point of the cities. The greatest of these was the ziggurat that Uunnamu built in his home city of Ur. The ziggurat of Ur is enormous.

In its day, it would have soared up to a height of 30 metres, or nearly 10 stories, towering over all the other low-lying buildings in the city. It was built purely from baked clay bricks and held together with the Tari's substance bitumen. It's thought that it would have taken at least 1,500 workers more than five years, just to build its base. Farmers, up to 20 kilometers away, would have been able to see this enormous shape rising on the horizon. To them, it would have testified to the power of the city of Ur, and the god who lived there. But despite this late flourishing, the age of the Sumerians was passing. and part of the reason for this lay in the soil beneath their feet.

All river water contains small amounts of salts and other minerals, and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, flowing over the limestone rocks of the Torres Mountains, contain more than most. When ancient farmers diverted this water into their fields to feed their crops, the hot sun would evaporate this water, and traces of salt, would be left behind. In places with a reasonable amount of rainfall, the rain would wash this salt away. But in the arid conditions of Iraq, the salt stays right where it is. Over time, this small amount builds up on the surface of the soil, and eventually plants find it difficult to grow. The records of

the Sumerian scribes paint a bleak picture. They kept meticulous notes of crop yields, years, year on year, and from around 2,350 BC, their texts show the gradual reduction of crops across the region. One telltale detail shows us that the salt content of the soil might have been to blame. While their main crop of wheat gradually reduced over the centuries, the rates of barley production remained constant. Barley, as we know today, is particularly resistant to salt-rich soil. Texts uncovered from the city of Girsu show that around the year 3,550 BC, wheat and barley

were being produced in equal amounts. But after a thousand years of irrigation, wheat accounted for only one-sixth of the crop. And only a few centuries later, in the 21st century BC, wheat was less than 2% of the annual harvest. This all points to a sharp increase in the salt content of the soil. You can sometimes hear very simplistic narratives surrounding soil salination in the south of Iraq. The Sumerians are sometimes portrayed as stupid or greedy, damaging the land in their ignorance, but that's not entirely fair. Although they didn't have our modern understanding, they did know that soil needed to be rested for several seasons if it was to remain fertile. And they did take steps to adapt to the changing condition

of the soil, switching almost exclusively to barley, and replacing the role of wheat in their diet. They also developed methods for draining the soil and reducing the rate of salination, but soil salinity is a challenge that still causes problems for farmers in Iraq today, despite all our technology and scientific knowledge. While the ancient people worked hard to mitigate the decline, the overall trend as the centuries wore on was slow but unstoppable. The soil was gradually failing, and with the population of Sumerian cities growing and the long drought dragging on, the demands on this farmland were only increasing. Eventually, a thick layer of salt would encrust the topsoil, and little would grow at all. Today when you walk around the

deserts of Iraq, the soil in some areas has a crumbly crust that cracks underfoot, peeling like old varnish. This is the salt that slowly began to choke the life from the earth, and in turn, choke the life from the civilization of Sumer. But the end of Sumerian culture would come not from the soil, but at the tip of a spear. As the Sumerians struggled to eke ever-decreasing barley crops from the salty soil, it seems that once again hostile outside forces began to sense weakness in this once great empire. After their failed attempt at empire building, the nomadic Guti had retreated to their mountains and returned to their nomadic ways. But they still posed a threat to Sumerian land, just as they always had, raiding towns and making away with cattle. Putting a stop to

these raids was the focus of much of the King Urnamu's reign. He raised an army and marched into the Gooty lands with the aim of putting a stop to the threat forever. It's unclear whether he actually met them in battle or whether he was struck by one of their characteristic ambushes. Either way, Uunnamu was killed in the mountains, far from home. The death of this king, which would begin the final death spiral of Sumerian culture, was commemorated in a lengthy epic poem, known as the death of Uurnamu. He who was beloved by the troops could not raise his neck anymore. The wise one lay down, silence descended as he who was the vigor of the land had fallen the land became demolished like a mountain

like a cypress forest it was stripped its appearance changed the poem tells the story of urnamu descending into the underworld and giving his offerings to the gods who lived there and in the afterlife the poem gives urnami himself this final lament now just as the the rain pouring down from heaven cannot turn back. I can never return to see the beautiful bricks of Ur. Four Sumerian kings would follow Urnamu. Some, like the King Shulgi, enjoyed successes on the battlefield and developed and reformed the economy as much as they could. But their reigns were characterized by ongoing threats from the wild mountain regions. The drought was still biting. The soil was becoming increasingly choked by salt, and as food got scarce, more and more nomadic

people were driven to raiding and plundering to feed themselves. By now, the Guti were far from the only people who threatened the border of Sumer and Akkad. One tribe in particular, known as the Mātu, posed a particular threat. The Mātu were a Semitic sheepherd people from the mountains of Syria and Lebanon. Like the Guti, the Sumerians considered them to be wild and barbarous, and tended to describe them in contemptuous, but also fearful terms. The Martu, the powerful South Wind, who from the remote past have not known cities, the Martu who know no grain, the Martu who know no house or town, the savages, of the mountains. The Martu who eat raw meat, who are not buried after their death.

Another text describes them in similar animalistic terms as the Guti. The hostile Martu have entered the plains. The Martu are ravaging people with canine instincts like wolves. And it's clear that around this time of drought and famine, the Martu were finding their way of life in Syria increasingly impossible. Environmental pressures were pushing them further south into the rich farmland of the river valley, into the lands of the Sumerians. Despite the weakened power of the Sumerian state, the later kings of Sumer were determined to stop the Martu incursions. One king, named Shu Sin, even ordered the construction of a wall. that stretched almost 300 kilometers between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

It would be called the Martu Wall, and sometimes the wall facing the high lands. What form exactly this wall took is unknown, since its remains have never been found. But it was likely an earthwork rampart, dotted with forts, and perhaps fronted with a moat fed by canals. It was more than twice the length of Hadrian's wall, and essentially turned the rich farmland between the Tigris and Euphrates into an island fortress, with the rivers on either side, the sea to the south and the wall to the north. It would have been an enormous engineering work, and shows that even in its final years, the Sumerian state still commanded considerable manpower and energy.

but ultimately the wall would prove useless. Like all walls, it was only effective with a constant garrison manning it. Soon it would become clear that the building of this wall was not an act of strength, but the last resort of an empire falling in on itself. The last Sumerian king was a man named Ibi Sin, who took the throne in the year 28. Virtually as soon as he was crowned, the empire began to fall apart. In his first year of ruling, the eastern city of Ashuna broke free from the empire. And Sousa, a city in the region of Elam in the Iranian lowlands, successfully rebelled in the third year.

These Elamites were an ambitious people. They were rivals for the later Assyrian and Babylonian empires, but at this stage, were only just beginning to flex their muscles. Their rise would spell the end of the Sumerian age. The fracturing Sumerian Empire could no longer maintain its defenses along the 300 kilometers of the great Martu wall. And so, in the fifth year of his reign, the wall that Ibi Sin's father had built failed. The Martu poured over the defenses and overranes. the rich farmlands that lay behind. The effects of this loss were immediate and devastating.

Food shortages ran rampant. In years 7 and 8 of Ibi Sin's kingship, the price of grain increased to 60 times the usual cost. People would have starved in the streets. The famine was hitting the capital city of Ure especially hard. and it's clear that at this point, the King Ibi Sin really began to panic. Desperate to feed his people, King Ibi Sin summoned one of his generals and told him to travel north to the city of Isin to buy grain, and pay many times its usual cost.

This general was a man called Isbiyara, and it's clear that he wasn't the most trusted of the king's generals. In another letter, the king had even complained that Ishiberra was Akkadian, not Sumerian, inferring that his loyalty may have been in question. But at this point, it's clear the king didn't have much choice. One remarkable letter from this moment has survived. It was sent to the king Ibi Sin by this general Isbiyah once he reached the city of Isin. It paints a vivid picture of Sumerian society's collapse.

You ordered me to travel to Issin and Kazaloo to purchase grain? With grain reaching the exchange rate of one shekel of silver per gur, 20 talents of silver have been invested in the purchase. But I heard news that the hostile Martu have entered inside your territories. I entered with the entire amount of grain. Now I have let the Martu. All of them penetrate inside the land. Because of the Martu, I am unable to hand over this grain for threshing.

They are stronger than me while I am condemned to sitting around. This letter shows that the twin pressures of the Martu invasions, coupled with the famine at home, were beginning to tear the very fabric of the kingdom apart. The Akkadian general Ishbira urges the king to send a fleet of 600, boats up the river to transport the grain. He also kindly offers to stay behind in Isin and help to defend it against the invasion. That I should guard for you the cities of Isin and Nibru, let it be my responsibility. My lord should know this. It's possible that Isbihara knew that the request for 600 boats was impossible. In fact, he had no intention of ever heading back

to the starving city of Ur. He stayed in Isin with all the grain and soon declared himself its king. This is just one story out of many that shows the Sumerian state truly beginning to come apart. Facing threats on multiple sides, the king Ibi-Sin entered into the city of the city into a frantic series of last-ditch measures. He ordered fortifications built at the important cities of Ure and Nipur, but these efforts were in vain. Ultimately, the Sumerian Empire fell apart, one city at a time, until only the capital of Ur remained, surrounded by hostile forces. Soon the Elamite people, those former subjects of the Sumerians in the foothills of Iran, marched down along the hill paths, gathering with them an army of tribesmen,

and laid siege to the great city of Ur. King Ibi Sin tried one last attempt to beat them back. And it's clear at this point how desperate he was. He tried to enlist the help of his great enemy, the wild Martu who had poured over his father's wall, he offered to pay them in exchange for their help. He even swallowed his pride and begged for the help of Isbiyara, the general who had stabbed him in the back on that journey for grain and was now ruling as the king of Ysin. but it was all useless. The Elamites broke through the walls of Ur and set the city on fire.

They poured into its sacred precinct and looted it of all its valuables. We can imagine them storming up the steps of Ure's great Zyghurat, killing priests and plundering its treasures as they went. The surrounding fields were burned, and the waterways became contaminated with disease. The armies of Elam stormed the royal palace and captured the king Ibi Sin. They took him away in chains, marched him back to their homeland and imprisoned him there. This was the last king of Sumer, a civilization that had endured for millennia, and he would die in chains, imprisoned by his enemies in a foreign land.

The ancient Sumerians who saw the destruction of their cities reacted to their sorrow in the same way that humans always have. They wrote poetry. In fact, for each of their great ruined cities, they wrote a lament. One of these poems, called The Lament for Ur, relates with tangible anguish, the horror of that time. The gods have abandoned us, like migrating birds. They have gone. UR is destroyed. Bitter is its lament.

The country's blood now fills its holes like hot bronze in a mold. Bodies dissolve like fat in the sun. Our temple is destroyed. Smoke lies on our city like a shroud. Blood flows as the river does. The lamenting of men and women. Sadness abounds. UR is no more.

The fall of UR. was one of the great turning points in ancient history. It marked the end of the unified Sumerian state, and the region entered a small dark age, in which individual city states once again vied for control over the ruins of the former empire. The wars of this period turned Sumerian cities to blackened heaps of burnt brick.

The people mourn. It's people like broken people. pot shards littering the approaches. The walls were gaping, the high gates, the roads were piled with dead. In all the streets and roadways bodies lay. In open fields that used to fill with dancers, the people lay in heaps. And meanwhile, the drought dragged on, and the salt-ridden fields were no longer producing enough barley. Faced with these problems, the Sumerian people began to flock out of the region in huge numbers. Refugees carrying with them their meager belongings and weeping for the home they had left behind. Over the next centuries, a vast population movement took place,

from the south of Mesopotamia to the north. Some of these Sumerian speakers would settle in the Akkadian lands. But with their connection to their homeland severed, their cultural identity went with it. They learned the Akkadian language of the northerners and left theirs behind in the smoking ruins of their cities. The Martu, those wild hill people so detested by the Sumerians, would themselves settle down in the cities they conquered along the river valley. The migrating Martu, the fleeing Sumerians and the native Akkadians would mix together. They would blend their cultures as the people of this region always had. The foundations they laid would give rise to the next chapter of Mesopotamian and human history, and forge the region's next superpowers.

These would rise as the legendary empires of Babylon and Assyria. But those are stories that I will save for another time. Sumerian was now a dead language. It would never again be heard spoken in the streets and the markets. But it did remain in use for at least another 2,000 years, preserved in the temples and scriptures of later empires. Just as Latin once survived in the churches of medieval Europe after the fall of Rome. For these later people, Sumerian became the language of the gods, the language of myth and magic. The king's, the king's. The king's, the word. The king's of Ur, those great Sumerian rulers, themselves passed into legend, and some of them would later be revered as gods themselves. And all the kings of Mesopotamia in Babylon and Assyria for the next

2,000 years would rule under a title that gave them a kind of ancient legitimacy, reaching right back to the first age, to the dawn of mankind's journey into civilized. King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkad. Even after the fall of the Sumerian Empire, many of its great cities would continue as population centers into the post-Sumarian era. Among these was the great coastal city of Ur, situated at the mouth of the Euphrates, which would rise and fall a number of times over its history. But ultimately, it was the landscape that had given birth to Ur, and it was the landscape that would bring about its demise. Today, if you stand in the ruins of Ur, the sea that once lapped its shores

is nowhere to be seen. In fact, early archaeologists were astonished to see the remains of millions of seashells scattered in the sand here on this lonely stretch of desert. As the millennia past, the continued depositing of silt, along with changes in global sea levels, have combined to push Iraq's Gulf Coast back to its present position, about 150 kilometers to the south. The Euphrates River that once brought the rich bounties of trade down from the north has also disappeared, its course having changed over the centuries. In fact, around a round of the sea, in the around the barren mounds of earth where the city of Ur once stood, there's nothing at all but the lone and level sands of the Iraqi desert, boundless and bare for miles around. Water had

always been this city's lifeblood, and the loss of the river and the sea meant the slow death of Ur. People soon left its houses and its streets. They stopped working its fields, and maintaining its irrigation canals, and soon the land dried up and the topsoil blew away in the wind. The priests extinguished the fires that burned in the top chamber of Ura's great ziggurat, and stopped leaving their offerings there to the moon god's sin. The markets closed, and the mud-brick buildings of the city began to crumble. The wooden beams of the roofs rotted and fell in. The sands and desert winds rolled through its streets, and the dunes buried its fallen walls.

Before long, the greater city the world had ever known was just a mound of ruins, where the occasional desert traveler would pass by, and where the Italian traveler, Pietro de la Vallé, would one day shelter with his wife from a threatening group of bandits, and discover the scattered fragments of writing. that the Sumerians had left behind in their forgotten language. Somewhere buried in the ruins lay the clay tablets on which the lament for the city's destruction was written. May that storm swoop down no more on your city.

May the door be closed on it, like the great city gate at night time, until distant days, other days, future days. In your city reduced to ruin mounds, may a lament be made to you. O Nana, may your restored city be resplendent before you. Following the sacking of Uruh around the year 2000 BC, the city of Uruk went into a steep decline and much of its population fled. Uruk did have another period of flourishing, when the later Assyrian Empire rebuilt it as a regional capital.

But as the Euphrates River changed its course, Uruk too would be completely abandoned. Today, the walls of Uruk, the same walls that are boasted about in the epic of Gilgamesh, are still visible, heaps of ancient brickwork lining the flat lunar landscape of the desert. But they are still 15 meters tall, encircling the whole city, now washed by a tide of broken pottery and bones. The English archaeologist, William Loftus, was the first European to rediscover the ruins of Uruk. He was impressed with the haunting sight of the vast mounds, rising out of the desert,

and he later wrote about how the site affected him. Of all the desolate sights I ever beheld, that of Uruk incomparably surpasses all. The process of decay in all the cities of ancient Suma, in Nipur, Eridu, Lagash, Ur, and Uruk, would have been gradual but unstoppable. Wind-borne sand and earth would pile up against the walls that still stood and filled in the streets. Meanwhile, rainwater and wind wore down any remaining structures. The sight of these ruins amazed to the streets. travelers, who, like the Italian de la Vallé, passed by them and saw their lonely shapes on the horizon.

People told stories about what must have happened to those people, who built such enormous constructions and then disappeared forever. Echoes of these stories still survive in tales like the Tower of Babel, about a people who built a tower that would reach to the heavens, and who were struck down by good. God on account of their pride. With their cities lost, the Sumerian people passed out of history. The civilizations who replaced them, who kept their language alive in their temples and still told stories of their kings would themselves pass into ruin. The knowledge of how to read Sumerian was forgotten entirely, and its history turned to dust. Only their clay tablets

remained, buried in the sands of Iraq, fragments containing the voices of a whole people, waiting for archaeologists to discover them, and, through arduous and painstaking work, to find out how to read them. These fragments give us little bursts of light, illuminating the dark ocean floor of this most distant past, giving us the records on recipes of the Sumerian people, their music and their prayers, their loves and grief, their triumphs, and their beautiful, sorrowful lamentations for the loss of the world's first cities. And it gives us to the wistful philosophies of these ancient people, as these lines from the epic of Gilgames show, nobody sees death, nobody sees the face of death, nobody hears the voice of

death. Savage death just cuts mankind down. Sometimes we build a house, sometimes we make a nest, but then brothers divide it upon inheritance. Sometimes there is hostility in the land. But then the river rises and brings flood water. Dragonflies drift on the river. Their faces look upon the face of the sun, but then suddenly there is nothing. time around the year 1700 BC, when the last kings of Ur were already a distant memory. Somewhere on the other side of the world, on a small rocky island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the last woolly mammoth to ever live on earth lay down and died. Sumerian society, in its imperial form, rose, lived out its golden age, and done.

died, outlived by the woolly mammoth. I want to end the episode with an excerpt from that great Sumerian poem, the epic of Gilgamesh. This section relates an episode that I think is one of the most incredible sequences in any piece of ancient literature. It shows the King Gilgamesh weeping over the loss of his dying friend, and his friend reaches up to him and tells him that he has dreamed. of the afterlife, that he has seen what awaits him after death. This passage is a melancholy meditation on loss. It shows all the kings of the earth who have ever ruled, living on in this dark and silent place, their crowns put away forever.

As you listen, imagine what it would have felt like to live in the great cities of Ur and Uruk, watching the twilight begin to fall over the Sumerian age. Imagine what it would feel like to see the crops grow weaker every year as the white crust of salt begins to form on the ground, and the city's people go hungry in the streets, wailing year after year for the gods to help them. Imagine how it would have felt to see the armies of the mountain people gathering on the horizon,

having to flee the city with your purpose, possessions on your back, leaving your home behind forever, as the wind rustles through the dying reeds, and the chanting of the priests still goes on in the Ziggurat's tall tower as the sun begins to set over the desert. Listen, my friend, this is the dream I dreamed last night. I stood before an awful being, the somber-faced manbird. He turned his stare towards me and he led me away to the palace of Hercala, the queen of darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back.

There is the house whose people sit in darkness. Dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering. They see no light. They sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust, and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away forever,

rulers and princes, all who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old. They who had stood in the place of the gods stood now like servants. In the house of dust were high priests and acolytes, priests of the incantation and of ecstasy. And there was Oreshkegal, the queen of the underworld, she who keeps the books of the dead. She raised her head. She saw me and spoke. Who has brought this one here? Then I awoke, like a man drained of blood, who wanders alone in a waste. Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilisations podcast.

I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode, Rie Brignall, Jake Barrett Mills, Shem Jacobs, Nick Bradley, and Emily Johnson. Special thanks go once again to the wonderful musicians, Gail and Philip Neumann from the group Ensemble de Organographia, who agreed to let me use some of their reconstructions of ancient Sumerian music during this episode. Their CD titled Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks, is available to buy from North Pacificmusic.com. This episode has touched a number of times on the power and necessity of the written word, a gift that ancient Iraq once gave to the world.

And I thought it would be fitting to take a moment here to promote a charity that really needs your help today. Its name is Book Aid. In 2015, the terrorist group ISIS burned over one million books in the library of Iraq's Mosul University. Today, the Book Aid team is trying to rebuild that library and give the students of Mosul some hope for their future. If you think you can spare anything, please head onto bookaid.org and see how you can help today. For every two pound you give, they can send another book to Mosul's University Library, and there's also a list of other ways you can help, to provide resources, equipment, and even training, to bring the gift of the written word back to the

place where it first began. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at Paul M.M. Cooper. And if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at Fall of Civ Pod, with underscores separating the words. A full bibliography and reading list will be available for free on Patreon. This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you help keep the podcast ad-free. You also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing,

to get the episodes out to you faster, to make them longer, and bring as much life and detail to them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider heading on to patreon.com forward slash Fall of Civilizations underscore podcast, or just Google Fall of Civilizations Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N. For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.