The Ancients - Fall of the Sumerians

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Tristan Hughes continues our special series on Great Disasters, journeying back to ancient Mesopotamia with Dr Paul Collins to explore the fall of the Sumerians.4,000 years ago, the great cities of Sumer — Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Girsu — stood as glittering centres of power, crowned with mighty ziggurats and ruled by ambitious dynasties. Yet within a few generations, this world of splendour and tradition unravelled. From the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to shifting power struggles and environmental pressures, uncover why these prestigious city-states declined — and ask whether we can truly talk of a 'fall of Sumer.' Join us as we step into the chaos of Mesopotamia’s first great age of empires and witness how disaster reshaped the cradle of civilisation.MOREThe SumeriansSargon of AkkadPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Swiped is a new movie inspired by the provocative real-life story of the visionary founder of online dating platform Bumble. Played by Lily James, Swiped introduces recent college grad Whitney Wolfe as she uses extraordinary grit and ingenuity to break into the male-dominated tech industry, paving her way to becoming the youngest female self-made billionaire. An official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hulu original film Swiped starts streaming September 19th, Only on Disney Plus. Hello everyone, a quick note from me before we start the episode.

Just a thank you. Thank you to everyone who came to our ancient live show last Friday, where we explored the story of Carthage with Dr. Eve MacDonald. We absolutely loved it. It was wonderful to meet so many of you in person. And I'm here to say that we will be releasing the audio of that live show for you are subscribers next week. So if you want to listen to that live show,

if you couldn't make it but really want to listen to it, well, you can, you just need to subscribe to The Ancients. We'll put a link in the show notes where you can do just that. And it's going to be released next Friday. The dozen different sources from the period say something very strange. They say basically that the sun disappeared. Witness a world where nature reigns supreme and catastrophe rewrote the story of civilization. Huge volcanic bombs are coming out of the sky, these great rocks about three feet across,

crashing through the material. In the ancient world, disaster was always lurking. Earthquakes and volcanoes flattened and buried mighty cities in an instant. Drought and plague wiped out civilizations without mercy. So if you've got an empire, that too becomes. immensely vulnerable and prone to collapse. Life in the ancient world often hung by a thread. Over the next four episodes, we'll discover that survival was never guaranteed.

It's like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the six holes. It's time to step into the chaos and witness the catastrophe to uncover how disaster reshaped civilizations and the world itself. This is great disasters. 4,000 years ago, a great shift was happening in ancient Mesopotamia. The Acadian Empire, sometimes called the world's first empire, had collapsed, and the prestigious cities of Sumer it had once ruled over, Oruk, U, Gursu, Lagash, had experienced a resurgence. It was a time of splendorous neo-Sumarian cities, ruled by powerful dynasties, defined by great ziggurats,

centred around ancient Sumerian as the chosen written language of these states. And yet, these new dynasties would soon also meet their own violent ends. In this episode, we are going to talk through the story of these famous Sumerian cities at the turn of the second millennium BC, a time of powerful, early empires rising and falling, a time often linked to when the Sumerian civilization collapsed. We're going to explore just how far we should believe such a statement with our guest, Dr. Paul Collins. Paul, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

We're all to be back, thank you. It's almost like we've done this before quite a few times, and in this room in the British Museum to talk all the things, the Sumerians and the Acadians. Very happy to be doing it again. And we are keeping on that topic, but we are also doing an episode on, and I have it in, I don't know, quotation marks is the right word, but with a little bit of hesitancy, the fall of the Sumerians to kick off this brand new series on the ancients about these disasters, these big declines of ancient history. When we talk about the fall of the Sumerians, do we mean the fall of some of the earliest known cities in the world? Well, I think you could start thinking about it from that point of view for sure. I mean, it's one of the most interesting questions we need to address is really why certain ways of living

come to an end. And the civilization that the Sumerians were certainly part of has come to an end. Do we have much source material for this topic? Because I'm presuming we're going back quite far in the story of ancient Mesopotamia. Well, I think it depends. where you want to start the story, really, because, of course, rise and falls depending how you define that happens across numerous periods at different periods, at different times. So I think certainly where you want to start will define how much information we've got. Well, before we get to that chronological date, I've got one in mind. But where are we talking first and foremost with the Sumerians? Where in the world? So Sumer is effectively southern or

Iraq. Today, it's the area covered by retreating marshlands under enormous threat from climate change, but the area roughly from south of Baghdad down to the head of the Persian Gulf. And was this right in the centre? Was this one of the birthplaces of farming in the fertile crescent? Was this a key area for the emergence of these earlier cities? So cities we now know have their origins, if one's thinking about large populations, concentrated in one base, much earlier than perhaps was previously thought. And we see some of the earliest big urban centres emerging in place like Syria, but almost certainly in parallel with similar developments in what's now southern Iraq. So across a broad sweep of the Middle

East, and we see from around 4,000 BC these concentrations of populations. And 4,000 BC is a Is that the rough time period that we should be talking about with the Sumerians? And how far forward can we go with their story? I'd like to begin the story, if we're talking about the decline, as far back as around 2,400, 2,500 BC. But that's still quite a jump from 4,000 BC that you've already mentioned. Well, of course, as early as 4,000 BC, the evidence we have becomes increasingly less. So it becomes more difficult to work out exactly what was happening

in those cities and then the causes of their decline. But by the middle of the third millennium BC, the date you're interested in starting the conversation, we have a much clearer idea about the political world. And of course, we can actually talk about Sumerians because they're writing their language. And that allows us to really begin to think about groups of people, their identities, the ways in which they operated and worked together,

and, of course, the impact of change on those societies. Well, you mentioned writing there, so it feels like we need to talk about this, first of all. What types of sources do we have surviving then from the Sumerians to learn more about their culture? So we have from Mesopotamia some of the earliest writing in the world, of course. And this is inscribed on clay tablets, so little tablets of clay but just large enough to fit and neatly into the palm of your hand. and then using a piece of sharpened reed or wood, impressed with signs which represented ideas, sound values, which could be built up into words and meaning. So is it phonetic? Is that what we should be thinking?

It's syllabic. So each of these little wedge-shaped cuneiform signs represented sound values, which you could rearrange effectively in different orders to create words. And we have lots of these tablets surviving, but do we also have active archaeology happening in the fields in southern Iraq today learning more about the story of these people? It's a huge amount of archaeological work going on, both by Iraqis and foreign teams. Of course, many are focused on much earlier or later periods, but there's certainly really exciting work going on for the third millennium BC when we're seeing some of these big urban centres. We mentioned their big urban centres. So can you paint a picture of the Sumerian world in, let's say, the middle of the third millennium BC? What did the Sumerian world look like by that time?

Well, southern Mesopotamia, we know, was divided between a series of city-states. So there would be a capital city with surrounding towns and villages, which were understood as belonging as it were to a fixed political area. and these city-states would be governed, at least theoretically, by a divine figure. A divine figure. A god or a goddess sat at the heart of each community, and of course they had temples where they were worshipped. But those temples were built by dynasties of kings. So you had mortal rulers serving the gods, usually passing on their power from father to son, but inevitably, as with all political powers, there was a rivalry and dynasties came and went. And did these kings, these rulers, did they see themselves as more than mortals?

Did they see themselves as the prime people who communicated with the gods? Do they see themselves as priests as well? So there's certainly the sense in these early cities that the kings, the rulers were responsible ultimately for mediating between the people of the city-states and their gods. And we see images of them. We have texts written by the kings on their behalf, talking about building temples, feeding the gods, clothing the gods, and then inevitably receiving the gods blessings. So we have these sophisticated city-states, you know, controlling the urban centres and then the surrounding countryside for their food. But also,

as you say, their contact with each other and beyond the borders of the Sumerian, lands, but also these growing rivalries between them as well. What main city should we be thinking of? Because I would think straightway of a city like Uruk. So Uruk is a very good example. I mean, certainly Uruk is one of the most ancient large urban centres in Mesopotamia, and by the middle of the third millennium was one of the largest. So a vast, sprawling network of canals and houses and agricultural lands, perhaps with many tens of thousands of people living together. But there were other great centres as well, places like Ur and Eridu, Nipur, Lagash. There are about 20 or 30 great cities that were

dividing the alluvial plains of southern Iraq between them. And so we get to the latter half of the third millennium BC. What is this big event that happens at that time that really shakes up the political order of, well, the Sumerian city states. What happens? Well, it's an event which really repeats what had been going on earlier, and that's rivalry between city states. So around 2,350 BC, more or less, we see the emergence of one powerful ruler in a city called Agaday, or Akkad. He's a ruler that. He's a ruler that. that calls himself, he's a ruler who calls himself Sagan, which means the king is true or the legitimate king. So it's obviously a title that he's taken on coming to the throne. And he

doesn't speak Sumerian, or at least his inscriptions suggest otherwise, and he speaks a Semitic language, a language related to modernly Arabic and Hebrew, which has completely different grammatical structure to Sumerian. And it's clear that the region of southern Mesopotamia was a very mixed population, with some people speaking Sumerian, perhaps closest to the Gulf, whereas others, perhaps further north, largely spoke the Semitic language, which we call Acadian after Sargon's capital. And one can think of this not as two distinct populations in opposition, but rather the result of mixed populations, sharing the same cultural outlook, but simply recording that in different languages. And Sagan, the Semitic speaker, marches out

with his army and does what earlier kings, some of whom spoke Sumerian, had been doing, and defeating rival city states, building from their city states larger kingdoms. And Sagan is simply more successful than others. He defeats his rivals across the alluvial plain, claims control of the entire region, and then marches, according to inscriptions, beyond the alluvial plain. So beyond ancient Sumer and the region that we could call Akkad, up the river Euphrates, up the river Tigris, or down the Persian Gulf, extending his authority. So does he conquer all of the Sumerian people then, all of Sumer, all of these city-states that we've mentioned, like Oruk, Ur, and so on. He claims to do so, and that seems to have been the case. I mean, I'll say

some of these earlier city-states, places like Our and Lagash, had also been extending their control by defeating their rivals, but nobody had taken it quite as far as Sagan. He managed to consolidate control across the entire alluvial plain. We have dedicated an entire episode to Sagan not too long ago and we really focused on his character and his expansion and so on but we didn't focus as much on what happens in those cities that he conquers so let's focus on that now on the Sumerian city states because how does this new acadian overlordship of places like uruk and o'er does it really affect their prominence does it affect the day-to-day runnings of these cities do we know how they fared so in many respects again as far as

as we can tell from the rather limited evidence, and we've got lots of tablets talking about the economies of these cities, life probably continued to some extent as before. So some of the rulers were left in charge, the way in which they organized their lives wouldn't have changed dramatically, so material would have been brought in from the countryside and offered to the gods. There would have been an exchange of goods across the luvial plane. But of course, Sargon would have expected taxation to have come into the centre. And so through his control, his dominance of these great trading networks and the agricultural wealth of the region, he was able to grow immensely wealthy. And we can see that to some

extent, under his successes, where they invested in extraordinary art and architecture to reflect their power. And do they build that art and architecture in the cities that they'd conquered, or their predecessors had conquered, like Saga? We certainly see buildings of the Agadei period reflecting their dominance, and they, of course, talk about that dominance through inscriptions. And they continue to use the Sumerian language to express power and authority. And in many ways, the Sumerian language begins to emerge as the language of kingship and of the language associated with the gods, whereas the Semitic language, Acadian, is used increasingly for economic documents. So again, a separation in the use of these different languages to define themselves in terms of

their own time, but also that of the past. And how long does this Acadian overlordship of the Sumerian city-state? How long do we think it lasts? Well, of course, Sargon begins a process, which then is expanded by his successors, over about a century and a half, 200 years at most. And then under his grandson, Naram Singh, the empire probably reaches its greatest extent, reaching into modern-day Syria and down the Persian Gulf. But it's always vulnerable because the Hadesian kings are done.

dependent on local rulers to maintain their relationships with the centre. And, of course, on numerous occasions, those local rulers would come together in coalitions and rebel against that overlord ship. Land a Viking longship on Ireland's shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient. ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoners' Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into Feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where Samurai warlords and Shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive,

but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, Listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week. We'll get more into those rebellions in a bit. first of all, because when we think of city states being conquered, you usually think that that symbolizes a fall of that city state from power and prominence. And yet, as you've stated there, Paul, from the limited evidence we have surviving, it seems that many of these city states

continued as they had before. The Sumerian language remains really important and arguably increases in importance. So how far can we say that the Sumerian people, the Sumerian city states, endured a decline during this period when the Akkadians were dominant. So I think we need to be thinking about then Sumerian as a language rather than necessarily a people. There's very little evidence to suggest that the people on the ground, as were in the street, thought of themselves necessarily as Sumerian, as opposed to being the residence of particular city-states. and identity was very much with the city and the god that, or goddess, that looked after that city. And the fact that some people spoke Sumerian and some people spoke Acadian

may not have been defining in terms of their local identities. So if we think about the Akkadian conquests, they are very much about repeating a pattern we've seen from much earlier, when more of the written documents were in Sumerian than they were in Acadian. But nonetheless, politically, there really wasn't a great deal of difference. But the Acadian consolidation of control over the alluvial plain created a new way of thinking about the region. And it was that that perhaps was its greatest impact, was that future generations of kings, regardless of the language that they spoke in Mesopotamia, looked backed the Acadian period as a time of great power and prestige that they wanted to emulate.

And so creating a control over the alluvium became the desirable thing to do for future kings. This is almost, dare I say, the origins of empire, imperial, of thinking in the Mesopotamia. It was a shift of thinking, for sure. Smaller kingdoms had always been created and then collapsed politically. And, of course, what we tend to be looking at is just the inscriptions of the elite and of kings. So we're getting a rather small snapshot of the reality on the ground. And as kings and princes and fell and rose, life in the streets may not have altered very much at all, regardless of the language you spoke. Absolutely. And these city-states do seem to be still doing pretty well at that time.

but also, as you hinted at, also sometimes not being very loyal to the Acadians. They want to rise up. So talk to me about these rebellions that start to erupt in many of these city-states as the Acadian Empire as time goes on. Well, you see this through the Acadian period. There are moments when there are coalitions of the city-states that retain their original identities as independent cities, and they come together in opposition to this idea of an overlordship. Obviously, there are kings, there are rulers who want to emulate

the Akkadian kings and replace them, but others simply that want to free themselves of the obligations to the centre and benefit from the enormous agricultural wealth and the trading connections that are bringing extraordinary materials into their centres that they want to control. And so Narim Sine, our greatest circadian emperor perhaps, is faced by a major rebellion which takes him in a number of years to quell. He claims his inscriptions to do it, but it's literally an uprising of the entire alluvial plain against him. Wow. And you mentioned he's an emperor there. Do we know that for sure? Well, that's a, modern term, of course, in a way that we can, then whether we want to think of this

circadian period as an empire in the sense that its control stretches beyond the traditional boundaries of the sort of cultural world or not is up for debate. I think probably many scholars would look for much later for the first true empire. It's with the Assyrians and so on, isn't it? And that's for another day entirely. But it was interesting what you were highlighting there. So the reign of Narim Sim, so Sagan's grandson, and this big rebellion against him, is he able to quell that rebellion, but is it at the same time? Even though he is successful, is it a symbol of things to come, how these various city states, Oruk, and so on, they are still prominent and they are still pretty pretty, pretty,

troublesome and they will come back. Yes, and that's the structure that's in place. That's embedded in the system, independent city-states. And inevitably, unless you can find a way of breaking down that traditional way of organizing things, this will happen in the future. Effectively, a country of Babylonia will be created in the second millennium BC. But it takes a long time to overcome that traditional fragmentation of the alluvium. And so built in to, you to any expansive kingdom in the third millennium BC, is this underlying problem that the independent cities will reassert their authority and want to throw off your authority. So these cities are still very much prominent and certainly don't seem to be in decline

at this time. So let's move on then, Paul, to the big event that then almost inevitably happens, which is the fall of the Acadian Empire. So what happens? The fall of the Acadian Empire, ways is, again, one of those great debates in scholarship because it almost certainly involved a number of different factors. We see in the inscriptions pressure on the centre from, obviously, the rival city-states as they take advantage of weakness at the centre, but also pressure from outside. Other groups, not least, the Elamites from southwest Iran, dominating the mountains to the east of Mesopotamia, they are always looking for an opportunity to take advantage of weakness,

and ultimately it is their invasions, the inscriptions tell us, that bring the Acadian Empire to its knees. But nonetheless, other factors were at work, and it now seems as if the end of the Acadian period, So around 2,200, 2150 BC was a period of climatic change. Drought affected the region dramatically. Now, these are city-states that are dependent on a world of agriculture sustained by irrigation. And the decline in water in the rivers or the advance of seawaters of those rivers from the Persian Gulf

affects the agricultural potential of the land. And even if it's just for a few years, this makes these city-states very, very vulnerable. It disrupts, obviously, the supply of agricultural goods, but also means that it's no longer possible to acquire traded material coming in from outside. So the whole system becomes very vulnerable and prone to collapse. And so if you've got an empire or an extensive control over these city-states, that too becomes immensely vulnerable. And this seems to be a major contributing factor to the ultimate control over that region by the Kings of Agadee. So it becomes vulnerable because all of the links become strained as that they're all, it's not just Agaday suffers from the famine.

It's that they all suffer from the famine. And then the whole, the fledgling, if I can even say the fledgling bureaucracy, the structure of, of this control, it falls as apart. And it just shows the fragility, doesn't it? Absolutely. And I think this has been a recurring theme throughout Mesopotamian history and was almost certainly happening, of course, much, much earlier. And we have less evidence for that surviving. But the rise and fall of the cities, their political and economic structures are all dependent on this extraordinary environment, but a very fragile one. Well, I think we can talk about the fall of a particular city here, then, in the case of Agadei.

You mentioned the Elamites earlier. Are these also the people that equate with the so-called Guti? So the Guti are, again, difficult to define precisely, but there are peoples that seem to be located somewhere in those mountains to the east of Iraq, the mountains that now divide Iraq from Iran, the so-called Zagros Mountains. and the people of those mountains are always attracted by the agricultural wealth and the resources of the alluvial place. It's this repeating idea, isn't it? These kind of montane pastoral herdsmen or so on, a bit more more like descending on the fertile plains in the valleys below. You see that again and again across the ancient world? You see it again and again, but also, of course, it's repeated in the inscriptions of the alluvial plain

as a sort of repeating motif. So it's perhaps an easy explanation if you're living on the flatlands of southern Iraq to blame those uncivilized barbarous people up in the mountains. The highlanders descending in it. How much reality behind that, of course, is much more difficult to determine.

This is just a way of explaining why your great civilization eventually declines. But almost certainly the decline politically, economically of these centres would attract other people in to take advantage of a situation, whether brought in as mercenaries or as workers or as invading armies. Again, probably a mixture of all those. So famine could have weakened one of these city states and then the destructive hammer blow could be outside external invaders coming in and destroying a city and looting it. Correct, exactly. And that may have happened from city to city or one big moment, which was the ultimate death nail, as it were, to the empire. Do we think that happens? That does happen to any cities at this time, because is it the case with Agadee that we don't know where it was? One of the theories is that it was just so brutally destroyed. Well, Agatee hasn't been located.

We have a sense of where it might have been, and it may well now lie under a suburb of modern Baghdad. It's certainly positioned very strategically on the river Tigris, or close to the Tigris, to benefit from the trade with the mountains of Iran and the alluvial plain to the south. But it's never been yet located. No doubt when it is, if anything survives after modern building, it will no doubt show some of the most spectacular material from this period. But at the same time, the Acadian Empire falls, but the city states, that we've already talked about, a rook, Ur, and so on, endure past the fall of the Acadian Empire, and normally after the fall of an empire, or if you can call it an empire, you see periods of chaos, you know,

kind of confusion, not really knowing what's going to happen next, almost a power vacuum. Do we know how these city states fared in the years following the fall of the Acadian Empire? So the Akkadian Empire certainly seems to have brought an idea of chaos. Later inscriptions in Mesopotamia look back to that period, the end of the Agadei Empire, and actually asked the question, who was king, who was not king? I mean, it was unclear who was actually in control. So that system of the single dynasty dominating the region had collapsed. So what was the new way that, in response to a new world as being imagined?

And of course, the city-state structure remained. And so it was back to individual cities and their rulers attempting now to restore the Agadei Empire. And of course, within that moment of chaos, there were the Guti, the Elamites and the local, rulers all vying to claim the Agaday mantle. So they're all still in the area of Lower Mesopotamia, or Sumer at that time. They're Goethe and the Elamites. They haven't gone back to their mountains. They've decided to kind of stay in the region, have they? So they, again, were dependent, of course, on later inscriptions which describe this period

of chaos and then the emergence of new centres of power. But could we then say that actually these city-states, they are weaker at that time If, as if from the surviving evidence may well be that there was a famine that contributed to the fall of the Acadian Empire, these other city-states they do endure, but can we see potentially in this time, it's a time of rebuilding, of regaining their strength, of recovering from things like famine. Again, it's difficult to know how much we should take literally, these literary descriptions of later, about this period of decline. of the agaday political control. Because of course, for many of these city-states, it was a sense of being liberated to do their own thing once again. And yes, no doubt the period of drought and upheaval would have affected things very widely. But after a couple of years, the agricultural resources returned, and then cities could once again start flourishing as they had always.

And so what time period should we be focusing in on now, Paul? How far ahead have we gone from where we began in the mid-third millennium BC? So the Agadei Empire has collapsed around 2150 BC, something like that. Again, the chronology, slightly imprecise, but we begin to see some city-states reasserting their independence, their identities, and one of the best known of those city-states for this particular period is one called Lagash, which is located on the alluvial plain relatively close to the mountains of Iran, so it's able to benefit enormously from close links to the Elamites and the rich resources to the mountains, the woods, the stones, the metals. And is this the first sense, real sense of stability then from our surviving sources

post the fall of this empire's decline? So what we see probably is a continuity in a way that the dynasties at Lagash had always benefited from its geographical position, its control over those trade routes and been wealthy as a result. And there are enormous temple buildings from the earlier a third millennium at Lagash and its cult center of Girsu, for example. So it's always an important centre. But now with the fall of the Agadei control over the region, we see a dynasty of kings emerging at Lagash that reassert that control over the wealth. And is this the figure I have in my notes? Is it King Gudea or Gadea? I'm probably saying it, butchering the pronunciation. Yes, so Gudea is certainly the most famous of the kings of this period,

who is a ruler of the city-state of Lagash and uses his new independence and control of all this wealth that the city-state is able to dominate, trade, bringing in metals and stones from the mountains of Iran and elsewhere, that he's able to create a sense of a new start, a new beginning, which he's in control of. It shows, doesn't it? So these city-states, they're still very much thriving, or at least Lagash is. But Lagash doesn't remain the only one that we see in the surviving sources that does seem to have a resurgence.

because Paul talked to me about the rise, the rise again of er in particular, because this city-state experiences a brand-new life at this time, it feels. Well, again, is it about a revival or is it rather continuity, but suddenly we're able to see it? Right. It's no longer blanketed by this Agadee overlordship, but rather able to exert its independence. But of course, all these city states, whether it's Lagash and Urr that emerges to then

dominate the region, they are in a new world in the sense that their rulers are building on the traditions of the Agadei period. Land a Viking longship on Ireland, Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoners' Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into Feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and Shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories,

Listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Because later you about the Neo-Assyrians versus the older Assyrians. as the Neo-Sumarian period. So it's called that really because the rulers of these city-states start to use the Sumerian language in a much more elaborate way than previously. So yes, they continue to create monuments with Sumerian inscriptions, but Sumerian increasingly is made the language of administration. And it's at a time probably when the spoken language is dying.

And this happens to languages across the globe, that they have a lifespan, they can be absorbed into other cultures and disappear from the spoken language. But is the spoken language then also Sumerian? So it's still remaining prominent in writing, but not being spoken? Correct.

So it's actually a political decision. So if one takes Latin as a better known example, after the Roman Empire, Latin ceases to become a spoken language, would be eventually replaced, of course, with Italian in the heartland, but Latin continues as a written language of authority of learning and administration, even though people in the street are no longer speaking it. and the same seems to have been the case with Sumerian. It's gradually replaced by the Semitic language, Acadian, and its relations. This isn't about conquest, this is just about cultural change. The majority of people start speaking that language. And Sumerian becomes less and less spoken in the street. But at that very moment, the new authorities in power see this language as ancient, as connected to their land, but is specialised. It's so special that their administrators, their scribes, their scholars can use it.

It's like Latin would be used in the medieval period. And as a result, modern scholars, reading all these texts, which are now in Sumerian, have created a notion that this is a revival of a people. I think it's not. It's the use of a dying language as the script of power and authority. So could you say then, getting my head around this, that the city states that are often called Sumerian today, like Uruk, Ur, Lagash, and so on,

they're still very prominent at this time. The people who are often labeled today as Sumerians, who lived in those places, they're still prominent at the time. And as you say, post-ocadian dynasty, the fall of the Acadians, there's the resurgence in some of these cities and would explore the rulers as well. But if we take the Sumerians or the Sumerian as meaning the language itself, at this time of resurgence for the city and potentially a people you argue it's not, the language itself, can we say has experienced a decline at this time.

It remains important, but it's not the spoken language anymore. So as a spoken language, Sumerian is declining and will eventually cease to be spoken. But it's being used now, is being written much, much more extensively. And it becomes the language of the state. and therefore its identity. So one could argue, indeed, that these are Sumerian states by virtue of the Sumerian language being at its heart, but in terms of people on the street, they're almost certainly not speaking it.

Well, we'll keep that in mind, is we'll call these Sumerian states for the meantime then, just to make it as easy and streamlined as possible. So they are experiencing a resurgence at this time. Who are the figures, let's say as Ur, because this seems a prime example. Do we know much about the rulers who oversee this prominence of this city at that time? Yes, we have a lot of information increasingly about this particular period, which often described as the Third Dynasty of Ower, or the Oir-3 state, according to later Mesopotamian tradition

is the third time that Ur has dominated the alluvial plain but that's something of a construct but the third dynasty of Ur, we have a great deal of written material of course largely in Sumerian and we can talk about the dynasty of kings originally, the dynasties emerging at the city of Uruk a city just the north of O'er, but then it's the dynasty from O'R itself that takes control.

And Uun Nama is credited with being the first king of this third dynasty. And he's very famous because he not only consolidates his control over many of the what have become independent city-states, again an attempt to reassert control of the alluvium, But he builds in those city-states some great monuments, most famously ziggurat towers, these stepped solid mud-brick structures for the focus of the worship of the gods who control these cities. And is this to a great ziggurat of Ur today? And was that built then by Errna M.A some 4,000 years ago? Yes, so the Zigrat ador is one of the best surviving examples in the city-states.

you can go and visit it today. It has its origins under Uwanama. He was the king who had it constructed. Subsequent dynasties of kings, of course, refurbished it and rebuilt it, not least Nabonidas much, much further on in the 6th century BC. So it's a monument that's been rebuilt on a number of occasions, but it's largely the result of Uanama. Given his expansion on the alluvial plain, is it possible to argue, if we call her a Sumerian city because of the prominence of Sumerian as the written language, does he actually form a Sumerian empire at that time? So he, like the Agadei kings, many respects a dynasty that expands their control over the alluvium. It takes a different shape than the Acadian Empire. That's because, of course, politics has changed and there are different powers in the region.

And the Uir three kings look largely towards the east, towards those rich mountains of Iran, to control those. And so the third dynasty of Our creates a kingdom or larger empire that expands into what as today, modern-day Iran. It doesn't seem to be near any sort of decline at this moment, I must admit. But keeping on Unama a bit more, he's famous for his law code. Can you tell us about this? Because I feel we have to talk about it. So we have attempts to show the king as the ruler of justice,

that the ultimate source of justice in the land was the king. We have earlier examples of that in Mesopotamia. But Uunama has indeed a so-called law code, which is an expression of examples of how justice would prevail. So there are examples, effectively, of good kingship. But they become the models of more famous law codes, not least, of course, that of Hamarabi of the 18th century BC, so some 400 years later, which becomes the ultimate model of the expression of the king of justice. And you mentioned how he is the founder of this dynasty, the third dynasty of Orr? Correct.

So how long does Ur remain prominent in this post-ocadian time and arguably being the prime Sumerian city at that time and ruling over many other city states in the area? So the third dynasty lasts about a century. So in the scheme of human life, it's quite a long time, but in the overall scheme of Mesopotamia, of course, it's yet another example of the rise of political powers centralisation across the alluvial plain. But ultimately, as with the Agadei Empire, it too collapses. And so what happens?

Why does it collapse? What are the theories behind why this Sumerian, city collapses. So the reasons, again, can probably be a mixture of factors as they were with the Agaday Empire. And we read in the contemporary sources, in the administrative documents of the Urethri state, evidence of pressure from harvests, so the collapse of harvest, the feeding of populations, the movement of grain in order to cope with. challenges, whether that's around drought or other forms of climate change, is actually unclear, but also evidence from those texts of pressure for outside. We read about walls being built

between some of the major rivers to ward off groups that are identified as Amorites. So tribal groups or other groups, again probably defined in some sense as these barbarians from the mountains in the traditional way of describing the enemies, they are exerting pressure. And that may well be again in response to a weakened centre. The 03 state was very, very bureaucratic. It controlled the taxation flowing in from the provinces to the centre in enormous detail.

And we have literally tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets which detail this taxation system. And are they almost all in Sumerian? They're all in Sumerian. Wow. Yes. Then the scribes, the administrators, trained at the center in the language of administration, which was Sumerian, and then manage the resources coming in from across this extensive kingdom.

And that also offers opportunities for disruption. So if some areas are prone to agricultural collapse or the movement of peoples, then it threatens the entire system. And so a very complicated picture is probably undermining that centralised control. We see only glimpses of that in the contemporary records. And with the end of the dynasty, do we then think it is, if OU has been weakened, is it a violent end? do we think that Ur was sacked? That's what we get from the later in Scotians, from the Mesopotamians of that region,

looking back to this period and composing what are described as lamentations. These are long, literary accounts of the terrible events that happened in their minds to the end of the Ur-3 Empire. So like the Agaday kings, like the Agaday Empire, the third dynasty would be viewed as a splendid period, again a period for to be repeated, to be emulated.

Of like the greatest city that had ever been created or to that point in history, do we think? Indeed. I mean, this is, you know, this is really what later kings look back on, even if they're creating it as a myth in their own making rather than as a reality. But certainly we know that the dynasty of Uwanamur and his successor, not least the great ruler Shulgi, who created an idea of what the greatest ruler should be writing in Sumerian, his inscriptions would be looked back as the model by which all future kings should rule. So later kings would look back, write lamentations on the decline,

of the U-A-3 state, and in those descriptions it's all about a violent end. And it's again, those pesky elamites from Iran sweeping in from the mountains, taking over and taking the last king of O'A-3, Ibisin, in chains, up to the mountains of Iran where he disappears from history. And is there a sense, I mean, in those written records that, as you mentioned, we do need to take with a pinch of salt, maybe a barrel of full of salt, that they also sacked, external invaders also sacked other cities in the area like O'Rourke or Girsu and so on?

Well, we get a sense that that is the case, that dynasties of new rulers or take up residents in these cities, even if it's briefly, and we see we're back to a period of chaos. Now, that's, of course, chaos politically. but it doesn't mean to say necessarily that it's the collapse of all other systems that people's lives, perhaps at the lowest levels of society, may not even be aware of some of these big changes. It's very difficult. So it's not the complete devastation. It's not like the sack of Carthage, or at least we don't know from our surviving records, where there is the brutal executions of people

in these cities, population replacements or the taking of people from a city and placing them elsewhere in the world. We just don't know stuff like that. It's not as if the people are changing completely in these cities. So I suspect very much, and we have evidence from different periods, as well as these literary accounts, that terrible things were going on, that there were, of course, invading armies, there was great slaughter. There would have been major disruption. This again, a recurring theme, not just, of course, in this part of the world. But then again, after that, those terrible events, then life returns and those old systems of bringing canals to the fields and the agriculture is revived. And that sense of independent city states at their

center, their gods, that continuity is very clear. What about? What about? the Sumerian language, does its fate really intertwine with that of the third dynasty of or? So when that dynasty comes to a violent end, does that also affect the survival of the Sumerian language? So the writing of the Sumerian language continues and it is embedded in the training of administrators, of scribes. It becomes an important part of a very complex way of defining and describing the worlds by these, not just administrators, but also scholars, where the Akkadian language, the Semitic language, is combined with the Sumerian language, to give a very complex and extremely rich way of describing the universe.

And Sumerian, in that sense, is never lost, because it continues to be used, by these scribes, by these scholars, right the way down to the end of cuneiform culture in the early centuries of the common hero. So is it the case that after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, that although Sumerian continues, it never is as prominent as it was during that time? That's correct, because the language of the street, as it were, the Semitic languages, the Acadian, is much more convenient. in terms of administration because so many other people speak it.

And so you continue to get Sumerian used for royal inscriptions. Again, it speaks of antiquity and power and authority and harks back to the Agadean or three periods of brilliance. But for administration, now it's the language spoken in the street, the Babylonian, the Syrian languages, dialects. of Acadian, which come to dominate. And is that epitomized by when you see the rise of Babylon soon after us, at Hammurabi and so on, that the language that they are using is Acadian.

Sumerian is still there, but to a lesser extent, is more as an intellectual pursuit? That's right. And I think that's what's given the impression that the Sumerians, as a people, have been defeated and has disappeared. But in fact, it's just a change in the use of language by the state. And they've been speaking Akkadian anyway for some time up to that point. They've been speaking Akkadian for forever. So the people endure, so that the Sumerian language changes at that time. Correct.

So when can we really say, I mean, it's a fascinating topic to explore, when can we really say Sumerian has reached its end? When can we say that these Sumerian cities, as in cities where Sumerian, Sumerian was still written, does evidently experience a decline, these cities do fall. So Sumerian has an echo long after the last person has spoken it for thousands of years. But it doesn't define as a way a group of people or a particular culture. It is part of the rebuilding and the remodeling and the reshaping of the reshaping of the, Mesopotamian culture over the millennia as new peoples take power and bring in their own

traditions and we see new forms of economic and political organisation. But Sumerian is there within that framework. So that legacy lives on. But do we have an idea? I mean, will the likes of Ur and a rook when you get to the second millennium BC, will they ever reach the heights that they had in previous centuries, do we see a clear decline in importance of these cities now as time has moved on? In many respects, no. The major changes to many of these cities are largely a result of the movement of the major rivers. And so the shift of the Tigris and the Euphrates and their tributaries and the streams that flow from them across the alluvial plane, they shift in their bed. But that is very often a gradual process or when

it's more violent change, then cities are left abandoned in the desert. But for places like Ur and Uruk, that doesn't happen until much later, the last centuries of the first millennium BC. So we're looking way into the future for the decline of those cities. and many of them continue to survive even as the river shift courses, because kings from other cities, recognizing their great antiquity and their importance and the home of great gods, continue to build there even when the populations are no longer a major component of their existence. So we're almost asking about, you might have to retitle this, maybe with a question mark, full of the Sumerian's question mark at the end. Can we even say that there is a clear

cutoff point for the fall of Sumer, for the fall of these cities, for the fall of the Sumerian language, if they manage to endure in these other forms, if when we mention the word Sumerian you actually have to be more careful with how you say it because the people didn't identify themselves as a Sumerian, you realize as an interviewer, it's much more complicated than simply full of the Sumerians. I think it's much more interesting. I think it's much more complex, real world that we're dealing with. And very often all we're seeing is that top elite royal level, where, of course, there are changes of dynasties and changes of identities, but fundamentally, these mixed populations

connected very much their identity with their cities, and that's something one finds in Iraq to this day. And with Sumerian language, so can we still imagine that there would have been people who knew how to write it, how to interpret it, all the way down to, let's say, the Neo-Assyrians in the first millennium BC, in the great library of Ashadabal, for instance, at Nineveh, or maybe even then transported into the Greco-Roman world. Do we know much about that? That's longevity of Sumerian as a language. So Sumerian is, continues to be written and, I mean, to some extent, of course, spoken in the same way that Latin would be spoken. But it's very much about a literary elite. It's the scribes who are trained in the system of writing and have the intellectual knowledge to be thinking about this. And they too were stumped by the tablets that were coming out of the ground. recording some of these earlier attempts to record Sumerian. And so we see in the new Assyrian period, in the first millennium BC, cuneiform tablets where their scribes are writing some of the more archaic forms of the signs and trying to work out their original meaning in the Sumerian language.

So it's an intellectual endeavor. and it's that intellectual world that really comes to an end when the cuneiform system of writing ends in the early centuries of the common era because Sumerian is embedded in the script and once the script is replaced by alphabetic systems then Sumerian disappears Sumerian as a language endures all the way through the cuneiform tradition that is extraordinary, and yes, as you say, almost the equivalent of Greek, ancient Greek and Latin today as an intellectual pursuit.

Paul, this has been eye-opening. I didn't know much about this topic at all, and you've highlighted so much about these cities and the people and, of course, the language of Sumerian and how it endured over millennia. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Thank you very much. well there you go there was fan favourite of the podcast the british museum's dr paul collins for this our second episode in our great disasters miniseries this september all about the sumerian cities some four thousand years ago and how we probably shouldn't be looking at the fall of a sumerian people but rather the fall of the sumerian language as a spoken language quite like latin today, becoming an intellectual pursuit. It's all really interesting. We'd love to hear your thoughts

about the episode in the comments. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, I would really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts add free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. Thank you.