The Sumerians were one of the earliest urban societies to emerge in the world, in Southern Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago. They developed a writing system whose wedge-shaped strokes would influence the style of scripts in the same geographical area for the next 3000 years. Eventually, all of these diverse writing systems, which encompass both logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic, and syllabic systems, became known as cuneiform.
Ancient Sumerians – The Cradle of Civilization
The Anicent Sumerians are thought to be one of the first urban societies. In 4000 B.C., human beings in many parts of the world still hunted their prey, tended sheep, and lived in caves or huts
The ancient Sumerians’ knowledge included how to control the yearly flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with levees and irrigation canals. Other teams of workers practiced advanced cultivation and harvesting techniques. Division of labor enabled the Sumerians to utilize their skills as craftsmen (carpenters, metalworkers, and sculptors), merchants, boatmen, priests, soldiers, even doctors. Keeping track of so many important things compelled them to create substantial documentation.
As their civilization grew, the Ancient Sumerians invented symbols to represent numbers, creating a system of arithmetic, based on two numerals—10 and 60. While we employ a base-10 system for our mathematical calculations and decimals, the Sumerians chose 60 as their base system. We still utilize the sexagesimal system (counting by 60) in some of our measurements—360° of a circle, minutes, and seconds of time.
It took the Sumerian scribes many hundreds of years to develop their system of writing. Their initial picture writings were clumsy and confusing. Soon their signs began to stand for words rather than objects. Pictures changed into wedge-shaped marks, which formed sentences when placed in a series, i.e. cuneiform . Eventually, each mark represented a sound instead of an idea or object. This significant step enabled Sumerians to convey in writing whatever they could convey by speaking.
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