Ten Inventions by the Sumerians

Introduction

The Sumerians were one of the first urban civilizations in the world, originating in southern Mesopotamia in 4000 BCE. They lived in city-states, including Ur, Uruk, and Eridu, running their own administration system, agriculture, and a complex religious framework. Moreover, they invented many technologies and intellectual elements that determined human development. The Sumerian legacy is still noticeable in various domains, such as writing or time. This article will focus on ten revolutionary Sumerian inventions summarized from academic sources and archaeological materials existed.

1. Cuneiform Writing:
   Humanity’s First Script Cuneiform writing emerged in 3200 BCE and became the first script in history. It started as simple pictographic symbols pressed on moist clay using a reed stylus and then developed into a fully-fledged communication system with hundreds of distinct signs. Initially used in agricultural trading, cuneiform later spread to law codices, myths, hymns, and astronomical records. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest literary works written in cuneiform script. This form of writing was used further on for governing documents, trade, and cultural heritage preservation and influenced future scripts, including Akkadian.
2. The Sexagesimal Base-60 Numerical System
   The Sumerians were the first to deduce the sound value of consonants, or in other words to realize the phonetic nature of these signs, and their habit of intertwining curse words with used symbols to call on their gods is utilized in this context often only the verbal mnemonic survives for the names of the signs. This legacy is still apparent from the standard division of an hour into 60 minutes and a minute into 60 seconds, and the 360 degrees of a circle. Of course, the first parameter isn’t large enough to be useful in many real-world settings, but certainly you could specify a number, such as 60—practically chosen because it is divisible by most major integers (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.), so would get you more precise results [3]. This method could be and was used in Mesopotamia, where entire civilizations were living and working as it evolved, to keep accounting records, design complex buildings, and predict astronomical events. This legacy continued in the Babylonian, Greek and Islamic mathematical traditions that dictated the practices of modern timekeeping and geometry.
3. The Oldest Recorded Recipes

The oldest culinary recipes were inscribed on tablets in cuneiform script discovered in Mesopotamia (Nippur), which were part of an effort to create a record of when various products were planted, harvested, and used in palace or temple economy stores. The tablets contain recipes for stews, broths and breads, providing a rare look at the Sumerians’ cuisine techniques. The plates contained mixtures of meat, vegetables, and spices, indicating not only a taste for flavour but also a tradition of food shared with others and foods with special value.[4] Description. According to Yale University’s Babylonian Collection, the potters who made these dishes designed some purely as “Anguish Bowls” with recipes designed “to become louder, to speak more” with mixtures of ground up ox’s dung, crushed ceramics, ground barley, fats, oils, and, at times, particular names of individuals who were then amongst the living.[4] Writing of recipes assumes a stable literate culture having a high regard for reliability of replication of knowledge.

4. The Wheel: Early Pottery and Transport

Though no one exactly knows the real origin of the wheel, evidence suggests that the very first wheels were developed around 3500 B.C.E. in Sumer in modern Iraq. Originally, it was used for the creation of pottery but was later used in transportation. In Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, the use of wheeled carts pulled by oxen made it easier to move goods, as well as people. ArrayPopulation growth, warfare, and trade all generated money-based exchange [5]. In short, the wheel has had a revolutionary effect on human mobility, facilitating the more efficient transportation of goods and people and facilitating economic growth and urban connectivity.

5. IV – Codified law: The matrix of all law

Even though the most famous was the Code of Hammurabi (circa 1754 BC), there were earlier Sumerian legal code like the code of Ur-Nammu (circa 2100 BC). These codes defined lawsuits and crimes, punishments for violation of the law, and property rights [6]. The Sumarians set up a system for the expression of justice so that laws were made public, and hence could be enforced, in contrast to capricious kin-based customs which were common up to that point in time. Etched in cuneiform, they focused on retribution, the dominance of social superiors and the ultimate power of the state — the fundamental principles that underpin modern legal systems.

6. Brewing Beer: A Holy or Unholy Social Activity?

Sumerians were one of the early civilization to brew beer centuries ago Evidence of brewing has been found in Sumerian tablets dating back to 3100 BCE. Contrary to contemporary hopped beers, the Sumerians’ malted emmer production was already using some form of bread or bread starter (bappir), date, pomegranate, and/or honey in their homebrew [7]. The beverage, also known as alulu, was served at religious rituals and communal meals. A hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, is a poetic recipe for making the beverage. Archaeological discoveries, such as dedicated brewing facilities, demonstrate the brewing of beer was known many centuries before the earliest written evidence from Iraq.

7. IRRIGATION SYSTEMS: Utilizing the Rivers

Confronted with a less than optimal natural environment, the Sumerians invested quite a lot in one of the first large-scale irrigation processes. They built canals, dikes, storage basins, and sluices to manage water from the Tigris and Euphrates to their farms [8]. This invention facilitated reliable agriculture and human settlement, and was a key development in the rise of urban development and civilization. Their works involved hydraulic engineering, and among their achievements were the construction of canals and watermills and the development of water storage and irrigation systems.

8. The Saros Cycle: How Solar Eclipses Are Predicted

The stars were viewed with great accuracy by the Sumerians. They found the “Saros cycle,” which every 18 years or so sees solar and lunar eclipses repeated. This enabled them to predict eclipses to an astonishing degree in their era [9]. Written in cuneiform on clay tablets, these observations were vital for both religious rituals and agricultural planning. The Sumerians believed that celestial events were signs from the Gods and occasionally even had kings replaced if he appeared when there was an eclipse in fear of political disaster.

9. The Archimedes Screw (Pre-Archimedes)

Although it is popularly attributed to Archimedes in the 3rd century BCE, similar versions of the water screw may have been used elsewhere in the world before his time [10]; for example water screws have also been found in Assyrian Mesopotamia dating to the reign of King Sennacherib (r. 704 – 681 BCE) which were perhaps taken from earlier Sumerian mechanisms for irrigation [11]. This contrivance raised water to a height, in consequence of which hanging gardens and terraces of flowers were watered. The principle of the snail cam — a helical surface in a cylindrical chamber — was — nearly a thousand years before the classical Greeks – the product of a very advanced understanding of mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics.

10. (The) First Schooling (Eduba)

Writing became a technology of statecraft with the invention of writing it became necessary to have formal education, and as early as the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE, Sumer(ian) (see Sumer), Sumer had schools called edubbas (“tablet houses”). They were prep schools for scribes who were taught to read, write, do mathematics, and also to perform basic administrative tasks by means of a standardized curriculum and rote learning techniques [11]. The students, mainly boys from privileged families, learned under strict discipline, including the laborious copying by hand of long passages of text for practice. These early institutions are the foundation of modern education and of reading and writing.

Conclusion

“Among the lands of civilization that began with not a powerful state, Pharaonic Egypt and the Indus Valley are the nearest rivals of Sumer; it is not yet clear if these rivals can be dated as early.Translated in time, place, and content, the experience of Sumerian civilization, which was vastly more complex and more culturally influential than the approaches of Pharaonic Egypt, reached the Mediterranean and India, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant and Anatolia.” – Samuel Noah Kramer The […] Sumerians not only developed the first urban civilization, their fundamental discoveries and traditions also continue to be easy to communicate. Their contributions to script, mathematics, farming, education, and law have shaped human societies. Although later civilizations such as the Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans adopted, absorbed, and built on Sumerian knowledge, the Sumerians had become the antecedents of sciences, culture, and technology.

References

1. Kramer, S.N. History Begins at Sumer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
2. Woods, C. “The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing,” Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 2010.
3. Neugebauer, O. The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Dover Publications, 1969.
4. Bottero, J. The Oldest Cuisine in the World, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
5. Piggott, S. The Earliest Wheeled Transport, Cornell University Press, 1983.
6. Roth, M. T. Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, Scholars Press, 1995.
7. Katz, S. H., & Voigt, M. M. “Bread and Beer: The Early Use of Cereals in the Human Diet,” Expedition, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1986.
8. Jacobsen, T. The Waters of Ur, Yale University Press, 1950.
9. Steele, J. M. Observations and Predictions of Eclipse Times by Early Astronomers, Springer, 2000.
10. Dalley, S. Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens, Oxford University Press, 2013.
11. Robson, E. Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History, Princeton University Press, 2008.