Sumerian civilization in brief. For everyone and about everything

Sumer was the first urban civilization in the historical region of Southern Mesopotamia (southern part of modern Iraq) during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages. Scientists believe that this was the world's first civilization.

Today you will find out brief information about the Sumerians and their unique civilization. Fans will find this text especially interesting.

Ancient Sumer

When most of humanity was still living in caves, the Sumerians were already creating the first civilization in the south of Mesopotamia - in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (modern Iraq). How this people appeared here is still not known exactly.

Perhaps the Sumerians came from the Caspian regions and reached Mesopotamia approx. 5500 BC e. Over the next 3,000 years, they built the first cities, established a monarchy, and invented writing.

Sumerian civilization

The Sumerian state flourished thanks to irrigated agriculture. The inhabitants of this region built reservoirs and canals, using them to transform dry lands into fertile ones.

Statue from the 24th century BC. e. Sumerian man praying (modern eastern Syria)

The emergence of other innovations also contributed to the increase in productivity: the plow, the wheeled cart and the sailing boat. The Sumerians invented all this.

The abundance of food led to an increase in population, the growth of cities and the opportunity for people to change rural occupations to urban ones.

Traders began to stand out among the Sumerians, and the exchange of local agricultural products for metal, wood and other resources began. Many skilled craftsmen appeared.

At first, Sumerian cities were governed by councils of elders. When conflicts between cities became more frequent, the councils began to appoint military leaders - lugals (in Sumerian - “ big man"). This position was temporary and then became hereditary. Subsequently, the word “lugal” acquired the meaning “king”.

Sumer had twelve independent city-states, each consisting of one or more urban centers surrounded by villages and farmland, and ruled by its own king.

In the middle of the city there was a temple of the patron god. Over time, these temples were transformed into huge stepped structures - ziggurats - up to 50 m high.

The Sumerians were good mathematicians. They used not only the decimal, but also the sexagesimal number system, which is where the division of the circle into 360°, an hour from 60 minutes and a minute from 60 seconds came from.

But greatest achievement Sumerian civilization was the creation of writing, which made it possible to record anything, from trade transactions to laws and interstate treaties.

Sumerian goddess

Around 2350 BC e. Sumer was captured by Semitic tribes that came from the north.

By 1950 BC. e. The Sumerians lost political power, but their writing, laws and religion were preserved in the civilizations of Babylon and Assyria that replaced them.

• Rich Sumerians placed their own images in the sanctuaries of the gods - small clay figurines with hands folded in prayer.
• The first settlements of the Sumerians were located near the coast of the Persian Gulf (south of modern Iraq). Over time, their influence spread throughout Mesopotamia.

The Great Ziggurat of Ur is the best-preserved temple complex of Ancient Mesopotamia.

Sumerian writing

Sumerian writing originates from a primitive counting system: traders and tax collectors applied icons and pictures (pictograms), indicating the number and type of objects, onto wet clay.

Over time, a system of stylized signs developed; they were applied with the sharpened end of a reed stem. The signs were shaped like wedges, which is why they got the name “cuneiform”.

Early cuneiform did not have grammatical elements until after 2500 BC. e. with the help of signs they began to show in what order what was written should be read. Finally, signs were invented that conveyed the sounds of speech.

The standard of war and peace from Ur are panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli, which were probably worn in ceremonial processions. One of them depicts scenes from the military campaign waged by the powerful city-state of Ur around 2500 BC. e. The fragment depicts cattle taken from defeated enemies and paraded before feasting rulers.

The Standard of War and Peace is a pair of inlaid decorative panels discovered by L. Woolley's expedition during excavations of the Sumerian city of Ur.

Main dates of Sumerian civilization

When studying the development and unique civilization of the Sumerians, it should be understood that all dates have relative accuracy. Naturally, all this happened before our era.

Years BC	Event
5400	In Mesopotamia, progressive farming methods appeared for the first time, including irrigation (artificial watering of the land).
3500	The emergence of the first Sumerian cities. Invention of primitive writing.
3400	Uruk (with an area of ​​approximately 200 hectares and a population of approximately 50,000 people) becomes the largest city in Sumer.
3300	The Sumerians invent the potter's wheel and the plow.
3000	In Sumer, pictographic writing was replaced by early cuneiform.
2900	Part of Mesopotamia is devastated by a severe flood; it is believed that it served as the basis for the legend of the Flood, set out in the Old Testament of the Bible.
2750	Gilgamesh, the legendary hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest literary work that has come down to us, becomes the ruler of Uruk.
2600	The rulers of Ur are buried in tombs along with their confidants who were sacrificed.
2500	Writing spreads throughout the world thanks to the development of trade relations.
2350	Sargon of Akkad, ruler of a Semitic tribe that lived in northern Mesopotamia, conquers Sumerian cities. Sargon subsequently unifies the country, founding the first empire known to history.
2100	Ur-Nammu, ruler of Ur, restores the glory of the Sumerian state, establishes scribal schools, proclaims the first set of laws, reforms the calendar, and encourages foreign trade.
1950	After the capture of Ur by the Elamites who came from Western Iran, the role of the Sumerian state in politics came to naught forever.

Well, now you know everything about ancient Sumer that the average educated person should know.

The Sumerians are the first civilization on Earth. It appeared in the Mesopotamia region more than six thousand years ago.

In their calculations, the ancient Sumerians used the ternary system, they were familiar with and the Legends of this people contain descriptions of the origin, structure and development solar system. Her image, created by the ancient Sumerians, is kept in Berlin, in State Museum. However, on ancient map the planet Nibiru is present. It is located between Jupiter and Mars and crosses the system once every 3600 years, so it is not visible to modern people.

The Sumerian civilization developed largely under the influence of Nibiru. According to legends, the ancient people could have contacted with. According to the Sumerians, the Anunaki came to earth from Nibiru.

Ancient stories about space point to an event that occurred about four billion years ago. The Sumerians called it “heavenly battle.” According to history, a catastrophe occurred that changed the overall appearance of the entire solar system

The Sumerian civilization left ancient manuscripts that contain information about the origin intelligent life on the ground. Legends say that the modern human race was created using methods more than three hundred thousand years ago. In other words, the Sumerians indicated that modern people- a civilization of biorobots.

Ancient clay tablets testify in some detail to the first appearance of man. They chronicle the process of its creation, including the mixing of divine and earthly elements, which is similar to in vitro fertilization.

The Sumerian civilization had a fairly large amount of knowledge. The people knew astronomy, chemistry, herbal medicine, and mathematics very well.

The Sumerian civilization was very well developed. This is indicated by the organization of their government. The Sumerians had elected and other bodies corresponding to the power structure in modern understanding.

The Torah (Hebrew Bible), created from the ruins of Sumer, was attributed to Elohim. This name is indicated in and can be interpreted as “Gods”. The Torah quite accurately defined the purpose of creating man as necessary for cultivating the land.

Sumerian legends testify to the creation of Adam. According to the chronicles, the chief scientist of the Anunaki, Enki, was called to the ruler Anu. Together they created Adam. This name comes from the ancient Sumerian name for the earth (“Adamah”). Thus, Adam means "Earthling".

The Sumerian civilization, especially its origin, causes quite a lot of controversy among scientists. The version about its cosmic origin is described in Zecharia Sitchin’s book “The 12th Planet”.

According to archaeological data and documentary facts, the Sumerian culture emerged as a fully developed culture that had its own written language. The religion of the people had cosmogonic roots; a whole pantheon of Gods was present in it and was responsible for natural forces. The main deities were considered KI and AN, personifying the masculine and feminine. The gods had to work quite hard, so they created people to help themselves.

The Sumerians left the world great amount objects used in the modern world: money, wheel and others. Ancient people possessed knowledge of the production of various alloys, mainly bronze.

The Sumerians introduced the Zodiac to carry out astronomical calculations, without reference to months, they also knew about the precessional cycle, they divided the sphere of the sky into twelve segments and united groups of stars into constellations.

The civilization lasted two thousand years. During this relatively short period, she provided invaluable knowledge for the development of humanity in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even more amazing is that the Sumerians mastered the methods of producing alloys. They were the first to learn how to produce bronze, a hard but easily workable alloy that changed the entire course of human history.

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

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

Unlike scientists of later centuries, the Sumerians knew that the Earth revolves around the Sun, the planets move, and the stars do not move.

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

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

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

The Sumerians are the first civilization on Earth.

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

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

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

This can't be true!

And yet this impossible Sumer existed and enriched humanity with so much knowledge that no other civilization gave it.

Moreover, the Sumerian civilization, which mysteriously arose six thousand years ago, also suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Orthodox scholars have several versions on this matter. But the reasons they name for the death of the Sumerian kingdom are just as unconvincing as the versions with which they try to explain its emergence and truly fantastic, incomparable rise.

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

In the 24th century BC, King Sargon the Ancient of Akkad defeated King Lugalzaggisi, the ruler of Sumer, uniting Northern Mesopotamia under his rule. The Babylonian-Assyrian civilization was born on the shoulders of Sumer.

Sumerian architecture

The development of Sumerian architectural thought can be most clearly seen by how the appearance of the temples changes.

In the Sumerian language, the words “house” and “temple” sound the same, so the ancient Sumerians did not distinguish between the concepts of “building a house” and “building a temple.” God is the owner of all the wealth of the city, its master, mortals are only his unworthy servants. The temple is the dwelling of God, it should become evidence of his power, strength, and military valor. In the center of the city, on a high platform, a monumental and majestic structure was erected - a house, the dwelling of the gods - a temple, with stairs or ramps leading to it on both sides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a monumental three-story brick structure, more than 20m high.

The Sumerians built temples carefully and thoughtfully, but residential buildings for people were not distinguished by any special architectural delights. Basically, these were rectangular buildings, all made of the same mud brick. Houses were built without windows; the only source of light was the doorway.

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

The ancient city forever remained in the Akkadian epic “Fenced by Uruk.”

Mythology

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until the end of the 3rd thousand.

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

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

Valery Gulyaev

Sumer. Babylon. Assyria: 5000 years of history

Where did the Sumerians come from?

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

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

b) seal from the temple of Inanna in Uruk.

Beginning III millennium BC e.

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

From an archaeological point of view, a connection is likely ancient Sumerians with the territory of Elam (southwestern Iran).

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

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

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

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

For a long time, there was a widespread theory that classified Sumerian as a Turkic-Mongolian language, but quite a few comparisons were made (for example, Turkic. tengri“sky, god” and Sumerian. dingir"god") were eventually rejected as random coincidences. Also, the long list of proposed Sumerian-Georgian comparisons was not accepted by science.

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

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

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

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

Con. IV millennium BC

Sumerian civilization briefly

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

Many years of searching for a more or less significant language group related to the Sumerian language did not lead to anything, although they were looking everywhere - from Central Asia to the islands of Oceania."

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

It, along with their beliefs, had to be brought from their ancestral homeland by the mountaineers, who paid honor to the gods on the mountain peaks. Moreover, in the Sumerian language the words “country” and “mountain” are written the same way.

The Sumerians themselves say nothing about their origins. Ancient myths they begin the story of the creation of the world with individual cities, “and it’s always that city,” notes Russian historian V.V. Emelyanov, “where the text was created (Lagash), or the sacred cult centers of the Sumerians (Nippur, Eredu).”

Texts from the beginning of the 2nd millennium name the island of Dilmun as the place of origin of life, but they were compiled precisely during the era of active trade and political contacts with Dilmun, therefore they should not be taken as historical evidence.

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

Don't these facts speak about the eastern, Iranian-Indian (of course, pre-Aryan) origin of the Sumerians?

Ill. 34. Vessel with images of animals. Susa. Con. IV millennium BC e.

Another evidence of the epic. The Nippur god Ninurta, fighting on the Iranian plateau with certain monsters seeking to usurp the Sumerian throne, calls them “children of An,” and meanwhile it is well known that An is the most venerable and oldest god of the Sumerians, and, therefore, Ninurta is with his opponents related.

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

Like most questions in Sumerology, this question remains open.

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

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

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

Westenholz suggests understanding “Sumer” as a distortion of the phrase ki-eme-gir -“land of the noble language” (that’s what the Sumerians themselves called their language). There are other, less convincing hypotheses. However, the term “Sumer” has long received citizenship rights in both specialized and popular literature, and no one is going to change it yet.

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

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

So, by the beginning of the 3rd millennium.

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

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

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

e. It seems that writing was invented at the same time, in one center, and from there, in a ready-made and unchanged form, distributed throughout the individual “nomes” of Mesopotamia.”

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

And although Nippur has never been an important political and administrative center, it has always been the “sacred” capital of all “blackheads”. No ruler of a city-state ("noma") was considered legitimate unless he received the blessing of power in the main temple of Enlil in Nippur.

Who ruled the Sumerians at the dawn of their history?

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

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

Sumerian civilization

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

In the Sumerian system, the base is not 10, but 60, but then this base is strangely replaced by the number 10, then 6, and then again by 10, etc. And thus, the positional numbers are arranged in the following row:

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

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

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

We rarely realize that not only our geometry, but also modern way We owe the calculation of time to the Sumerian number system with a sexagesimal base.

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

They are also found in the modern counting system, in which numbers from 1 to 12 are distinguished separately, followed by numbers like 10+3, 10+4, etc.

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

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

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

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

The absence of any other than astronomical possible applications for the products of the numbers 25,920 and 2160 can only mean one thing - this system was developed specifically for astronomical purposes.

It seems that scientists are avoiding answering the question. awkward question, which is as follows: how could the Sumerians, whose civilization lasted only 2 thousand years, notice and record a cycle of celestial movements lasting 25,920 years?

And why does the beginning of their civilization date back to the middle of the period between the zodiac changes? Doesn't this indicate that they inherited astronomy from the gods?

Where could the first civilization have arisen? Some consider the land of Shinar (Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia), which is located in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to be such. In ancient times, this land was called the “House of Two Rivers” - Bit-Nahrain, the Greeks - Mesopotamia, other peoples - Mesopotamia or Mesopotamia. The Tigris River originates in the mountains of Armenia, south of Lake Van, and the sources of the Euphrates lie east of Erzerum, at an altitude of 2,000 meters above sea level. The Tigris and Euphrates connected Mesopotamia with Urartu (Armenia), Iran, Asia Minor, and Syria. The inhabitants of Southern Mesopotamia called themselves "the people of Sumer." It was established that Sumer was located in the south of Mesopotamia (south of today's Baghdad), Akkad occupied the middle part of the country. The border between Sumer and Akkad passed just above the city of Nippur.

According to climatic conditions, Akkad is closer to Assyria. The climate here was more severe. The Sumerians appeared in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates - around the 4th millennium BC. e. Who they were and where they came from, despite many years of persistent searches, is difficult to say for sure. “The Sumerians considered the country of Dilmun, which in our time corresponds to the islands of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, to be the place where humanity appeared,” writes I. Kaneva. “Archaeological data makes it possible to trace the connection of the Sumerians with the territory of ancient Elam, as well as with the cultures of the northern Mesopotamia.”

Ancient authors spoke quite often about Egypt, but there is no information about Sumer, the Sumerians and the Sumerian civilization. The Sumerian language is unique and completely unlike the Semitic languages, which did not exist at all at the time of its appearance. He is also far from developed Indo-European languages. Sumerians are not Semites. Their writing and language (the name of the type of writing was given by Oxford University professor T. Hyde in 1700) is not related to the Semitic-Hamitic ethno-linguistic group. After deciphering the Sumerian language in late XIX centuries, the name of this country found in the Bible - Sin,ar - traditionally began to be associated with the country of Sumer.

To this day it is unclear what was the reason for the appearance of the Sumerians in those parts - global flood or anything else... Science recognizes that the Sumerians most likely were not the first settlers of the Central and Southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerians appeared on the territory of the Southern Mesopotamia no later than the 4th millennium BC. e. However, where they came from here is unknown. There are also a number of hypotheses regarding the places where they could have appeared. Some believe that it could be the Iranian Plateau, the distant mountains of Central Asia () or India. Others see the Sumerians as the Caucasian people (S. Otten). Still others believe that they are the original inhabitants of Mesopotamia (Frankfort). Still others talk about two waves of Sumerian migration from Central Asia or from the Middle East through Central Asia.

The Sumerians developed the very first written language - cuneiform. In a very short period of time, it became so widespread among their people that almost the entire population was literate. Over time, this writing was used by subsequent civilizations. The chronicles of the Sumerian civilization describe what happened on Earth 400–500 thousand years ago.

The Sumerians were skilled builders. Their architects invented the arch. The Sumerians imported material from other countries - cedars were delivered from Aman, stones for statues from Arabia. They created their own letter, an agricultural calendar, the world's first fish hatchery, the first forest protection plantings, a library catalogue, and the first medical prescriptions. There are those who believe that their ancient treatises were used by the compilers of the Bible when writing texts.

The patriarch of modern "world history" W. McNeil believed that the Sumerian written tradition is consistent with the idea that the founders of this civilization came from the south by sea. They conquered the indigenous population, the “black-headed people,” who previously lived in the Tigris and Euphrates valley. They learned to drain swamps and irrigate the land, because L. Woolley’s words are unlikely to be accurate that Mesopotamia used to live in a golden age: “It was a blessed, alluring land. She called, and many responded to her call.”

Although, as the legend says, Eden was once located here. The Book of Genesis gives its location. Some scientists claim that the Gardens of Eden could be located in Egypt. There are no traces of an earthly paradise in Mesopotamian literature. Others saw him at the source of the origin of four rivers (Tigris and Euphrates, Pishon and Geon). The Antiochians believed that paradise was somewhere in the east, perhaps somewhere where the earth meets the sky. According to Ephraim the Syrian, heaven was supposed to be on an island - in the Ocean. The ancient Greeks imagined finding “paradise,” that is, the posthumous abode of the righteous, on islands in the ocean (the so-called Islands of the Blessed).

Plutarch, in his biography of Sertorius, described them: “They are separated from one another by a very narrow strait, located 10,000 stadia from the African coast.” The climate here is favorable due to the temperature and the absence of sudden changes at all times of the year. Paradise was an earth covered with an evergreen garden. This is exactly how the image of the Promised Land was seen, where people are well-fed and happy, eating fruits in the shade of gardens and cool streams.

Research by scientists has provided food for new guesses and hypotheses. In the 1950s, a Danish expedition led by J. Bibby found on the island of Bahrain traces of what others immediately called the ancestral home of the Sumerian civilization. Many believed that this is where the legendary Dilmun was located. In fact, such ancient sources as the poem about the adventures of the gods, rewritten in the 4th millennium BC. e. with even more ancient source, already mentions a certain Arabian country Dilmun.

This "sacred and immaculate country" appears to have once been located on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as nearby lands along the Arabian coast. There is no doubt that it was famous for its wealth, developed trade, and luxurious palaces. The Sumerian poem "Enki and the Universe" also noted as a well-known fact that Dilmun's ships carried timber, gold and silver from Melluch (India). It also says about the mysterious country of Magan. The Dilmun people traded copper, iron, bronze, silver and gold, ivory, pearls, etc. Truly it was a paradise for the rich. Let's say, in the 2nd century BC. e. a Greek traveler described Bahrain as a country where “the doors, walls and roofs of houses were inlaid with ivory, gold, silver and precious stones" Memory of amazing world Arabia survived for a very long time.

As you can see, this circumstance prompted the expedition of J. Bibby, who described his odyssey in the book “In Search of Dilmun.” He found the remains of ancient buildings on the site of a Portuguese fortress. A sacred well was discovered nearby, in which there was a mysterious “throne of God.” Then the memory of the Sacred Throne of Dilmun passed from people to people and from era to era, being reflected in the Bible: “And the Lord God planted a paradise in Eden in the east; and he placed there the man whom he had created.” This is how the fairy tale about this magical land, from where the expulsion of a person was so painful, if it took place, of course.

Looking at the lifeless, dead space of Mesopotamia, where sandstorms are raging and the bright sun is mercilessly scorching, it is somehow difficult to correlate this with paradise, which should delight the eyes of people. Indeed, as M. Nikolsky wrote, it is not easy to find a more inhospitable country (although the climate could have been different earlier). For the Russian and European gaze, accustomed to greenery, there is nothing to fix your eyes on here - only deserts, hills, dunes and swamps. Rain is rare. In spring and summer, the view of Lower Mesopotamia is especially sad and gloomy, because everyone here is sweltering from the heat. In both autumn and winter, this region is a sandy desert, but in spring and summer it turns into a water desert. At the beginning of March the Tigris floods, and in mid-March the Euphrates begins to flood. The waters of the overflowing rivers unite, and the country for the most part turns into one continuous lake. This eternal struggle of the elements is reflected in the myths of Sumer and Babylonia.

Many believed that Sumerian culture was a derivative culture. The Englishman L. Woolley, a researcher of the royal burials in Ur, for example, expressed the following hypothesis: “There is no doubt that the Sumerian civilization arose from elements of three cultures: El-Obeid, Uruk and Jemdet-Nasr, and finally took shape only after their merger. And from this moment on, the inhabitants of Lower Mesopotamia can be called Sumerians. Therefore, I believe,” wrote L. Woolley, “that by the name “Sumerians” we must mean a people whose ancestors, each in their own way, created Sumer with disparate efforts, but by the beginning of the dynastic period, individual traits merged into one civilization.”

Although the origin of the Sumerians (“blackheads”) remains largely a mystery these days, it is known that in the middle of the 4th millennium BC. e. settlements arose - the city-principalities of Eredu, Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, Eshnunna, Nineveh, Babylon, Ur.

The Sumerians were able to create a vast state with its capital at Ur (2112–2015 BC). The kings of the third dynasty did everything possible to appease the gods. The founder of the dynasty, Urnammu, took part in the creation of the first codes of Ancient Mesopotamia. No wonder S. Kramer called him the first “Moses”. He also became famous as a remarkable builder, having erected a number of temples and ziggurats. “For the glory of his mistress Ningal Urnamma, the mighty man, the king of Ur, the king of Sumer and Akkad, erected this magnificent Gipar.” The tower was completed by his sons. The capital had a sacred quarter dedicated to the moon god Nanna and his wife Ningal. The ancient city, of course, did not resemble modern cities in any way.

Ur was an irregular oval only about a kilometer long and up to 700 meters wide. It was surrounded by a wall with a slope made of raw brick (something like a medieval castle), which was surrounded by water on three sides. A ziggurat, a tower with a temple, was erected inside this space. It was called "Heavenly Hill" or "Mountain of God." The height of the “Mountain of God”, on the top of which stood the Nanna Temple, was 53 meters. By the way, the ziggurat in Babylon (“Tower of Babel”) is a copy of the ziggurat in Ur. Probably, of all the similar ziggurats in Iraq, the one at Ur was in the best condition. (The Tower of Babel was destroyed by soldiers.) The Ur ziggurat was an observatory temple. It took 30 million bricks to make it. Little has survived from ancient Ur, the tombs and temples of Ashur, and Assyrian palaces. The fragility of the structures is explained by the fact that they were created from clay (in Babylon, two buildings were built from stone).

Outwardly, the Sumerians differed from the Semitic peoples: they were beardless and beardless, and the Semites wore long curly beards and shoulder-length hair. Anthropologically, the Sumerians belong to a large Caucasian race with elements of a small Mediterranean race. Some of them came from Scythia (according to Rawlinson), from the Hindustan Peninsula (according to I. Dyakonov, etc.), while some came from the island of Dilmun, present-day Bahrain, the Caucasus, etc. It is also argued that, since the Sumerian legend tells of mixing languages ​​and that "in the old good times they were all one people and spoke the same language,” it is possible that all peoples came from one original people (superethnic group).

What people created the Sumerian civilization? What language did the people of Mesopotamia speak? The foundations of civilization in Mesopotamia were laid by the Sumerians. Already in the 6th millennium BC. they were the main population of Mesopotamia, but not its first inhabitants. Gradually occupying southern Mesopotamia, the Sumerians may have met some tribes here. It is not clear where the ancestral home of the Sumerians was located. The Sumerians themselves considered themselves to be from the island of Dilmun in the Persian Gulf. They spoke a language whose relationship with other languages ​​has not yet been established.

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

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

The first cities in human history arose on the territory of Mesopotamia. Already in the 4th millennium BC. large settlements here turn into city-states. A city-state is a self-governing city with its surrounding territory. Typically, each such city had its own temple complex in the form of a high stepped ziggurat tower, a ruler's palace and adobe residential buildings. The cities of Sumer were built on hills and were surrounded by walls. They were divided into separate villages, from the combination of which these cities emerged. In the center of each village there was a temple to the local god. The god of the main village was considered the lord of the entire city. Approximately 40-50 thousand people lived in each of these city-states.

The city of Uruk, located on the Euphrates, played a major role in the development of Sumerian civilization. In the 4th millennium BC. it was the largest city in Mesopotamia. Uruk occupied an area of ​​approximately 7.5 square meters. km., a third of which was under the city, a third was occupied by a palm grove, and the rest of the area was occupied by brick quarries. The inhabited territory of Uruk was 45 hectares. There were 120 different settlements in the Uruk region, indicating rapid population growth. There were several temple complexes in Uruk, and the temples themselves were of considerable size. The Sumerians were excellent builders, although they lacked stone and wood. To protect against water, they lined the buildings. They made long clay cones, fired them, painted them red, white or black, and then pressed them into clay walls to form colorful mosaic panels with patterns imitating wickerwork. In a similar way The red house of Uruk was decorated as a place of public meetings and meetings of the council of elders.

The Sumerian civilization of the Uruk culture period did not always develop in a straightforward manner. The highly artistic so-called has disappeared in pottery production. culture of painted ceramics. This regression was associated with the mass production of clay products made using a potter's wheel. The new masters no longer had time to apply magical patterns to the dishes, since this could slow down the process of mass production of ceramic products, the production of which had to keep pace with the growth of the population and its needs.

Sumerian tribes of Mesopotamia in various places the valleys were engaged in draining swampy soil and using the waters of the Euphrates and then the Tigris to create irrigation agriculture. The creation of an entire system of main canals, on which regular irrigation of fields was based, in combination with well-thought-out agricultural technology, was the most important achievement of the Uruk period.

The main occupation of the Sumerians was agriculture, based on a developed irrigation system. In urban centers, crafts were gaining strength, the specialization of which was rapidly developing. Builders, metallurgists, engravers, and blacksmiths appeared. Jewelry making became a special specialized production. Besides various decorations They made cult figurines and amulets in the form of various animals: bulls, sheep, lions, birds. Having crossed the threshold of the Bronze Age, the Sumerians revived the production of stone vessels, which in the hands of talented anonymous craftsmen became genuine works of art. This is the cult alabaster vessel from Uruk, about 1 m high. It is decorated with an image of a procession with gifts going to the temple. Mesopotamia did not have its own deposits of metal ores. Already in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. The Sumerians began to bring gold, silver, copper, and lead from other regions. Walked briskly international trade in the form of barter transactions or exchanges of gifts. In exchange for wool, fabric, grain, dates and fish, they also received wood and stone. There may have been real trade carried on by sales agents.

The life of Sumerian society developed around the temple. The temple is the center of the area. The creation of cities was preceded by the creation of temples, followed by the resettlement of residents of small tribal settlements under its walls. In all the cities of Sumer there were monumental temple complexes as a kind of symbol of Sumerian civilization. Temples had important social and economic significance. At first, the high priest led the entire life of the city-state. The temples had rich granaries and workshops. They were centers for collecting reserve funds, and trade expeditions were equipped from here. Significant concentrations were concentrated in the temples material values: metal vessels, works of art, various types of jewelry. Here the cultural and intellectual potential Sumer, agronomic and calendar-astronomical observations were carried out. Around 3000 BC Temple households became so complex that they needed to be accounted for. They needed writing, and writing was invented at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennium BC.

The emergence of writing the most important stage in the development of any civilization, in this case Sumerian. If before people stored and transmitted information in oral and artistic form, now they could write it down in order to store it for as long as they wanted.

Writing in Sumer first appeared as a system of drawings, as a pictogram. They drew on damp clay tablets with the corner of a sharpened reed stick. The tablet was then hardened by drying or firing. Each sign-drawing designated either the depicted object itself, or any concept associated with this object. For example, the sign of the foot meant walking, standing, fetching. This ancient form of writing was invented by the Sumerians. Around the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. they handed it over to the Akkadians. By this time, the letter had already largely acquired a wedge-shaped appearance. So, it took at least four centuries for writing to transform from purely reminder signs into an orderly system for transmitting information. The signs turned into a combination of straight lines. Moreover, each line, due to the pressure on the clay with the corner of a rectangular stick, acquired a wedge-shaped character. This type of writing is called cuneiform.

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

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

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

In Sumer there were several political centers led by the Lugals, who claimed dominance in the country. They all lived in constant conflict with each other. There was a fierce struggle for land, for the head sections of irrigation structures, for control over the entire irrigation network. Among the states whose rulers claimed a predominant position were Kish in the north and Lagash in the south. The struggle of Kish with the southern Sumerian city of Uruk is reflected in the cycle of epic poems about Gilgamesh. However, Kish soon overtook Lagash. This city became very powerful and fought successful wars with the neighboring city of Umma. Lagash rulers bore the title ensi and received the title of lugal from the council of elders only temporarily, for the period of the war. But wars were fought more and more often, and the Lugali received almost unlimited power.

The internal position of Lagash was not strong. More than half of all land was the property of the ruler and his family. The situation of the community members, who were in debt to the nobility, worsened. Extortions associated with the growth of the state apparatus have increased. All this caused discontent among various segments of the population and made necessary anti-aristocratic reforms, which were carried out by the ruler (ensi) of Lagash, Uruinimgina, who later accepted the royal title of Lugal. But the reforms turned out to be minor and short-lived. In essence, the situation changed little: the removal of temple farms from the property of the ruler was nominal, the entire government administration remained in place. In addition, Lagash again got involved in the war and suffered defeat in 2312 in the fight with the ruler of Umma Lugalzagesi, who managed to unite all of Sumer for some time. However, the state was only a confederation of city-states (nomes), which Lugalzagesi headed as high priest.

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

In the northern Mesopotamia, such an extraordinary personality suddenly appeared as Sargon of Akkad (the Ancient), a talented commander and statesman. Everything that is known about him fits into the classic formula of an eastern despot: he created a kingdom for himself, became a true king, possessing unlimited power, founded a dynasty, and established the authority of his state in the eyes of other peoples. Legends and traditions about the origin of Sargon brought him closer to the mythical gods and thereby contributed to the growth of his popularity. A foundling raised in the family of a water-carrier, Sargon became the personal servant of the lugal Kish, and then elevated him to no one famous city Akkad, creating his own kingdom there.

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

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

Sargon created a permanent professional army for the first time in world history. The army of the united Mesopotamia numbered 5,400 people. Professional warriors were settled around the city of Akkakda and were completely dependent on the king, obeying only him. Particularly great importance was attached to archers, a more dynamic and operational army than spearmen and shield bearers. Relying on such an army, Sargon and his successors achieved foreign policy, conquering Syria and Cilicia. The state was replenished with raw materials, labor products and living labor with slaves.

The despotic-bureaucratic rule of Sargon created an entire army of officials, a new service nobility, the ranks of which were not replenished. A huge court environment was also created. A despotic form of government was established in Mesopotamia for thousands of years, determining the specifics of the civilization developing here. Already Sargon's grandson Naram-Suen discarded the old traditional title and began to call himself the king of the four cardinal directions. The Akkadian state reached its apogee.

Subsequently, despotism became a special form state power in all ancient eastern states. The essence of despotism was that the ruler at the head of the state had unlimited power. He was the owner of all lands, during the war he was the supreme commander-in-chief, and served as the high priest and judge. Taxes flocked to him. The stability of despotism was based on the belief in the divinity of the king. A despot is a god in human form. The despot exercised his power through an extensive administrative and bureaucratic system. A powerful apparatus of officials controlled and counted, collected taxes and administered justice, organized agricultural and craft work, monitored the state of the irrigation system, and recruited militia for military campaigns.

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

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

This system of labor organization required constant accounting and control. Those who worked received a standard daily ration of 1.5 liters. (male), 0.75 l. (female) barley, a little vegetable oil and wool. This highly centralized bureaucratic system, created by the Third Dynasty of Ur, lasted for about 100 years.

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

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