Sumerian civilization

A detailed Summary of Sumerian civilization


Civilizations have been created throughout the history of the world. There have been hundreds of established civilizations that have worked because of three important key traits. A civilization must have cities, specialized workers, and some form of writing system. (Krieger.et.al.31,32) These three things are what scholars believe make a culture "civilized". (Krieger.et.al.31)

The Sumerians, who lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, are known as the first group of people to become civilized. (Krieger.et.al.31) The first, and most important step they took was the creation of cities. Even the word civilization comes from the Latin word for city. (Krieger.et.al.31) The Sumerians had built at least a dozen cities by 3000 B.C. (Krieger.et.al.31) A city is not just people living closely together, it is a communing center for people to trade, sell and socialize. A trading center is vital to a civilization. This is where civilians get different go


The third and most useful trait of a civilization is a system of writing. This also made its debut in Sumer with the Sumerians. (Krieger.et.al.32) There form of writing was called "cuneiform", which is a Latin word for wedge. (Krieger.et.al.32) Writing became a necessity in city life for priests, merchants, or anyone else that had to keep track of something. (Krieger.et.al.33) Eventually, other forms of writing came into play such as pictographs, ideograms, and cuneiform signs. (Krieger.et.al.33) Pictographs were symbols of commonly traded items such as oxen, a donkey, or a sack of grain. (Krieger.et.al.33) Ideograms were ideas that had a related symbol such as a house for safety. (Krieger.et.al.33) Cuneiform signs stood for syllables instead of a whole word. (Krieger.et.al.33) With these they could put together anything from business records to poems. (Krieger.et.al.33) Because they now had a way of tracking things through writing, their society could function on a more e

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