Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations | First Cities of Sumer (Lecture 2)

Lecture 2: Cuneiform tablets from 2800 B.C. on illuminate the economic, social, and religious life of the first Sumerian cities. The Sumerians are also revealed as the progenitors of the urban civilization of the ancient Near East based on writing and long-distance trade. Sumerian merchants and immigrants carried their writing, material culture, and aesthetics to Elam and Akkad, to northern Mesopotamia and the Levant, and even to the Egyptian Delta. Cuneiform ultimately inspired diverse writing systems across Eurasia.

Sumerians spoke an agglutinative language (without any known relative), from which pictograms were readily adapted to represent either phonograms or ideograms. By 2600 B.C., cuneiform had been developed to express every grammatical nuance of spoken Sumerian and, thus, made possible government and literature. Furthermore, cuneiform was adapted to the unrelated languages Akkadian and Elamite. Writing had been invented to facilitate commerce and exchange within early Sumerian cities. Long-distance trade fed Sumer with laborers, building materials, and luxuries vital for urban life, and exports of Sumerian manufactured goods stimulated economic growth across the Near East.

Further Reading:
Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer.
H. R. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000–3000 B.C. Translated by E. Lutzeier and K. Northcott.

Lecture 3: https://www.bitchute.com/video/2spX2GDrVghJ/