Original subtitles

In the year 1625, an Italian nobleman named Pietro della

Valle went on a tour of the Middle East.

Della Valle was a prolific traveller. He journeyed around Asia, North Africa,

and even India. He married an Assyrian Christian

princess in Damascus, and now the two of them traveled

together, journeying by horseback and camel,

accompanied by local guides. At this time, travel in this region

couldn't have been more dangerous. The Ottoman and Persian Empires were at

war, fighting over who would rule in Baghdad,

and meanwhile, local bandits took advantage of the chaos to prey on

travelers. In those days, lions even roamed in these

hills. Due to these various dangers, Della

Valle's guides were constantly on edge. It was June the 18th,

1625, when they spotted a distant group of tribesmen

on the horizon. Their guides decided that they might be in danger, and

began to search for a place to hide. In the distance, they spotted the looming

mass of a series of enormous ruins, as Della

Valle later wrote in his memoirs.

Being suspicious to some Arabian vagrants or vagabonds,

for more security we removed a mile further,

and took up our station under a little hill near some ruins of buildings

which we saw from far away.

Della Valle’s group stayed in those ruins for several nights

while their guides negotiated with the local ruler,

asking for safe passage. During the day, under the baking Iraqi

sun, Della Valle passed his time by walking

among those monumental ruins.

Our removal hence being still deferred, I went in the forenoon to take a more

diligent view of the ruins of the above said ancient

building. What it had been, I could not understand,

but I had found it to have been built with very good bricks,

most of which were stamped with certain unknown letters which appeared very

ancient. I observed that they had been cemented

together not with lime, but with bitumen or pitch.

Della Valle was fascinated by the broken fragments of writing that littered the

ground of this ruined place. He explored further and wrote down some

of the symbols that he saw again and again stamped

into the stones and pieces of clay brick. Surveying the ruins again, I found on the

ground some pieces of black marble, hard and fine, engraven

with the same letters as the bricks which seemed to me to be a kind of seal.

Amongst other symbols which I discovered in that short time,

two I found in many places. One was like a pyramid, and the other

resembled a star of eight points.

Della Valle and his wife didn't know it, but they had stumbled

across the ruins of Ur, a city that had formed the center of one of

mankind's first civilizations. This society

was known as Sumer, and it was where so much of the world we know today first

began.

Eventually, negotiations with the local leader

fell apart, and Della Valle's guides no longer felt safe camped out there in

the ruins. They departed in the dead of night and

fled to safety across the desert. In Della Valle’s bags were a few of the

clay tablets that he had found scattered around the

ruins of Ur. These would be the first examples ever

seen in Europe of a language that had been dead and

forgotten for thousands of years. All the way home, Della Valle must have

turned those tablets over in his hands, gazed at their mysterious ancient

symbols. He must have wondered to himself, who had

built those enormous mounds of brick and earth,

all alone out there in the middle of the desert?

What did the symbols on those broken pieces of clay mean,

and if such a great city had once stood there,

what in all the world could have happened to it?

My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations

podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of

the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of

history. I want to ask, what did they have in

common? What led to their fall, and what did it

feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end

of their world?

In this episode, I want to go back to the very beginning

and look at a society that is one of the candidates

for the first-ever technological human civilization.

These are the people of Sumer who we call the Sumerians. I want to show how,

over the course of millennia, the Sumerians would build a society

that would form the blueprint for all that followed after.

I want to show how they rose to invent writing,

mathematics, and the wheel, and built the largest cities that humanity

had ever seen. I want to explore what happened

to cause their final and devastating collapse.

In the highlands of Southeastern Turkey, a range of snow-topped limestone peaks

rise over 3,000 meters above the flat plains beneath.

These are the Taurus mountains. The mountains of Turkey rise so sharply

that rain clouds find it difficult to pass over them.

Instead, these clouds pool in their hollows and valleys,

and give these hills an exceptionally high rate of annual rainfall.

In spring and summer, the warm air means that the clouds are even denser,

and violent thunderstorms rock these mountains, too,

echoing of the stones of the valleys. As a result, this is a landscape shaped

by water. The steep sides of the Taurus mountains

have been eroded to form streams and waterfalls, while underground

rivers have cut into the rock and hollowed out

some of the largest caves in Asia.

Just as it has shaped the rocks, water has also shaped the beliefs

of this region's people. The name of these mountains,

Taurus, comes from the Latin word for bull,

and the reason for this isn't hard to see.

Temples have been unearthed all across these mountains,

decorated with terracotta statues of bulls.

Since ancient times, the people who lived here worshipped the storm god

Teshub. They believed he rode on the back of a bull,

perhaps because the sound of the thunderstorms reminded them

of the thumping of enormous hooves.

Accompanied with the cracking and booming of these thunderstorms,

these heavy spring rains drain into streams,

and join rivers already flowing down from the snowy mountain passes of

Armenia. Soon, these small rivers join together

and flow down from the mountains and out onto the wide, flat plains

beneath in two great majestic watercourses

that run together in near parallel for nearly 2,000

kilometers. The vast floodplain of these rivers

is today the land we call Iraq. In Arabic, this area is called Bilad

al-Rafidayn, the land of the two rivers. In the

west, it has been known since ancient times

by its Greek name, combining the words mesos,

or middle, and potamos, or river. Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers.

These two great waterways are known as the Tigris and the Euphrates.

For millennia, these rivers have brought life

down into the flat floodplain of Iraq, and the source of that life comes from

some of the most lifeless things; the rocks of the mountains themselves.

Virtually all rocks are held together with tiny flecks of two different

materials called quartz and feldspar.

Quartz is a clear, glittering crystal formed from oxygen and silicon,

while feldspar is a complex mineral derived from silicon.

Together, they make up over 60 percent of the earth's crust,

and when rivers cut their roots through the mountain gullies

and underground streams, their waters wash

over the rocks, and dissolve their soluble parts.

But quartz and feldspar don't dissolve in water,

and so, these tiny crystals are carried along by the river

in a cloud of glittering particles. We call this substance silt.

Silt is sometimes known by the more poetic name,

rock flower, and its particles are smaller than a grain of sand.

But these tiny specks can have an enormous impact.

Soil with a high silt content tends to hold water better,

and promotes air circulation. For this reason, silty soil forms the

perfect habitat for most plants.

The rivers Tigris and Euphrates transport

vast amounts of silt down into the lowlands of Iraq

every year, and as a consequence, this flat stretch of otherwise arid

desert has become exceptionally fertile.

For the history of this region and the history of all humanity,

these tiny particles would prove immensely significant.

Other than its rich clay soil, the desert plains of southern Iraq

are an inhospitable landscape. In fact, this is perhaps the last place you might

expect the first human civilizations to arise.

For one thing, the climate of this region is extremely hot

and dry. Summer temperatures can reach over 52 degrees centigrade or

126 degrees Fahrenheit. Rainfall is rare, especially in

summer. Coupled with the strong winds that blow

across these plains, this means that the soil is arid and

windswept. Although the seasonal flooding of

the rivers brings life to the earth, these floods are also unpredictable.

In Egypt, the River Nile flows directly from the Great Lakes of Africa

which act as a stabilizing and regulating force.

But the Tigris and Euphrates depend on the amount of rain

that fell on the mountains of Turkey, Armenia, and Kurdistan,

a quantity that varies greatly from year to year.

Years of drought can often be followed by years of devastating floods,

and during winter, the whole plain is covered

with a thick layer of mud. The region of southern Iraq is also poor

in natural resources. The land is essentially nothing but a flood plain

made of clay and silt. There were no metals to be mined here,

and virtually no stone. Because of all these challenges,

it took early humans a long time to reach

this hostile environment. In the far prehistoric, archaic humans

like Homo Erectus vied for survival in the upper reaches

of the rivers. Archaeologists have found stone axes and

other artifacts dating back to nearly half a million

years ago. But the river lands of southern Iraq

weren't suitable for this hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

But about 13,000 years ago, things began to change.

The first nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down

in permanent villages. These early innovators

had noticed something interesting; they saw that when they threw away the

discarded seeds of edible plants, that same plant would later sprout out

of their rubbish dumps. This gave them an idea.

They realized that if you buried plant seeds in the earth,

fed them and watered them, more of the same plants would grow.

These were some of the first farmers, and once they found a good patch of land,

they quite understandably didn't want to move.

They soon built houses nearby, and storehouses to keep

food through the winter. They banded together

into larger communities in order to divide the labor of farming

and to protect their grain should anyone else try to take it.

They learned how to take the clay from the ground and shape it into pots,

but they were still limited to areas where the rains were plentiful,

to the mountains and the foothills. From about the year 6500 BC,

these human settlements began to spread. Century by century, millennium by

millennium, they worked their way down the courses

of the two great rivers, and into the inhospitable land of

southern Iraq. Who these people were, what language they spoke, and what they

called themselves, we have no idea. Today,

we call this stretch of several thousand years

the Ubaid Period, named quite arbitrarily after the site where their first

artifacts were found.

As the Ubaid people moved down the rivers of Iraq,

they began to notice other things, too. They noticed that date palms grew

in some areas of the river, providing them

with a rich and delicious source of calories.

They soon found out that these, too, could be cultivated

and planted in orchards. They also noticed that these palms

could provide shade for other more fragile plants,

allowing them to be grown, too, beneath the harsh Iraqi sun.

They made another crucial discovery, too.

They realized that they didn't have to grow their plants only on the banks of

the river. With a bit of hard work, they could dig

channels that diverted the life-giving water

inland. Now, they could grow crops just about

anywhere, so long as you could dig a canal long

enough. The people of this region would soon

become very good at digging canals.

Worked properly in this manner, this landscape

could be immensely productive. In their fields, the people here grew

wheat, millet, and sesame. In gardens beneath the

shade of their date palms, they also grew pomegranates, grapes, and

figs, as well as chickpeas, lentils, leeks,

garlic, cucumbers, and watercress.

But there was one noticeable patch of green

in the midst of all this desert. In the south of Iraq, the rivers Tigris

and Euphrates branched into deltas and shallow lakes

before they meet the ocean, creating an ancient marsh landscape.

Here, dense thickets of reeds grow, so tall you can't see over the tops of

them, populated with buffalo, wild boar, and marshland birds.

Since ancient times, the people here have built their houses out of reeds,

binding them together into incredibly strong beams of up to a meter thick,

and building large, vaulted houses out of nothing but reeds.

It's in this marshy southern landscape that the greatest Sumerian

cities

rose.

Just as Mesopotamia was watered by two great rivers,

its lands were also populated by two great peoples.

These were the people of Sumer and the people of Akkad.

Over the course of their history, the Sumerians and the Akkadians

grew together in such a symbiotic way that it's impossible to tell the story

of one without the other. We know

a decent amount about the Akkadian people in the north.

They spoke a language in the Semitic family,

meaning that it's in the same language family as the Aramaic of the Bible,

and later Hebrew and Arabic. This language seems to have been

indigenous to the region, and it shares grammar and words with

many other languages that surrounded it. But the Sumerian people are much more

mysterious. In fact, they are such a mystery that

they have caused archaeologists to refer to what's called The Sumerian Problem.

Sumerians spoke what we call a language isolate.

That is, it has no relation to any of the languages around it,

and it's essentially in a language family all of its own.

Sumerian was so alien to the region that early scholars who discovered its first

texts didn't believe it could be a real language at all.

They thought it must have been a kind of code used to communicate in secret.

This alone has led some historians to ask

whether the Sumerians may have arrived in southern Iraq

from somewhere else.

The Sumerian culture centered on the sea coast

of Iraq's far south, and so, some have suggested

that they may have arrived by boat. Some backing for this theory may come in the

writings of Roman historian Flavius Josephus, who

wrote down a Babylonian legend that he heard in the first century AD.

It relates the story of a half-man, half-fish

called Oannes who walked out of the sea and taught the people of Mesopotamia the

secrets of culture. He brought them the knowledge of letters,

sciences, and all kinds of techniques. He also taught them how to found cities,

build temples, create laws, and measure plots of land. He

revealed to them how to work the land and gather fruits.

After teaching mankind all these secrets, Oannes leaps back into the sea and swims

away. It's possible that in this myth, ancient

storytellers have preserved some memory of the arrival of the

Sumerians landing en masse by boat, and bringing

with them their advanced urban culture.

Some have even argued that the Sumerians may have come

from as far afield as India.

More evidence for the migration theory seems to come from the words

that the Sumerians used for their professions.

For more common jobs, the ones that involved manual labor,

the Sumerians used old, pre-Sumerian words.

Meanwhile, they brought new words with them to describe more sophisticated

and urban occupations. For instance, the words for ‘scribe’ and ‘winemaker’ are

both distinctly Sumerian.

But others have proposed a more interesting theory

which does seem to solve some of these contradictions.

Although it does seem a little far-fetched, I think it is worth

mentioning here. The clue to this theory comes, once again,

from mythology.

The Sumerian version of history was dominated

by a devastating event of apocalyptic proportions.

If you were brought up reading Bible stories, you may

find it familiar. The Sumerians believed that in a time long before,

in the time of their most distant ancestors,

a great flood had washed over the world. This same story would later pass on into

the legends of the Babylonian Empire, and from there, to the Hebrew poets who

wrote the first books of the Bible. For this reason, the story of the flood

is perhaps the oldest, continuously-told story, and it's in this

legend that the clue to the origin of the

Sumerians might lie. The story of the flood is so striking

that many historians with varying degrees of credibility have

tried to come up with some historical event

that may have inspired it, and history is actually

full of great inundations.

When the last ice age ended around 10,000 BC,

global temperatures rose between four to seven degrees

over a period of about five thousand years.

Up until that point, vast ice sheets had covered the land in the north of the

planet, reaching as far south as Berlin.

But as temperatures rose, these ice caps melted,

and their water poured back into the oceans.

Global sea levels rose an average of two- -and-a-half centimeters a year,

until by the end, the sea had risen an incredible

120 meters, or enough to completely swallow

a 30-storey building. Around the world, the sea engulfed vast

regions of the coast. The land bridge that had once connected

Russia and Alaska was submerged, separating Asia and the

Americas forever. Low-lying regions of what is now

Europe's North Sea flooded, turning Great Britain into an

island. In the Middle East, the effects were

felt just as dramatically. During the low sea levels of the ice age,

the Tigris and Euphrates had flowed for a further 600 kilometers,

joining into a single river, and meandering along a stretch of low-lying

valley wedged between what is now Iran and

Saudi Arabia. This grand river would have met the

Indian Ocean around the region of Dubai today.

Some historians have argued that Neolithic humans

may have made their home in this fertile valley,

having journeyed down from the mountains of Iran.

But as the glaciers melted, the sea advanced. Slowly at first, but with an

increasing speed. Over the next five thousand years, the

coastline would have moved an average rate of 120

meters a year. That's over a kilometer

every ten years, or one meter every three days. If there were humans

living in this low-lying region at the time,

this event must have been utterly terrifying.

The next centuries would see these people driven north

by the encroaching waves which swallowed whole forests and villages.

These people would have been pressed into ever-denser populations,

forced to adapt as they went. They would have been

a roving band of refugees, never able to settle anywhere for long

before the sea made its next advance. This exodus would have continued until

the planet's temperature stabilized and the sea coast reached its

furthest point, right around the year 5000 BC,

just at the time that Sumerian culture as we know it

burst onto the historical stage.

This is a theory that I think deserves some consideration;

that as the waves of Semitic-speaking farmers

moved down the rivers from the mountains to the north,

they met another population coming up from the south,

a ravaged and devastated people speaking a language

that had evolved independently, and telling tales

of a flood that had drowned the whole world.

This theory could be supported by that legend

of the amphibious fish-man Oannes. Is it possible that the Sumerians came

to southern Iraq not by boat, but actually walking out of

a land that was now at the bottom of the sea?

Another legend called The Myth of Enki and Ninhursag

relates a creation story in which the god Enki

creates man in a land called Dilmun. Like the Garden of Eden, Dilmun is an

earthly paradise.

In Dilmun, the crow does not utter its cry, the lion does not kill,

the wolf does not seize the lamb, the wild dog,

devourer of kids, is unknown.

Dilmun is thought to have been what is now Bahrain,

an island in the middle of the Persian Gulf,

that body of water that was once a fertile river valley.

All we have on this subject is speculation,

and until any further evidence is found, this

will remain just a theory. But as a storyteller,

I can't help but be drawn to this colorful explanation.

When we try to work out the truth of what happened

in this incredibly distant past, we are reminded that history is not a rigid

set of dates and facts, but a continuing

process of inquiry and debate. It can sometimes

feel like mapping the surface of a planet in

another solar system, or like exploring the dark depths of the

deep sea, and all we have to work with are the

small spots of light that history provides.

We may never know the truth about where the Sumerians came from,

but there is plenty that we do know.

The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg ga,

or ‘the black-headed people’, and the Akkadians called them tsalmat-qaqqadi,

which meant the same thing in their own language.

From carvings that depict Sumerians, we can see how they wore their hair;

curly on top, and cut short on the sides. Common men wore sheepskin kilts while

the richer people would have worn coloured fabrics spun

from wool, decorated with tassels and beads.

Among the wealthy, both men and women wore jewelry;

anklets, bracelets, necklaces, and ear ornaments,

made of copper and sometimes gold. Remarkably, we also have a great deal of

evidence about Sumerian music. Like everything

else, the Sumerians wrote their music down on

clay tablets, and we've also discovered other texts

that explain how to play it, including how to tune the instruments.

Today, we're able to hear the sounds of the music

that once played in the temples and courtyards

of cities like Eridu, Ur, and Uruk.

These two great peoples, the Semitic Akkadians

and the Sumerians, formed a symbiosis over the next centuries

that would see their cultures run in parallel,

just like their two great rivers. They shared their successes and advances,

they shared the cities that were even now growing

to become the largest ever seen, but they also shared

their failures. As a result, their fates became inextricably

intertwined.

The Sumerians believed that the world was a roughly

circular landmass surrounded on all sides by a huge body of water.

They believed that another ocean also lay above their heads,

held in place by the solid structure of the sky

which occasionally let some of this water through as

rain. They divided water into two types; that of the rain and rivers, sweet water,

and that of the sea, bitter water. Sumerians called their homeland

ki-en-gi(-r), which means ‘the land of the noble lords’.

To describe the settled societies of the Sumerians and Akkadians,

they used the word ‘kalam’, meaning ‘civilized’,

while they used the word ‘kur’ to describe the mountainous zones

bordering the plains. ‘Kur’, in the Sumerian language,

meant ‘mountain’, but it also came to mean ‘rebellious’, ‘barbarous’, and ‘wild’.

At this time, that's how the outside world must have looked to them.

To their south and west, the vast desert of Arabia yawned,

a rolling sea of sand dunes where nothing grew,

home to fierce nomadic tribes. To the north, the rocky Taurus mountains

of Turkey and Kurdistan hemmed them in, full

of hardy mountain people, while the Zagros mountains of Iran

formed the edge of their world to the east.

Today, the Arabic word for the region of upper Mesopotamia

still holds within it a sense of this feeling of isolation.

They call it Al-Jazeerah, meaning ‘the island.’ But despite the challenges of

their landscape, the Sumerians flourished. They had no

stone to build with, so instead they learned to make bricks

from the river mud, mixing them with straw, gravel, and broken

pottery, and baking them. With clay, they made

everything from pots and plates to sickles and writing

tablets. They had no wood, so instead they

harvested vast numbers of reeds, tying them together into bundles, and

platting them together into mats.

The Sumerians invented or adopted the pottery wheel,

the wagon wheel, the plow, and the sailboat.

Their buildings used complex arches and domes.

They worked out how to cast metals such as copper,

and later, bronze. The Sumerians were also

avid mathematicians. They developed complex systems of measurement,

as well as methods for dividing, multiplying, and calculating angles,

even writing down the first-ever multiplication tables on clay tablets.

We actually use Sumerian mathematics every day.

It was the Sumerians who divided time into the minutes and seconds we still

use, and since their number system worked on

a base of 60 rather than our system of 10, that's why

we have 60 minutes in an hour. The reason for using 60 as

the base of a number system is actually quite simple, and it's rooted

in the design of our bodies. If you hold your hand out

in front of you right now, you'll notice that each of your four

fingers is divided into three segments. It's thought that ancient people would

use the thumb of their right hand to tap each segment of the finger

counting up to 12. When they reached 12, they would raise a

finger on their left hand, counting up the 12s. When you had

five fingers raised on your left hand you had 60, and you had to start again.

The fact that there were 12 cycles of the moon in each year

would have confirmed for the Sumerians that this was the number system

intended by the gods. The 360 degrees we still use in angle measurement

is another relic of this system.

Due to this spark of ingenuity, Sumerian society grew

at a slow but steady pace. They dug vast networks of irrigation

canals that extended the agricultural zone

around the rivers, and also allowed them to transport goods

in canal boats. They built dams to regulate the flow of

the rivers and ensure that the spring floods came

in a more controlled way. In fact, the Sumerian language has a vast

array of words to describe the different kinds of

canals, reservoirs, dams, and lock gates required to control

their water. Gradually, the landscape of southern Iraq

transformed from dusty salt flats and marshy swamps

to a green patchwork of farmland.

Many historians have argued that it was the digging of these canals and

watercourses that originally led to the greater

social organization we see during the Sumerian period.

These extensive systems of water management needed careful planning,

engineering expertise, and mathematical calculations.

Work teams needed to be organized, and paid in

food and beer. Foremen and overseers needed to be appointed, and all of this

led to a kind of early bureaucracy that gave rise to the first

true states. In the 1930s, historian Arnold Toynbee famously argued

that it was just these environmental challenges in southern Iraq

that created the conditions in which civilization

could be created.

The desiccation of the region impelled the fathers of the Sumeric civilization

to come to grips with the jungle swamp of the lower valley of the Tigris and

Euphrates, and to transform it. The ordeal through

which the fathers of the Sumeric civilization

passed is commemorated in Sumeric legend.

The slaying of the dragon Tiamat by the god Marduk

and the creation of the world out of her mortal remains

signifies the subjugation of the primeval wilderness

and the creation of the land by the canalization of the waters and the

draining of the soil.

The tough semi-desert landscape created what he called

a ‘stimulus and response effect’ in these early people.

Toynbee argues that in conditions that are too comfortable,

people have little need of increased social organization

or technological development. In conditions that are too harsh,

society finds it impossible to develop. He argues that it's in environments such

as southern Iraq, where the challenges are numerous but

not overwhelming, that a cradle of civilization can occur.

According to Sumerian texts, the first city in the region

was the city of Eridu. One controversial document known as the

Sumerian King List describes Eridu as the place where the

god Enki first decided that a king should rule.

When kingship from heaven was lowered, the kingship was in Eridu.

In Eridu, Alulim became king. He ruled for 28,800

years. Alalngar ruled for 36,000 years.

For obvious reasons, many historians have questioned

the reliability of this source. Some have even gone so far as to call it

a piece of utter fiction, or a later piece of propaganda

designed to legitimize a usurper to the throne.

But the King List does tell us how the Sumerians,

of at least one point, thought of their history,

and many have argued that Eridu may well have been

the world's first city. Eridu was founded around the year

5400 BC. That's nearly seven and a half millennia

ago. At this time, populations of woolly

mammoths, survivors of the end of the ice age,

still roamed in remote parts of the world.

Eridu was populated by Sumerian speakers, and soon it would make up just one of a

whole constellation of small cities that dotted the

landscape of southern Iraq. These independent

city-states were centered around their temples,

and ruled by priest kings known as the Ensi. Records show that these

Ensi were often assisted by a council of elders

which included both men and women. Most of the largest cities in this

period were probably no bigger than about 10,000

people. The borders of these city states

were defined by the courses of canals and specially-created boundary stones,

carved monuments left jutting out of the earth to mark

the line between one territory and another.

Slowly, these cities began to eclipse the old Ubaid culture that had preceded them.

Art and architecture began to take on the form that we would truly call

Sumerian, and technology also began to take huge leaps forward.

This first period seems to have been a time

of relative peace. There's little evidence of

organized warfare or the keeping of professional soldiers

in these early cities. Most towns during this period went without

walls. One exceptionally ancient Sumerian myth

called The Gifts of Inanna seems to capture

some of the spirit of this period of transition.

It describes technology and the refinements of civilization

being handed down by Enki, the king of the gods,

to his daughter, the goddess Inanna. She later passes them down to the people

of Sumer. Holy Inanna received the craft of the

carpenter, the craft of the coppersmith, the craft

of the scribe, the craft of the smith, the craft of the

leatherworker, the craft of the builder, the craft of

the reed worker. Holy Inanna received wisdom, the

shepherd's hut, the knowledge to pile up glowing

charcoals, the sheepfold.

Enki teaches Inanna about family, the proper laws of inheritance,

and the art of good judgment. But he also goes on to give her other gifts,

some of which show that the darker side of civilization

was already beginning to make itself known.

Holy Inanna received deceit and the rebel lands.

Holy Inanna received heroism, power, wickedness, the plundering of cities, and

the making of lamentations. It may be that the ancient Sumerians

already recognized, right at the dawn of settled human

society, what the scholar Walter Benjamin would

one day write, that there is no record of civilization

that is not at the same time a record of barbarism.

It's true that during this period, the Sumerians began

practices that would begin a sorrowful phase

of human history. Among them is the use of slave labor.

They captured men and women from the hill countries outside their borders,

and used their labor to fuel the growth of their own

economy.

In the last episode, I used the metaphor of the death of stars

to talk about the life cycle that empires often pass through,

but we might also think about the birth of civilizations

in this way. The first stars were born from gas clouds compacted

together under the weight of their own gravity

into a spinning ball of matter. Under enough pressure, the temperature of

the star's core increased and finally, nuclear fusion

began. The first stars burst into light.

When enough people gather together in one place, that settlement obtains a kind

of gravity. It draws other people towards it, and as

the size of the settlement increases, so does pressure on its various systems.

In some cases, this pressure results in those people

being fused together into more complex forms of organization.

Sometime around the year 3200 BC, the first stars of these human

settlements began to burst into light. That light was the invention of

writing.

One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta

gives the first known story about the invention of writing.

This poem attributes the invention to a king

who has to send so many messages that his messenger can't remember them all.

Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat the message,

the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it like a tablet.

Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.

The Sumerians had two things around them in virtually

limitless abundance; that's the clay beneath their feet,

and the reeds that grew in the marshes and along the banks of the rivers.

It's these two resources that combined to form

the first human writing. Sumerian scribes would pick up a lump of

clay big enough to fit in their hand. In fact, about the size of

a modern smartphone. They would take a piece of reed cut

into the shape of a wedge, and print it over and over into the clay

to form symbols. The distinctive wedge shapes of the

reeds give this form of writing its name. We call it

cuneiform.

The oldest cuneiform clay tablets come from the city of Uruk, and date to the

late fourth millennium, probably around the

32nd or 31st centuries.

This script originally consisted of pictographs,

small pictures designed to depict objects so everyone could understand

what they represented. These were first used to keep track of

everyday things like rations and supplies. On some of

these very early tablets, you can still see very clearly what they

mean. A bowl of food is depicted with an

eating mouth next to six impressions, and a sheaf of

wheat next to five. This indicates that a worker can

exchange this tablet for six bowls of food and five sheaths

of wheat. Scribes would have had to work fast,

copying hundreds of documents throughout their day.

Slowly, this pressure meant that the signs

had to become simpler and more abstract. Before long, they no longer looked like

the objects they described. After the year 3000, the number of

symbols was reduced from around 1,500 to about 600,

and someone else had the bright idea that each symbol

could stand for a certain sound instead of a whole idea.

This was the beginning of the first alphabet,

but it meant that now only an educated few

could understand writing, and soon, a separate class of scribes emerged.

The human brain would never be the same again.

People could now read the words of kings and scribes

who had died hundreds of years before. They could also begin to write down

everything that they had learned so it could be remembered, and more

importantly, it could be built upon.

Partly due to this ability to record knowledge, the technology of Sumer around

this time began to take even greater leaps forward.

This next period of history would be known as the Period of Uruk.

The period is named after the city of Uruk,

which by the middle of the 4th millennium BC,

had grown into the largest and most powerful city

in southern Mesopotamia. One of the key ways that historians mark

the shift into the Uruk Period is by observing a dramatic change that

occurred around this time in the region's pottery. If you're

thinking that the pottery must have got more sophisticated and ornate as

technology improved, then you're mistaken. In fact, the ancient

pottery of the Ubaid Period was exceptionally beautiful. It was made

on a device known as a slow wheel, and painted with distinctive geometrical

designs in brown or black. It was a luxury item

for the select few. The shift to the Uruk Period

saw a great increase in the amount of pottery produced,

but the quality fell dramatically. Thanks to a technology known as the fast

wheel, clay jars and pots could now be made in

great numbers by workmen in intensive workshops.

This was the first era of mass production.

The booming economy of the Sumerian cities

comes to life in their documents. The clay tablets tell us that in the

city of Girsu, for instance, fifteen thousand women were employed in

the textile Industry. One factory produced eleven hundred tons

of flour a year, as well as bread, beer, and linseed oil.

This factory employed 134 specialists and 858 skilled workers,

of which the vast majority were women. Since there was no currency at this time,

workers were paid directly in food and other goods. The minimum ration

of an unskilled factory worker consisted of 20 liters of barley a month,

along with 2 litres of oil, and two kilos of wool per year.

Meanwhile, their supervisor would earn roughly twice this ration.

The poor in Sumerian society were downtrodden

and were probably pretty miserable. They often had to borrow

food or silver from predatory money lenders

at crushing interest rates of as high as 30 percent.

But despite this rising inequality, by the middle of the

fourth millennium BC, economic advancement

meant that the city of Uruk had grown into the largest and most powerful city

in southern Mesopotamia. This was around the year 3500 BC,

or over 5,000 years ago.

By this time, nearly 2,000 years had already passed

since the original founding of the first city at Eridu.

That's enough time to take us from the present moment to the age of Julius

Caesar. By this time, Sumerian civilization was

already ancient, but the very earliest of the pyramids of

Egypt would still not be built for another 900 years.

In Britain, the Neolithic monument Stonehenge

was at this time just a series of barrows and earthworks,

and its large stones would not be moved into place

for another 1,300 years. When writing was invented in Uruk in the

32nd century BC, the last population of woolly

mammoths to survive the end of the ice age

were still clinging to life on a rocky outcrop

in the East Siberian Sea known as Wrangel Island.

By this time, Uruk would have had about 50,000

inhabitants. That's only enough to fill

a modern medium-sized football stadium. But at this time, it was the largest city

that the earth had ever seen. The world's earliest surviving piece of

literature, known as the Epic of Gilgamesh, begins in

this city. It is the story of a king of Uruk named

Gilgamesh, who likely ruled some time in the third

millennium. Whatever the historical facts of his

reign are, Gilgamesh made enough of an impression as a ruler

that he went down into legend as a mythical hero,

two-thirds god and one-third man. Although there's much more myth than

fact in this ancient tale, the Gilgamesh epic does tell us a

little about how Sumerian society changed

in the early centuries of the third millennium.

For one thing, it's clear that warfare had begun to increase

in the region. The tale opens in the powerful city of Uruk,

and one feature of the city is mentioned as a great source of pride.

That's a ring of enormous fortified walls,

as these lines from the epic of Gilgamesh show.

Behold the outer walls which gleam like copper!

See the inner wall which none can rival! Touch the threshold stone – it is from

ancient days! Go up and walk on the wall of Uruk!

Inspect the cornerstone, and examine its brickwork!

Is it not built of baked brick? It's clear that city walls were now a

necessity, but we can tell from the great pride

shown in Uruk’s fortifications that they may have also been quite rare.

In fact, throughout the story, the city is referred to repeatedly

as ‘strong walled Uruk.’ We also get a sense of how the city was

divided during this time, suggesting some level of urban planning

from its rulers. These parts comprise Uruk. One-third for

city, one-third for garden, one-third for field,

and a precinct for the temple of Ishtar. At the height of the Uruk Period, the

city covered an area of two and a half square kilometers.

It had a port on the river, along with workshops and cluttered houses.

At the center of the city was Uruk's famous White Temple.

It was elevated 21 meters, and covered in white

gypsum plaster that reflected the sunlight

and would have caused the temple to glow during the day.

If you walked the streets of Uruk during this time,

you would have seen markets full of produce like beans and lentils,

pomegranates and dates, jars of date syrup, and oil.

In the richer parts of town, houses would be built from baked bricks.

But elsewhere they would be mud and clay, dried in the sun. The houses would likely

be arranged in a chaotic way, creating a labyrinth of alleys and

warrens, covered by reed matting to keep them

cool in the heat of the day. Farmers would be carrying large bundles

of reeds and wheat on their backs, and herders would bring their

long-haired sheep and oxen into the city.

Here and there, you would see men sitting in circles

in shaded courtyards, sharing a large jar of beer in the center,

all sipping it through long straws made of hollow reeds.

While the Sumerians did import some wines from the northern regions,

it was beer that they loved most of all. They had over 30 different varieties,

with names like ‘white’, ‘dark’, ‘cloudy’, and ‘sweetened with honey’.

Some of their beer was flavoured with herbs. It was brewed directly from the

wheat and barley of the fields, and if you bought the cheapest kind, it

would often still have seeds of grain floating at the bottom. One cuneiform

text has even preserved a kind of drinking

song. I will summon brewers and cupbearers to

serve us floods of beer and pass it around!

What pleasure! What delight! Blissfully to take it in,

to sing jubilantly of this noble liquor, our hearts enchanted and our souls

radiant.

We can imagine the conversations that these ancient people would have had

around their jars of beer; probably not that different to the conversations

you'd find in any bar or pub today.

Some of these everyday concerns have been preserved in lists of ancient

Sumerian proverbs. These groups of beer-drinkers would

doubtless have complained that they were not appreciated at work.

I am a thoroughbred steed but I am hitched to a mule,

and must draw a cart and carry reeds and stubble.

Others would have commiserated about one of the oldest human concerns;

not having enough money.

The poor man is better dead than alive; if he has bread,

he has no salt. If he has salt, he has no bread.

As with drinkers in all parts of history, they would have fallen out,

and shouted insults at each other in the streets.

If you were put in water, the water would become foul.

If you were put in a garden, the fruit would rot.

At night, people usually slept on their rooftops,

since the heat inside the houses would have been too much for them.

The city would have been a pungent mixture of smells.

Pottery kilns and brickworks would have belched smoke throughout the day.

There were no drainage systems in the roads, and people would have thrown their

waste out into the street. In the houses,

people laid down layers of clay, crushed gypsum dust,

and reed mats to create a soft, carpet-like effect.

From the epicentre of this great metropolis,

the Uruk civilization sent out ripples across the world,

and eventually, a number of similarly great cities

rose up around it. But as the fourth millennium drew to a close,

another Sumerian city was rising in power,

and soon, it would take Uruk's place as the new

center of Sumerian culture. It would flourish into realms of untold

wealth, and push the boundaries of what humanity

thought possible in the realms of art and architecture.

It's the city whose ruins we opened this episode with,

and the name of that city was Ur.

Ur was situated right at the point where the Euphrates River met the sea.

It was a trading port and fishing town where seagulls would have circled,

and fishermen came in with their catches of fish,

oysters, and turtles. Its position both on the sea

and the river would have made it a booming hub

of the region's trade. As we've already seen, if you needed clay

or reeds, southern Iraq was the place to be.

But for virtually everything else they needed, the Sumerians had to import

from other lands. But luckily for them, they always had something to trade.

They were alone among almost all the nations of the ancient

Middle East, in that they produced a large surplus and variety of food.

Archaeology shows that due to their farming abilities,

the Mesopotamians of antiquity enjoyed a far more rich and varied diet

than their neighbors in either Turkey or Iran.

We have even uncovered some ancient Sumerian recipes

written down on clay tablets. This is the recipe for a dish they

called Tuh’u, and it gives you a sense of the variety

they enjoyed.

Get the water ready. Add fat, salt, beer, onion, rocket, coriander,

semolina, cumin, and beetroot. Add them to the cooking pot, then pound

leek and garlic together, and add. Let all blend and reduce to a pulp, then

sprinkle with coriander and carrot.

Boats full of wheat and grains, dried reeds, and figs

were now forging up the rivers, bringing food to all the neighboring lands.

In return, other resources flowed back.

Copper came down from the mountains of northwestern Iran,

and later by ship from the island of Cyprus.

Tin travelled through the long mountain passes from Afghanistan,

as it would throughout the later Bronze Age.

Silver came down the Euphrates on barges from Turkey's Taurus mountains, while

gold came over land from Egypt, and by ship from India. Ordinary wood for

everyday building could be chopped in the Zagros mountains

of Iran to the east. But for finer constructions; for palaces

and ornate city gates, only the prized wood of the cedar tree

would do. This was brought by ship from Lebanon,

where it grew among the high mountain passes.

In fact, one episode in the epic of Gilgamesh

relates the king's quest to slay a monster in the mountains of Lebanon,

and steal this beautiful wood from its forest.

The ancient Sumerians traded in what we would consider a truly globalized way.

From their tiny coasts on the Persian Gulf, their ships sailed out to trading

ports in modern Bahrain and Oman. From there, they sailed along the

coast to trade with another of the world's most ancient and mysterious

cultures, the people we know today as the Indus

Valley Civilization.

From there, the Sumerians got all kinds of spices,

and gemstones like carnelian, as well as the brilliant blue Lapis Lazuli

that the Sumerians adored. They used it to make jewelry and amulets,

inlays in gaming boards, musical instruments, and sculptures of

astonishing beauty.

All of this trade would have passed through Ur

and swelled the city to a wealth that likely no

other human habitation had ever achieved. Grave goods uncovered in Ur show not

only the incredible wealth of its rulers, but also magnificent craftsmanship that

suggests an advanced community of artists.

One such artifact found in a royal tomb in Ur has given us an incredible insight

into the lives and manners of the ancient Sumerians.

It's an ornate, decorative piece of furniture,

inlaid with a mosaic of shell, red limestone, and Lapis Lazuli.

Its images show detailed scenes from everyday life

around 4,600 years ago.

Today, it is called the Standard of Ur.

On one side, the artifact shows images of the Sumerians at war;

the chariots pulled by donkeys, the soldiers wearing leather capes and

helmets, the men carrying spears and axes.

On the other side, it depicts the Sumerians at peace;

farmers and herders working on one level, and above them, the scribes with their

shaved heads sitting at their desks.

At this time, urbanism in the Sumerian world was reaching its peak.

By the end of the third millennium, a majority of the region's population

would live in cities, and in this newly urbanized

world, the economic power of Ur remained king.

Over the next centuries, its power expanded and contracted,

and at one point, some of its kings wrote inscriptions

calling themselves both the King of Ur and the King of Kish,

another city that lay nearby. This suggests that Ur

may have subdued some of its neighbors under its political control.

But by the mid-third millennium, it seems the influence of Ur

began to wane. This was a new militarized age, when the power of trade

and diplomacy seems to have no longer been enough.

One city called Lagash truly came into its own

in this era of violence.

Lagash was a slaving city. It had grown rich by raiding villages in

the hills, kidnapping people, and selling them

across the region. Sometime around the year 2500 BC,

Lagash fell out with its neighbor, a city called Umma. The dispute seems to have

been over a stretch of farmland along the river,

and it caused the two cities to go to war.

One carved stone monument from this time, known as a stelae, captures something of

the spirit of this age. It is known as the Stelae

of the Vultures. The upper part of the stone is normal enough.

It shows the King of Lagash, a man named Eannatum,

leading his soldiers into battle. They wear leather helmets and skirts made of

reeds, shouldering their spears. These spears

would have likely been topped with blades of copper or bronze,

and would have flashed red in the sun as they marched.

The king is riding ahead of them in an early chariot,

wearing an animal skin slung across his chest,

with a spear and a container of javelins beside him.

When the armies met, the stelae shows King Eannatum of Lagash

dismounting from his chariot, and proceeding to lead his men

on foot. They advance in a phalanx, a tight square of men with broad shields

protecting their fronts, and a porcupine of short spears jutting

out ahead. The fighting was bitter. Eannatum was

struck in the eye by an arrow, but he lived on to see his army to

victory, as the inscription on the stelae records.

Eannatum struck at Umma. The bodies were soon

3,600 in number. I, Eannatum, like a fierce storm wind,

I unleashed the tempest!

As the soldiers of Umma tried to flee the bloody battlefield,

the stelae shows the soldiers of Lagash cutting them down

and trampling them beneath their feet. There's something to this carving that

to me, embodies something of a change in the spirit of Sumerian warfare.

It's a particular kind of nastiness that revels in the suffering of your enemies,

and this is shown most clearly in the part of the carving

that gives it its name. These are the vultures flying overhead,

carrying the severed heads of the soldiers of Umma

in their beaks, picking at their tongues and eyes.

It clearly shows a kind of massacre perpetrated by the

city of Lagash, and it does so with relish.

Due to military victories of this kind, the slaving city of Lagash

went on to conquer much of southern Mesopotamia.

Lagash established what some historians have called the first

true empire in the world, but its rule was short-lived. In these ancient times,

administrating even one city was difficult,

and the Empire of Lagash, despite its military success,

was soon critically overstretched. To make matters worse, King Eannatum

seems to have ruled through what amounts to a campaign of

terror. Unsurprisingly, his rule was unpopular,

and revolts rose up against him.

As the hated Empire of Lagash fractured and collapsed,

the ruler of one of its subjugated cities seized his

chance. He was the King of Umma, the city whose defeat and humiliation is

depicted with such relish on the Stelae of the Vultures, and his

name was Lugalzaggesi.

It's not clear exactly what made Lugalzaggesi so

successful, but it's clear he was animated

by an ardent desire for revenge against the Empire of Lagash.

Perhaps he had even been at the battle when King Eannatum

had slaughtered thousands of his fellow citizens.

He rose in rebellion against Lagash, and quickly toppled kings that were

still loyal to the empire in the cities of Kish and Larsa.

Then he marched on the great city of Ur itself,

and the mighty walled fortress of Uruk. These both fell in turn, and the rebel

Lugalzaggesi moved his capital to Uruk.

Finally, he marched on the city of Lagash itself,

the heart of the empire, and it's here that that fiery vengeance in his heart

burst out. The city didn't hold out for long.

Lugalzaggesi burst over its walls, sacked the city, and burned it to the

ground.

Even by the standards of the time, this seems to have been a shocking

act, as one piece of Sumerian poetry recalls with sorrow.

Because the man of Umma destroyed the bricks of Lagash, he committed a sin

against the city's god. The god will cut off any hand raised against him.

May Nidaba, the personal goddess of Lugalzaggesi,

make him bear all these sins.

After sacking Lagash, Lugalzaggesi’s momentum

seems to have been unstoppable. He worked his way north,

up the course of the two rivers, and soon, he had conquered all the regions that

Lagash had once claimed. One inscription written by him even

claims to have conquered all the lands between what he calls the

upper and the lower seas, meaning from the

Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast. The great god Enlil gave kingship of the

land to him, the region from the lower sea through

the Tigris and Euphrates, to the upper sea. Thirty-two kings

gathered against him, but he defeated them and smote their

cities, and prostrated their lords, and destroyed the whole countryside as

far as the silver mines.

Admittedly, this is probably something of an exaggeration.

The Sumerians had never been able to maintain distant colonies

or occupy far-off lands for very long. It's more likely that Lugalzaggesi

pulled off something like a successful raiding party on the coast, perhaps

looting some towns and cities, and bringing treasure back to Uruk.

But this was the first time that a Sumerian prince had ever made this claim.

For them, this upper sea was the western edge of their entire world,

and the idea of a king who might conquer all the lands between the seas

began to possess the imaginations of all the kings who came after.

But King Lugalzaggesi, like the rulers of Lagash before him,

had made the critical mistake of overstretching his resources.

This empire was simply too big. Before long, civil wars and rebellions

broke out between the various Sumerian cities.

In this time of chaos, the other great people of Mesopotamia

began to fancy their chances at ruling.

These were the people who, up until this moment, had been something of a junior

partner in the civilization of southern Iraq.

These were the people of Akkad.

One man would soon lead them in an outright rebellion

against the Sumerian Empire. He would go down in history with a name

that in Akkadian means ‘the one true king’. That name

was Sargon, and he ushered in the twilight

of the Sumerian age.

Like many episodes in Sumerian history, the origin story of Sargon of Akkad is

one you might find familiar if you were brought up on the stories of

the Bible. He was born sometime in the middle of

the 24th century BC, and legend has it that as a baby, he was

found in a reed basket on the banks of the Tigris. He was found

by a gardener who worked in the palace in the city of

Kish, and who brought him up as his son.

But like the biblical Moses, this foundling child

had big ambitions.

There seems to have been something special about him.

Something about his charming manners meant that he was soon taken on as a

cupbearer in the palace, bringing wine to the lords and royalty

of the kingdom. This was a position of high honor, and a

way for a young man to gain influence at court. The young Sargon

must have proven himself in other ways, too.

That's because he was soon entrusted with a mission of the utmost secrecy

and importance.

At this time, Kish was still part of Lugalzaggesi’s Sumerian Empire,

stretching over all the lands between the two seas.

The Sumerian King Lugalzaggesi was away on a distant campaign,

possibly fighting in the lands of Syria or putting down a rebellion

in a far-flung province. The young Sargon was given a small band of fighting men

and told to travel to the city of Uruk, where Lugalzaggesi kept his royal court.

Their plan was to strike the city in a surprise attack,

to knock out the capital of this new empire,

and free the city of Kish from imperial control.

It was a daring plan. The tall city walls of Uruk,

immortalized in legend, must have looked daunting to the young Sargon

and his men as they readied for their attack.

But Lugalzaggesi had taken much of his army with him on campaign,

and left few behind to defend his capital.

The attack came as a complete surprise. Sargon's men overcame their defenses,

poured over their walls, and the defenders fled. Sargon captured

the city, and before reinforcements could arrive,

he broke down several sections of those famous city

walls. It was a deeply symbolic act, and a

strike against the might of Lugalzaggesi’s empire.

King Lugalzaggesi must have been enraged.

He swung around from his distant war- -making and marched back home,

gathering all his subject kings to him as he went.

Inscriptions record that as many as 50 kings may have marched under his banner,

and their task was easy enough; to crush the forces of one

small city-state. But Sargon seems to have been one of those characters from

history, one of those geniuses like Hannibal or

Napoleon, who are able to turn battles in their

favor no matter the odds. We don't know how he did it,

but in a pitched battle with the whole amassed force of the empire,

it was Sargon's army that emerged

victorious. Lugalzaggesi was captured, and Sargon

marched him through the gates of the Holy city of Nippur

wearing a neck stock, a heavy piece of wood

clapped around his neck and shoulders like an oxen.

This would have been humiliating of course, but here again

is where Sargon sets himself apart from other rulers of the time.

That's because he seems to have had something of a merciful streak.

The old King Lugalzaggesi wasn't killed. Incredibly, he was allowed to continue on

as the governor of Uruk, so long as he swore an oath to the high

King Sargon. Sargon founded a new city to act as his

empire's capital, and he named it Akkad.

From there, he would go on to conquer much of what the preceding empires

had before, as one inscription beneath a statue in the city of Nippur

claims. Sargon, the King of Kish, triumphed in 34 battles over the cities,

up to the edge of the sea, and destroyed their walls.

He bowed down to the gods, and the gods gave him the upper land

up to the cedar forest, and up to the silver mountain.

Sargon didn't make the mistakes of his predecessors.

At each city he conquered, he made a point of destroying the city's walls,

reducing its ability to defend itself, and therefore reducing the likelihood

of it rebelling against his rule. He conducted a ceremony to symbolize his

mastery over the whole land. He washed his

weapons in the waters of both the Persian Gulf and the

Mediterranean Sea. But once the dust of war had settled, his

achievements went on. He made efforts to centralize the

empire's administration, and even reformed the dating system. His

reforms strengthened the central state and

increased the stability of the empire. In many ways, he was something of a

progressive and enlightened ruler. But Sargon was also Akkadian,

and he was what we today might call a nationalist.

Until now, Sumerian had been the official language of royal inscriptions

on palaces and temples. But during Sargon's reign,

Akkadian began to be used in official inscriptions for the first time.

The cuneiform alphabet was now re-engineered to write Akkadian,

and Sargon also gave himself the new title,

King of Akkad. He appointed only his fellow Akkadians to key

positions in the government, and garrisoned Sumerian cities with

Akkadian troops to ensure their loyalty.

The two people of Mesopotamia who had lived and grown together for millennia,

were now beginning to drift apart. Resentment in the southern

Sumerian-speaking cities began to reach a boiling point.

Sargon ruled for 55 years, and towards the end of his reign, this

resentment bubbled over, as one later Babylonian text recalls.

In his old age, all the lands revolted against him,

and they besieged him in Akkad the city. But he went forth to battle, and defeated

them. He knocked them over and destroyed their vast army.

For the meantime, it's clear that Sargon's flair for battle

kept his empire together, but as the old king weakened,

virtually all the southern cities burst out in open rebellion.

When Sargon of Akkad died around the year 2284,

his two sons had to take over and try to fix the mess he had left behind.

The first of these sons was called Rimush. He ruled for nine years

and spent most of them in bitter battles to reconquer the rebellious Sumerian

cities of the south. He crushed rebellions in Ur, Umma, Lagash,

and Adab, and one of the years in which he ruled

is even known as ‘the year that Adab was destroyed’.

When Rimush died, Sargon's other son, Manishtushu,

took over. He seems to have resorted to the kinds of terror tactics

that had once made the kings of Lagash so hated.

It was Sargon's grandson, a man named Naram-Sin,

who would return the empire to its former greatness.

He managed to quell the Sumerian rebellion in its southern heartlands,

and returned the Empire of Akkad to stability.

Naram-Sin didn't rule only by force; it seems he made some effort to

reconcile the two intertwined peoples of Mesopotamia,

breaking from his grandfather's title, King of Akkad, and ruling under the more

diplomatic title King of Sumer and Akkad.

But this didn't entirely heal the rift there was even now

continuing to grow between these two peoples.

Part of the problem was that the Sumerian people were no longer the

primary cultural force in the region. For centuries,

Akkadian had been gradually replacing Sumerian as a spoken language.

Some of this may have been down to the official policies of the Akkadian Empire,

discouraging the use of Sumerian in official documents.

But it was also affected by the increasingly cosmopolitan makeup of the

empire. Sumerian, as we've seen, was a language

isolate with a different structure and sound to

all the languages around it. But the people who lived in all the

surrounding lands spoke languages that were linguistic

cousins of Akkadian, all in the Semitic family of languages.

They had the same grammar, and even shared sounds and words with Akkadian.

Learning Akkadian for them would have been like an English speaker

learning French or Spanish, while Sumerian

would have been like learning Korean. Akkadian was just easier to learn for

these people, and so, it would naturally become the

language of trade and commerce. The people of Mesopotamia had been

largely bilingual for centuries, but gradually, all Sumerians would have

learned to speak Akkadian, and fewer and fewer Akkadians would have

needed to learn Sumerian. Slowly, the Sumerian language

began to fade. But the days of the Akkadian Empire

were also numbered, and the Sumerians would get

one more chance to leave their mark on the world's history.

When the great Akkadian King Naram-Sin died,

his son Shar-Kali-Sharri took over. He was Sargon of Akkad's great grandson,

and four years into his reign, a great celestial sign

would have appeared in the skies overhead.

Far out in the depths of space, nearly 200 million kilometers away from Earth,

a giant ball of ice and dust 40 kilometers across

flew past, sometime around the year 2213 BC. This

was the comet Hale-Bopp. It would spend the next four millennia

or so flying through our solar system on a

deep elliptical orbit, until it flew past the Earth again as a

blazing streak of light in the year 1997.

It was the brightest comet with the longest tail

that has ever been observed in our night skies.

It remained visible with the naked eye for 18 months.

In 1997, the site of the comet in San Diego, California caused 39

members of an apocalyptic cult called Heaven's Gate to commit

suicide by drinking a lethal mixture of vodka

and phenobarbital. They believed that their souls would be

carried away on a spaceship that was hidden behind the iridescent

tail of the comet, and we can only imagine what effect the

sight of this comet may have had on ancient people.

Some may have looked up and seen the blessings of the gods,

smiling on the lands of Sumer and Akkad. Others may have stared up at that lonely

cosmic traveler and seen a sign of doom.

Ultimately, it was these latter who would prove correct.

During the reign of King Shar-Kali-Sharri,

the world's climate underwent a mysterious

and sudden shift. This change is known only by the cryptic

name, the ‘4.2 kilo year event’. It has been tentatively linked to

changes that took place in the sea ice of the North Atlantic,

causing ripples throughout the world's delicate and intimately interlinked

climate systems. But whatever the causes, its effects were

dramatic. In various places around the world, it

coincided with periods of reduced rainfall.

Studies of dust layers in Iraq and the Middle East

have shown that around this time, annual rainfall dropped dramatically,

and the climate became much more arid. The annual floods of the rivers on which

so much of the agriculture of the region depended

would now routinely fail, and famine would set in.

This dry period wasn't brief. In fact, it would last for well over a

century, and some think it may have even lasted

for the next 300 years. This period of drought and the famines

it caused were mentioned in Egyptian texts of the time,

too, and has affected cultures all around the globe.

It's been linked to civilizational collapses in Egypt's old kingdom,

the Indus Valley Civilization in India, and the Liangzhu culture in China.

In Mesopotamia around this time, still ruled by the Akkadian Empire,

it's clear that resources became suddenly scarce.

The days of a booming surplus of food were over,

and it's around this time that the first towns and cities

began to be abandoned in the drier zones of the north.

After the death of King Shar-Kali-Sharri around the year 2193 BC,

a period of chaos and bitter civil war descended on the Empire of Akkad.

The Sumerian King List records this period

with an almost sarcastic tone. Then who was king? Who was not the king?

Four of them ruled in only three years.

All this chaos did not go unnoticed. In the mountains overlooking the plains

of Mesopotamia, a nomadic tribal people known as the

Guti were watching.

Who the Guti were, what language they spoke, and which gods they worshipped,

we don't know. They seem to have been an unsophisticated nomadic people,

and the ancient Sumerian texts reserve particular contempt for them.

The Guti were unhappy people, unaware of how to revere the gods,

and ignorant of the right religious practices.

The Guti had raided and plundered along the borders of the Akkadian Empire for

years, burning villages and stealing cattle.

One remarkable letter, dating from the reign of King

Shar-Kali-Sharri, was written by an Akkadian lord who owned land on the borders of

the Guti territory. He tells his workers to ignore the Guti

attacks and keep working, although it's clear he

does this while keeping himself at a safe distance.

Cultivate the field and watch over the cattle.

Do not tell me, ‘the Guti enemies are around. I could not cultivate the field.’

Post sentries at one-mile intervals, and if the Guti try to attack you,

take all the cattle into the village. Now, I swear on the life of King Shar-Kali-

-Sharri that if the Guti men drive off the cattle and you cannot pay for them

yourself, I won't pay you any silver when I come

to town.

For years now, these hill people had watched

as drought ravaged the settled societies of the river valley.

They watched as the city-dwellers fought over the increasingly scarce farmland,

and it's in this moment of weakness that they chose to strike.

The Guti gathered their forces and marched down from the hills

into the lands of Sumer, this time not to raid, but to invade and take these

lands for themselves.

One remarkable literary text relates the tragic events of those days.

It was written a few centuries later, and is called

The Curse of Akkad. In this version of the story, the great

god Enlil is angry at the king of Akkad for

disrespecting the gods, and he summons the Guti as a punishment.

The hill people are imagined as monstrous creatures,

half-animal, with a language that sounded to the Sumerians

like the barking of dogs.

Enlil…what destruction he wrought. He raised his eyes to the mountain, and

mustered the whole mountain as one. The rebellious people, the land whose

people is without number. Gutium, that land that brooks no control,

whose understanding is human, but whose appearance and stuttering words are that

of a dog. Enlil brought them down from the

mountain in vast numbers. Like locusts, they covered the earth.

Nothing escaped their arm. No one escaped their arm.

All the lands raised a bitter cry on their city walls.

It's not clear how many men were in the Guti army,

but they were enough to quickly overwhelm the weakened forces of

Akkad. It seems the Guti practiced hit-and-run tactics,

raiding supply lines, and leaving scorched earth behind them.

Their attacks devastated the economy of Akkad,

and the already drought-ridden and war-torn society

began to fall apart.

For the first time since cities were built and founded,

the great agricultural tracks produced no grain,

the inundated tracts produced no fish, the irrigated orchards produced neither

syrup nor wine. The gathered clouds did not rain, the

plants did not grow. He who slept on the roof died on the

roof. He who slept in the house had no burial.

People were flailing at themselves from hunger.

The weakened Akkadian society folded completely

beneath the pressure of the Guti attacks. The demoralized Akkadian army went out

to meet this fearsome enemy in battle, and was defeated. Soon after,

the Gutis swept down on the city of Akkad,

and burned it to the ground. They destroyed Sargon city

so utterly that its ruins have never been

found. The Guti attempted to set up their own dynasty

and rule over the lands of Sumer, but for a number

of reasons, they were not successful. After all,

as empires in our own day have found out, it's much easier to conquer a country

than it is to rule it. Cuneiform sources suggest that the Guti administration

showed little concern for maintaining agriculture, written records, or public

safety. The Guti were not literate, and would

have struggled to administrate an empire that for over a millennium, had

relied on the power of the written word. For reasons known only to them, and

perhaps relating to their nomadic lifestyle,

they didn't believe in keeping animals in pens.

They released all of the land's livestock to roam about the countryside

freely. Their policies soon brought even further

famine, and caused a massive increase in the

price of grain. Under neglect and lack of investment, the

land's infrastructure began to crumble.

The poetry of The Curse of Akkad shows how the roads of the kingdom began to

fall apart, and become overgrown with weeds, while

long grass grew on the towpaths where oxen used to pull

barges. The grass grows long on your canal-bank towpaths, the grass of

mourning grows on your highways laid for wagons!

Wild rams and snakes of the mountains allow no one to pass on your towpaths

built up with canal sediment.

The destruction of the central authority of the Akkadian Empire

meant that during this time, a number of Sumerian city states

reasserted their independence. It seems the Guti, weakened by their

failing attempt to hold an empire together, don't seem to

have been able to do much to stop them. The Guti occupied southern Iraq for more

than 150 years, and this period was by all accounts a

time of suffering. It was a miniature dark age where

written records are unsophisticated, as well as few and far between.

But as resentment to their rule grew, rebellions rose around the country,

and one Sumerian man would see the opportunity this period of crisis

provided. He was filled with a desire to return the lands of Sumer

to the rule of a Sumerian king, and his name

was Utu-Hengal.

Little is known about the life of Utu-Hengal.

He was a Sumerian, and may have been the governor of Uruk

during the final years of the Gutian Period.

He must have watched as the ongoing famine ravaged his people,

and the arrogant Guti kings refused to do anything about it,

violently punishing any resistance to them.

At this time, a new Guti king had just ascended to the throne of Sumer and

Akkad. His name was Tirigan, and he seems to

have been typical of the Guti rulers. He cared

little for maintaining the land's infrastructure,

and even destroyed elements of it to punish populations who rebelled against

him, as recalled in the Sumerian King List.

Tirigan's troops established themselves everywhere.

Nobody would leave their cities to face him. In the south,

in Sumer, he blocked the water from the fields.

In the uplands, he closed off the roads. Because of him,

the grass grew high on the highways of the land.

Tirigan had been on the throne for only forty days,

and he was still in the middle of consolidating his rule.

It's clear that Utu-Hengal, the governor of Uruk,

thought that this was the time to make his move.

His plan may have been in place for years.

Perhaps he sent out secret envoys to the other Sumerian cities of the south,

telling them to prepare for war the moment a new king

ascended to the throne. Then when everything was in place

and his moment came, he struck.

When Tirigan heard of this rebellion, he must have been enraged.

But he doesn't seem to have been the bravest of kings.

He sent two of his generals, men named Ur-Ninazu and Nabi-Enlil,

to lead his armies in his place while he stayed back home in the palace.

Meanwhile, the rebel leader Utu-Hengal massed his forces, and marched to meet

the two Guti generals on the field. On his way to the decisive battle, he

stopped at the temple of Iškur, the Sumerian god of storms, and made an

offering.

He may have sacrificed a lamb or goat, and sang an ancient prayer in the

Sumerian tongue before the altar of the god. Then,

he marched out to meet Tirigan's armies.

After departing from the temple of Ishkur, on the fourth day, he set up camp

in Naĝsu on the Surungal canal. He captured the generals of Tirigan sent

as envoys to Sumer, and put chains on their hands.

Utu-Hengal was victorious, and here again, we see that the Guti King Tirigan wasn't

the courageous sort. After getting the news that his generals

had been defeated, he fled north to a city called Dabrum.

The Sumerian King List records what happened next.

Then Tirigan, the King of the Guti, ran away,

alone, on foot. He thought himself safe in Dabrum,

where he fled to save his life, but since the people of Dabrum knew that Utu-Hengal

was a king endowed with power by Enlil, they did not

let Tirigan go, and an envoy of Utu-Hengal arrested

Tirigan, together with his wife and children, in

Dabrum. They put handcuffs and a blindfold on him.

After centuries, the Sumerians finally rejected

both Guti and Akkadian rule. For the first time since the reign of

Sargon, a Sumerian king would once again rule over the lands of

Sumer.

Utu-Hengal made the Guti, the fanged snakes of the mountains, go back to drink again

from the rocky crevices. He brought back the kingship of Sumer.

Utu-Hengal’s successful rebellion ushered in an era

known today as the Third Dynasty of Ur, and sometimes called the Neo-Sumerian

Empire. Others have even called this the

Sumerian Renaissance. It was the final flourishing of Sumerian

culture, but it was a flourishing that would

leave an indelible mark on human history.

Despite bringing the kingship back to Sumer,

the rebel king Utu-Hengal didn't rule for long.

He died in unusual circumstances after only seven years,

apparently killed when a river dam that he was inspecting

burst, sweeping him away in a flood. If you think this sounds suspicious, it's

because it probably is. One of Utu-Hengal’s more ambitious

governors, a man named Ur-Nammu, came to the throne

soon after, and some historians have certainly raised questions

about whether he had a hand in that dam bursting,

if indeed any dam burst at all.

Regardless of the way he rose to power, Ur-Nammu proved to be an effective ruler,

and an outstanding administrator. He standardized bronze weights that

merchants used in the market, and created a standardized weight that

would lay down the foundations for the first currencies.

He divided silver into a unit known as the mina,

which was made up of 60 shekels. Ur-Nammu also wrote down a code of laws

that today is the earliest surviving example of a legal code,

three centuries older than the more famous Code of Hammurabi.

Here are a few examples of the laws contained within.

Number 17: if a slave escapes from the city limits and someone returns him,

the owner shall pay two shekels to the one who returned him.

Number 18: if a man knocks out the eye of another man,

he shall weigh out half a mina of silver. Number 19:

if a man has cut off another man's foot, he has to pay 10 shekels.

Among all his other achievements, Ur-Nammu was also a prodigious

builder. He constructed buildings at the cities of Nippur,

Larsa, Kish, Adab, and Umma. He rebuilt the kingdom's roads and

irrigation ditches after the long decades of neglect under

the Guti rule. But more than anything, Ur-Nammu loved to

build ziggurats. These are the distinctive

stepped towers that were the hallmarks and

pinnacle of Sumerian architecture.

Each one rose in three layers like a wedding cake,

with steps leading up to the top. They would have been painted with white

gypsum paint. The priests who kept them may have grown

plants and trees on the terraces that lined

them, and birds would have roosted high up in

these tall towers. Under Ur-Nammu,

soon every Sumerian city would have a ziggurat,

and they formed the focal point of the cities.

The greatest of these was the ziggurat that Ur-Nammu built

in his home city of Ur.

The ziggurat of Ur is enormous. In its day, it would have soared up to a

height of 30 meters or nearly 10 stories, towering

over all the other low-lying buildings in the city.

It was built purely from baked clay bricks,

and held together with the tarry substance bitumen.

It's thought that it would have taken at least 1,500 workers

more than five years just to build its base.

Farmers up to 20 kilometers away would have been able to see this enormous

shape rising on the horizon. To them,

it would have testified to the power of the city of Ur,

and the god who lived there. But despite this late flourishing, the

age of the Sumerians was passing, and part of the reason for

this lay in the soil beneath their feet.

All river water contains small amounts of salts

and other minerals, and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers,

flowing over the limestone rocks of the Taurus mountains,

contain more than most. When ancient farmers diverted this water

into their fields to feed their crops, the hot sun would evaporate this water,

and traces of salt would be left behind.

In places with a reasonable amount of rainfall, the rain would wash this salt

away, but in the arid conditions of Iraq, the salt stays right where it is.

Over time, this small amount builds up on the surface of the soil,

and eventually, plants find it difficult to grow.

The records of the Sumerian scribes paint a bleak picture.

They kept meticulous notes of crop yields,

year on year. From around 2350 BC, their texts show the gradual reduction

of crops across the region. One telltale detail shows us that the salt

content of the soil might have been to blame.

While their main crop of wheat gradually reduced over the centuries,

the rates of barley production remained constant.

Barley, as we know today, is particularly resistant

to salt-rich soil.

Texts uncovered from the city of Girsu show that around the year 3550 BC,

wheat and barley were being produced in equal amounts. But after a thousand years

of irrigation, wheat accounted for only one-sixth of

the crop. Only a few centuries later, in the

21st century BC, wheat was less than two percent of the

annual harvest. This all points to a sharp increase in

the salt content of the soil.

You can sometimes hear very simplistic narratives surrounding soil

salination in the south of Iraq. The Sumerians are sometimes portrayed as

stupid or greedy, damaging the land in their ignorance, but

that's not entirely fair. Although they didn't have our modern

understanding, they did know that soil needed to be rested for

several seasons if it was to remain fertile, and they did take steps to adapt

to the changing condition of the soil, switching

almost exclusively to barley, and replacing the role of wheat in their

diet. They also developed methods for draining

the soil and reducing the rate of salination,

but soil salinity is a challenge that still causes problems for farmers in

Iraq today, despite all our technology and

scientific knowledge. While the ancient people worked hard to

mitigate the decline, the overall trend as the centuries wore

on was slow but unstoppable.

The soil was gradually failing, and with the population of Sumerian

cities growing, and the long drought dragging on, the

demands on this farmland were only increasing.

Eventually, a thick layer of salt would encrust the topsoil,

and little would grow at all.

Today when you walk around the deserts of Iraq,

the soil in some areas has a crumbly crust

that cracks underfoot, peeling like old varnish.

This is the salt that slowly began to choke the life from the earth,

and in turn, choke the life from the civilization

of Sumer. But the end of Sumerian culture would come not from the soil, but at the

tip of a spear.

As the Sumerians struggled to eat ever-decreasing barley crops from the

salty soil, it seems that once again, hostile outside

forces began to sense weakness in this

once-great empire. After their failed attempt at

empire building, the nomadic Guti had retreated to their

mountains, and returned to their nomadic ways.

But they still posed a threat to Sumerian lands,

just as they always had; raiding towns and making away with cattle.

Putting a stop to these raids was the focus of much of the king Ur-Nammu's reign.

He raised an army and marched into the Guti lands

with the aim of putting a stop to the threat forever.

It's unclear whether he actually met them in battle

or whether he was struck by one of their characteristic

ambushes. Either way, Ur-Nammu was killed in the mountains far from home.

The death of this king, which would begin the

final death spiral of Sumerian culture, was commemorated in a lengthy epic poem

known as the death of Ur-Nammu. He who was beloved by the troops could

not raise his neck anymore. The wise one lay down. Silence descended

as he, who was the vigor of the land, had fallen.

The land became demolished like a mountain. Like a cypress forest,

it was stripped, its appearance changed.

The poem tells the story of Ur-Nammu descending into the underworld, and

giving his offerings to the gods who lived there.

In the afterlife, the poem gives Ur-Nammu himself

this final lament.

Now, just as the rain pouring down from heaven cannot turn back,

I can never return to see the beautiful bricks of Ur!

Four Sumerian kings would follow Ur-Nammu. Some, like the King Shulgi, enjoyed

successes on the battlefield, and developed and reformed the economy

as much as they could. But their reigns were characterized by

ongoing threats from the wild mountain regions.

The drought was still biting. The soil was becoming

increasingly choked by salt, and as food got scarce,

more and more nomadic people were driven to raiding and plundering to feed

themselves. By now, the Guti were far from the only

people who threatened the border of Sumer and

Akkad.

One tribe in particular, known as the Martu,

posed a particular threat. The Martu were a Semitic sheep-herding

people from the mountains of Syria and Lebanon.

Like the Guti, the Sumerians considered them to be wild and barbarous,

and tended to describe them in contemptuous,

but also fearful terms. The Martu, the powerful south wind, who,

from the remote past, have not known cities.

The Martu, who know no grain. The Martu, who know no house or town. The savages of

the mountains. The Martu, who eat raw meat, who are not

buried after their death. Another text describes them in similar

animalistic terms as the Guti. The hostile Martu have

entered the plains. The Martu, a ravaging people with canine

instincts like wolves. It's clear that around this time of

drought and famine, the Martu were finding their way of life

in Syria increasingly impossible. Environmental

pressures were pushing them further south into the

rich farmland of the river valley into the lands

of the Sumerians. Despite the weakened power of the

Sumerian state, the later kings of Sumer were determined

to stop the Martu incursions. One king named Shu Sin even ordered the

construction of a wall that stretched almost 300 kilometers

between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It would be called the Martu Wall, and

sometimes ‘The Wall Facing the High Lands’.

What form exactly this wall took is unknown,

since its remains have never been found, but it was likely an earthwork rampart

dotted with forts, and perhaps fronted with a moat fed by

canals. It was more than twice the length of

Hadrian's Wall, and essentially turned the rich farmland

between the Tigris and Euphrates into an island fortress, with the rivers

on either side, the sea to the south, and the wall to the

north. It would have been an enormous

engineering work, and shows that even in its final years,

the Sumerian state still commanded considerable manpower

and energy. But ultimately, the wall would prove

useless.

Like all walls, it was only effective with a constant garrison manning it.

Soon, it would become clear that the building of this wall

was not an act of strength, but the last resort

of an empire falling in on itself.

The last Sumerian king was a man named Ibbi-Sin,

who took the throne in the year 2028. Virtually as soon as he was crowned, the

empire began to fall apart.

In his first year of ruling, the eastern city of Eshunna

broke free from the empire, and Susa, a city in the region of Elam in the

Iranian lowlands, successfully rebelled in the third year.

These Elamites were an ambitious people. They were rivals for the later Assyrian

and Babylonian Empires, but at this stage, were only just

beginning to flex their muscles. Their rise would spell the end of the

Sumerian age. The fracturing Sumerian Empire could no

longer maintain its defenses along the 300 kilometers of the great

Martu Wall, and so, in the fifth year of his reign,

the wall that Ibbi-Sin's father had built, failed.

The Martu poured over the defenses and overran the rich farmlands that lay

behind. The effects of this loss were immediate

and devastating. Food shortages ran rampant.

In years seven and eight of Ibbi-Sin's kingship,

the price of grain increased to 60 times the usual cost.

People would have starved in the streets. The famine was hitting the capital city

of Ur especially hard, and it's clear that at

this point, the king Ibbi-Sin really began to panic.

Desperate to feed his people, King Ibbi- -Sin summoned one of his generals

and told him to travel north to the city of Isin

to buy grain, and pay many times its usual cost.

This general was a man called Ishbi-Erra, and it's clear that he wasn't the most

trusted of the king's generals. In another letter, the king had even

complained that Ishbi-Erra was Akkadian, not Sumerian, inferring that his loyalty

may have been in question. But at this point,

it's clear the king didn't have much choice.

One remarkable letter from this moment has survived.

It was sent to the King Ibbi-Sin by this general Ishbi-Erra,

once he reached the city of Isin. It paints a vivid picture of Sumerian

society's collapse.

You ordered me to travel to Isin and Kazallu to purchase grain.

With grain reaching the exchange rate of one shackle of silver per

gur, 20 talents of silver have been invested in the purchase.

But I heard news that the hostile Martu have entered inside your territories.

I entered with the entire amount of grain. Now,

I have let the Martu, all of them, penetrate inside the land.

Because of the Martu, I am unable to hand over this grain for threshing.

They are stronger than me, while I am condemned to

sitting around. This letter shows that the twin pressures of the Martu

invasions, coupled with the famine at home,

were beginning to tear the very fabric of the kingdom

apart. The Akkadian general Ishbi-Erra urges the king to send a fleet of 600

boats up the river to transport the grain. He also

kindly offers to stay behind in Isin, and help to defend it against the

invasion. That I should guard for you the cities

of Isin and Nibru; let it be my responsibility. My lord

should know this! It's possible that Ishbi-Erra knew that the

request for 600 boats was impossible. In fact, he had no

intention of ever heading back to the starving city of Ur.

He stayed in Isin with all the grain, and soon declared himself its king.

This is just one story out of many that shows the Sumerian state truly

beginning to come apart.

Facing threats on multiple sides, the king Ibbi-Sin

entered into a frantic series of last-ditch

measures. He ordered fortifications built at the important cities of Ur and

Nippur, but these efforts were in vain.

Ultimately, the Sumerian Empire fell apart

one city at a time, until only the capital of Ur

remained, surrounded by hostile forces.

Soon the Elamite people, those former subjects of the Sumerians

in the foothills of Iran, marched down along the hill paths,

gathering with them an army of tribesmen, and laid siege to the great city of Ur.

King Ibbi-Sin tried one last attempt to beat them back, and it's clear at this

point how desperate he was. He tried to enlist

the help of his great enemy, the wild Martu, who had

poured over his father's wall. He offered to pay them in exchange for

their help. He even swallowed his pride and begged

for the help of Ishbi-Erra, the general who had stabbed

him in the back on that journey for grain, and was now

ruling as the king of Isin. But it was all

useless. The Elamites broke through the walls of Ur, and set

the city on fire. They poured into its sacred precinct, and

looted it of all its valuables. We can imagine them storming up the

steps of Ur's great ziggurat, killing priests, and plundering its

treasures as they went. The surrounding fields were burned, and

the waterways became contaminated with disease.

The armies of Elam stormed the royal palace,

and captured the king Ibbi-Sin. They took him away in chains, marched him

back to their homeland, and imprisoned him there. This was the

last king of Sumer, a civilization that had endured

for millennia, and he would die in chains, imprisoned by

his enemies in a foreign land.

The ancient Sumerians who saw the destruction of their cities

reacted to their sorrow in the same way that humans always have;

they wrote poetry. In fact, for each of their great ruined cities,

they wrote a lament.

One of these poems, called The Lament for Ur,

relates with tangible anguish the horror of that time.

The gods have abandoned us. Like migrating birds,

they have gone. Ur is destroyed. Bitter is its lament. The country's blood

now fills its holes like hot bronze in a mold. Bodies

dissolve like fat in the sun. Our temple is destroyed.

Smoke lies on our city like a shroud. Blood flows as the river does,

the lamenting of men and women. Sadness abounds.

Ur is no more.

The fall of Ur was one of the great turning points

in ancient history. It marked the end of the unified Sumerian state,

and the region entered a small dark age in which individual city states once

again vied for control over the ruins of the former empire.

The wars of this period turned Sumerian cities

to blackened heaps of burnt brick. The people mourn. Its people like broken

potsherds littering the approaches. The walls were gaping. The high gates, the

roads, were piled with dead. In all the streets

and roadways, bodies lay. In open fields that used to fill with

dancers, the people lay in heaps.

Meanwhile, the drought dragged on, and the salt-ridden fields were no

longer producing enough barley. Faced with these problems, the Sumerian

people began to flock out of the region in huge numbers;

refugees carrying with them their meager

belongings, and weeping for the home they had left behind.

Over the next centuries, a vast population movement

took place from the south of Mesopotamia to the north. Some of these Sumerian

speakers would settle in the Akkadian lands,

but with their connection to their homeland severed, their cultural identity

went with it. They learned the Akkadian language of the northerners,

and left theirs behind in the smoking ruins of their cities.

The Martu, those wild hill people so detested by the Sumerians,

would themselves settle down in the cities they conquered

along the river valley. The migrating Martu,

the fleeing Sumerians, and the native Akkadians

would mix together. They would blend their cultures

as the people of this region always had. The foundations they laid would give

rise to the next chapter of Mesopotamian and human history, and forge the region's

next superpowers. These would rise as the legendary

empires of Babylon and Assyria, but those

are stories that I will save for another time.

Sumerian was now a dead language. It would never again be heard spoken

in the streets and the markets, but it did remain in use

for at least another 2,000 years, preserved in the temples and scriptures

of later empires, just as Latin once survived in the

churches of medieval Europe after the fall of Rome.

For these later people, Sumerian became the language of the gods,

the language of myth and magic.

The kings of Ur, those great Sumerian rulers

themselves passed into legend, and some of them would later be revered

as gods themselves. All the kings of Mesopotamia in

Babylon and Assyria for the next two thousand years,

would rule under a title that gave them a kind of ancient legitimacy,

reaching right back to the first age to the dawn of mankind's journey into

civilization; King of Ur, King of Sumer

and Akkad.

Even after the fall of the Sumerian Empire,

many of its great cities would continue as population centers

into the post-Sumerian era. Among these was the great coastal city

of Ur, situated at the mouth of the Euphrates,

which would rise and fall a number of times over its history.

But ultimately, it was the landscape that had given birth to Ur,

and it was the landscape that would bring about its demise.

Today, if you stand in the ruins of Ur, the sea that once lapped its shores is

nowhere to be seen. In fact, early archaeologists were

astonished to see the remains of millions of

seashells scattered in the sand here on this

lonely stretch of desert. As the millennia passed, the continued

depositing of silt, along with changes in global sea levels,

have combined to push Iraq's gulf coast back

to its present position, about 150 kilometers to the south.

The Euphrates River that once brought the rich bounties of trade down from the

north has also disappeared, its course having

changed over the centuries. In fact, around the barren mounds of

earth where the city of Ur once stood, there's

nothing at all but the lone and level sands of the

Iraqi desert, boundless and bare for miles around.

Water had always been this city's lifeblood,

and the loss of the river and the sea meant the slow death

of Ur. People soon left its houses and its streets. They stopped

working its fields and maintaining its irrigation

canals, and soon, the land dried up and the topsoil blew away in the wind.

The priests extinguished the fires that burned

in the top chamber of Ur's great ziggurat,

and stopped leaving their offerings there to the moon god Sin.

The markets closed, and the mud brick buildings of the city

began to crumble.

The wooden beams of the roofs rotted and fell in.

The sands and desert winds rolled through its streets,

and the dunes buried its fallen walls. Before long, the greatest city the world

had ever known was just a mound of ruins where the

occasional desert traveller would pass by,

and where the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle

would one day shelter with his wife from a threatening group of bandits,

and discover the scattered fragments of writing

that the Sumerians had left behind in their forgotten language.

Somewhere buried in the ruins lay the clay tablets

on which the lament for the city's destruction was written.

May that storm swoop down no more on your city.

May the door be closed on it like the great city gate at night time.

Until distant days, other days, future days.

In your city reduced to ruin mounds may a lament be made to you.

O Nanna, may your restored city be resplendent before you.

Following the sacking of Ur around the year 2000 BC,

the city of Uruk went into a steep decline,

and much of its population fled. Uruk did have another period of

flourishing when the later Assyrian Empire rebuilt

it as a regional capital. But as the Euphrates River changed its

course, Uruk, too, would be completely abandoned.

Today, the walls of Uruk, the same walls that are boasted about

in the epic of Gilgamesh, are still visible,

heaps of ancient brickwork lining the flat,

lunar landscape of the desert. But they are still

15 meters tall, encircling the whole city now washed by a tide of broken

pottery and bones. The English archaeologist

William Loftus was the first European to rediscover the ruins of Uruk.

He was impressed with the haunting sight of the vast mounds

rising out of the desert, and he later wrote

about how the sight affected him.

Of all the desolate sights I ever beheld, that of Uruk incomparably surpasses all.

The process of decay in all the cities of ancient Sumer,

in Nippur, Eridu, Lagash, Ur, and Uruk, would have been gradual but unstoppable.

Wind-borne sand and earth would pile up against the walls that still stood,

and filled in the streets. Meanwhile, rain water and wind wore down any

remaining structures. The sight of these ruins amazed

travellers who, like the Italian Della Valle, passed

by them and saw their lonely shapes on the

horizon. People told stories about what must have

happened to those people who built such enormous constructions

and then disappeared forever. Echoes of these stories still survive in

tales like the Tower of Babel, about a people

who built a tower that would reach to the heavens, and who were struck down by

god on account of their pride.

With their cities lost, the Sumerian people passed out of history.

The civilizations who replaced them, who kept their language alive

in their temples and still told stories of their kings,

would themselves pass into ruin. The knowledge of how to read Sumerian

was forgotten entirely, and its history turned to dust.

Only their clay tablets remained, buried in the sands of Iraq,

fragments containing the voices of a whole people,

waiting for archaeologists to discover them and,

through arduous and painstaking work, to find out how to read them.

These fragments give us little bursts of light,

illuminating the dark ocean floor of this most

distant past, giving us the records and recipes of the Sumerian people,

their music and their prayers, their loves and grief,

their triumphs, and their beautiful, sorrowful lamentations

for the loss of the world's first cities. It gives us, too, the wistful

philosophies of these ancient people, as these lines from the epic of

Gilgamesh show.

Nobody sees Death, nobody sees the face of Death,

nobody hears the voice of Death. Savage Death just cuts mankind down.

Sometimes we build a house, sometimes we make a nest,

but then brothers divide it upon inheritance.

Sometimes there is hostility in the land, but then the river rises and brings

flood water. Dragonflies drift on the river, their

faces look upon the face of the sun, but then suddenly there is nothing.

Sometime around the year 1700 BC, when the last kings of Ur

were already a distant memory, somewhere on the other side of the world, on a

small rocky island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the last

woolly mammoth to ever live on earth lay down and died.

Sumerian society, in its imperial form, rose, lived out its golden age,

and died, outlived by the woolly mammoth. I want to end the episode with an

excerpt from that great Sumerian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This section

relates an episode that I think is one of the most incredible sequences

in any piece of ancient literature. It shows the king Gilgamesh weeping over

the loss of his dying friend, and his friend reaches up to him and

tells him that he has dreamed of the afterlife,

that he has seen what awaits him after death.

This passage is a melancholy meditation on

loss. It shows all the kings of the earth who have ever ruled,

living on in this dark and silent place, their crowns put away forever.

As you listen, imagine what it would have felt like to live

in the great cities of Ur and Uruk, watching the twilight begin to fall over

the Sumerian age. Imagine what it would feel like to see

the crops grow weaker every year as the white crust of salt begins to

form on the ground, and the city's people go hungry in the

streets, wailing year after year for the gods to

help them. Imagine how it would have felt to see

the armies of the mountain people gathering on the horizon, having to flee

the city with your possessions on your back,

leaving your home behind forever as the wind rustles through the dying reeds,

and the chanting of the priests still goes on in the ziggurat’s tall

tower as the sun begins to set over the desert.

Listen, my friend. This is the dream I dreamed last night.

I stood before an awful being, the somber-faced man-bird.

He turned his stare towards me, and he led me away to the palace of

Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which

none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back.

There is the house whose people sit in darkness;

dust is their food, and clay their meat. They are clothed

like birds with wings for covering. They see no light,

they sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust,

and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away forever;

rulers and princes, all who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the

days of old. They who had stood in the place of the

gods stood now like servants. In the house of dust were high

priests and acolytes, priests of the incantation and of

ecstasy, and there was Ereshkigal, the Queen of the

Underworld, she who keeps the books of the dead.

She raised her head; she saw me and spoke, ‘Who has brought this one here?’ Then I

awoke like a man drained of blood, who wanders

alone in a waste.

Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode Rhy Brignell,

Jake Barrett-Mills, Shem Jacobs, Nick Bradley, and Emily Johnson.

I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and

tell me what you thought. You can follow me at PaulMMCooper, and

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This episode has touched a number of times on the power and necessity of the

written word, a gift that ancient Iraq once gave to

the world, and I thought it would be fitting to

take a moment here to promote a charity that really needs your help today. Its

name is Book Aid. In 2015,

the terrorist group ISIS burned over one million books

in the library of Iraq's Mosul University.

Today, the Book Aid team is trying to rebuild that library,

and give the students of Mosul some hope for their future.

If you think you can spare anything, please head onto bookaid.org

and see how you can help today. For every two pound you give, they can

send another book to Mosul's university library.

There's also a list of other ways you can help to provide resources,

equipment, and even training to bring the gift of the written word

back to the place where it first began. For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.