WEBVTT 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 History’s first empire rose out of a hot, dry landscape, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 without rainfall to nourish crops, without trees or stones for building. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In spite of all this, its inhabitants built the world’s first cities, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with monumental architecture and large populations— 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and they built them entirely out of mud. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Sumer occupied the Southern part of modern Iraq 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in the region called Mesopotamia. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Mesopotamia means “between two rivers”— 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the Tigris and the Euphrates. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Around 5000 BCE, early Sumerians used irrigation channels, dams, and reservoirs 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to redirect river water and farm large areas of previously bone-dry land. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Agricultural communities like this were slowly springing up around the world. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But Sumerians were the first to take the next step. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Using clay bricks made from river mud, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they began to build multi-storied homes and temples. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They invented the wheel— 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a potter’s wheel, for turning mud into household goods and tools. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Those clay bricks gave rise to the world’s first cities, probably around 4500 BCE. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 At the top of the city’s social ladder were priests and priestesses, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who were considered nobility, then merchants, craftspeople, farmers, and enslaved people. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The Sumerian empire consisted of distinct city-states that operated like small nations. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They were loosely linked by language and spiritual belief 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but lacked centralized control. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The earliest cities were Uruk, Ur, and Eridu, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and eventually there were a dozen cities. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Each had a king who served a role somewhere between a priest and a ruler. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Sometimes they fought against each other to conquer new territories. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Each city was dedicated to a patron deity, considered the city’s founder. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The largest and most important building n the city was this patron god’s home: 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the ziggurat, a temple designed as a stepped pyramid. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Around 3200 BCE, Sumerians began to expand their reach. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The potter’s wheel found a new home on chariots and wagons. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They built boats out of reeds and date palm leaves, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with linen sails that carried them vast distances by river and sea. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 To supplement scarce resources, they built a trade network 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with the rising kingdoms in Egypt, Anatolia, and Ethiopia, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 importing gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and cedar wood. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Trade was the unlikely impetus for the invention of the world’s first writing system. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It started as a system of accounting for Sumerian merchants 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 conducting business with traders abroad. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 After a few hundred years, the early pictogram system 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 called cuneiform turned into a script. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The Sumerians drafted up the first written laws 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and created the first school system, designed to teach the craft of writing— 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and pioneered some less exciting innovations, like bureaucracy and taxes. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In the schools, scribes studying from dawn to dusk, from childhood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 well into adulthood. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They learned accounting, mathematics, and copied works of literature–– 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 hymns, myths, proverbs, animal fables, magic spells, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the first epics on clay tablets. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Some of those tablets told the story of Gilgamesh, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a king of the city of Uruk who was also the subject of mythical tales. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But by the third millennium BCE, Sumer was no longer the only empire around, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or even in Mesopotamia. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Waves of nomadic tribes poured into the region from the north and east. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Some newcomers looked up to the Sumerians, adopting their way of life 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and using the cuneiform script to express their own languages. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In 2300 BCE, the Akkadian king Sargon conquered the Sumerian city-states. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But Sargon respected Sumerian culture, and Akkadians and Sumerians 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 existed side-by-side for centuries. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Other invading groups focused only on looting and destruction. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Even as Sumerian culture spread, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a steady onslaught of invasions killed off the Sumerian people by 1750 BCE. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Afterward, Sumer disappeared back into the desert dirt, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 not to be rediscovered until the 19th century. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But Sumerian culture lived on for thousands of years— 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 first through the Akkadians, then the Assyrians, then the Babylonians. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The Babylonians passed Sumerian inventions 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and traditions through along Hebrew, Greek, and Roman cultures. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Some persist today.