Lacking stone, southern Mesopotamians had fi rst built in reeds plastered with mud, then with bricks made from the mud and dried in the sun. Their brick technology was advanced enough by the end of the Sumerian period to make possible very large buildings with columns and terraces; the greatest of its monuments, the Ziggurat of Ur, had an upper stage over 100feet high and a base 200feet by 150 . The earliest surviving potter’s wheel was found at Ur; this was the fi rst way in which man made use of rotary motion. On it rested the large-scale production of pottery which made it a man’s trade and not, like earlier pottery, a woman’s. Soon, by 3000 BC , the wheel was being used for transport. Another invention of the Sumerians was glass, and specialized craftsmen were casting in bronze early in the third millennium BC.
This innovation raises further questions: where did the raw material come from? There is no metal in southern Mesopotamia. Moreover, even in earlier times, during the Neolithic, the region must have obtained from elsewhere the fl int and obsidian it needed for the fi rst agricultural implements. Clearly a widespread network of contacts abroad is in the background, above all with the Levant and Syria, huge distances away, but also with Iran and Bahrain, down the Persian Gulf. Before 2000 BC Mesopotamia was obtaining goods – though possibly indirectly – from the Indus valley. Together with the evidence of documentation (which reveals contacts with India before 2000 BC ), it makes an impression of a dimly emerging international trading system already creating important patterns of interdependence. When, in the middle of the third millennium, supplies of tin from the Middle East dried up, Mesopotamian bronze weapons had to give way to unalloyed copper ones.
The whole of this civilization was sustained on an agriculture which was from an early date complicated and even rich. Barley, wheat, millet and sesame were grains grown in quantity; the fi rst may have been the main crop, and no doubt explains the frequent evidence of the presence of alcohol in ancient Mesopotamia. In the easy soil of the fl ood plains no very advanced tools were needed to achieve intensive cultivation; the great contribution of technology here was in the practice of irrigation and the growth of government. Such skills accumulated slowly; the evidence of Sumerian civilization has been left to us by 1 , 500 years of history.
So far this huge stretch of time has been discussed almost as if nothing happened during it, as if it were an unchanging whole. It was not. Whatever reservations are made about the slowness of change in the ancient world, and though it may now seem to us very static, these were fi fteen centuries of great change for the Mesopotamians – history, in the truest sense. Scholars have recovered much of the story, but this is not the place to set it out in detail, especially as much of it is still debated, much of it remains obscure, and even its dating is often only approximate. All that is needed here is to relate the fi rst age of Mesopotamian civilization to its successors and to what was going on elsewhere at the same time.
Three broad phases can be marked out in the history of Sumer. The fi rst, lasting from about 3360 BCto 2400 BC , has been called its archaic period. Its narrative content is a matter of wars between city-states, their waxings and wanings. Fortifi ed cities and the application of the wheel to military technology in clumsy four-wheeled chariots are some of the evidence of such warfare. Towards the middle of this 900 -year phase, local dynasties begin to establish themselves with some success. Originally, Sumerian society seems to have had some representative, even democratic basis, but a growth of scale led to the emergence of kings distinct from the fi rst priestly rulers; probably they began as warlords appointed by cities to command their forces who did not give up their power when the emergency which called them forth had passed. From them stemmed dynasties which fought one another. The sudden appearance of a great individual then opens a new phase.
Puppet Government under British Pressure
